What Is Data Loss Prevention?

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a tool that ensures sensitive or critical data is not leaked outside the organization, either accidentally, deliberately or maliciously. DLP software classifies and tracks data to prevent it from leaving the network via unauthorized channels. These solutions detect leakage and exfiltration by monitoring sensitive data while it’s in use, in motion, and at rest.

DLP can therefore be seen as a policy enforcement that utilizes a number of tools to achieve data security within your company. These solutions must work in cooperation with your existing IT infrastructure, your current data usage policies and your business needs. The means by which this data is filtered, encrypted and handled must be done speedily and accurately without affecting business operations negatively.

Why Is Data Loss Prevention Important?

Confidential data can reside on a variety of computing devices (physical servers, virtual servers, databases, file servers, PCs, flash drives and mobile devices) and move through a variety of network access points (wireline, wireless, VPNs, etc.), there are a variety of solutions that are tackling the problem of data loss, data recovery and data leaks.

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a solution that identifies confidential data, tracks that data as it moves through and out of the enterprise and prevents unauthorized disclosure of data by creating and enforcing disclosure policies.

As the number of internet-connected devices skyrockets into the billions, data loss prevention is an increasingly important part of any organization’s ability to manage and protect critical and confidential information. Examples of critical and confidential data types include:

• Intellectual Property: source code, product design documents, process documentation, internal price lists.

• Corporate Data: Financial documents, strategic planning documents, due diligence research for mergers and acquisitions, employee information.

• Customer Data: Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, medical records, financial statements.

How DLP Works

First of all, you will need to create a data classification policy; i.e, establish what data is sensitive, what data is classified and what data is safe for public consumption. You will also need to know what acceptable use of that information is, and what constitutes a breach of the policy. Based on these policies, users will find that when sending emails, copying data or transmitting information, they will be blocked or made to justify their actions; otherwise, that data will be encrypted and rendered unreadable by the recipient.

An example of this policy when applied to email is as follows: the DLP scans emails, looking for specific fingerprints to run against the stored triggers that are set out in the policy. This allows remediative action to take place once a DLP event has been detected. Examples of these actions are:

• Block email all together.
• Allow message to go, but inform management and/or IT.
• Quarantine the email, send a bounce back message telling user not to send this type of information out in future, review email and see if it can be sent out. If not, then remediative action can be taken.

In cases where certain employees are allowed to send out confidential information, auditing tools must be in place to check what has been sent for specific periods of time so that data security is managed and reviewed.

Key Benefits of DLP

Data loss prevention is a billion dollar industry, primarily due to the growing risk of data loss at the hand of company insiders. The core benefits of DLP solutions are typically to adhere to Regulatory Compliance, to Monitor Sensitive Data Movement, and to prevent critical files from leaving via specific egress points.

• Data Loss Prevention makes securing your data easier as it makes the process of deploying and customising DLP policies for supporting and enforcing IT security policies streamlined and easy to manage.
• DLP prevents sensitive data from being insecurely sent in your emails.
• DLP protects your data by scanning email messages for sensitive information that may be subject to your policies or regulations that have been set up.
• Data Loss Prevention is not only a powerful but also a user-friendly tool within the security policy compliance arena.

Do you really need to have Data Loss Prevention?

At Ctelecoms we believe that DLP can help you solve three main pain points of your business:

• If your business collects and stores personally identifiable information, protected health information or payment card information, then you can protect your customer’s sensitive data with the help of DLP. It can identify, classify and monitor activities surrounding this data.
• If your business has information or intellectual property that, if it fell into the wrong hands, could put your business’s financial health and/or brand image at risk, DLP can help to classifying the information in either structured or unstructured forms and therefore protect against unwanted exfiltration of your data.
• If you’re trying to increase the visibility of your data going back and forth, DLP helps by providing a comprehensive solution that can track your data on your network, cloud and also to each of your endpoints. It supports your business by giving you the details on how users and other individuals are interacting with your data.

If you’ve read through to here and it’s a big ‘YES, I want to protect my data!’ but you’re not sure where to start? Get in touch with Ctelecoms today and let us help you secure every single bit of your data!