Tech Tips
How DLP Software Can Protect Your Company From Data Breach
It would help to have a good DLP strategy to protect your company from data breaches. This includes preventing data loss, detecting data leaks and educating employees about the importance of DLP policies.
The first step is to inventory and assess your data assets and risk exposure. This will help you prioritize which data and communication channels should be protected.
Detecting Data Leaks
Various reasons, including cyberattacks and employee errors, can cause data leaks. To prevent them, organizations use DLP software to monitor their sensitive data and identify any risks.
DLP solutions can detect data leaks through several techniques, including examining the content of emails and other communications, monitoring user behavior, or tracking endpoint devices. They can also block suspicious transfers and movements, which can help security teams thwart breaches before they happen.
One of the most common ways that data is leaked is by employees accidentally or maliciously sharing it. DLP solutions detect this and take steps to remediate the issue with alerts, encryption, or other actions.
Another way that DLP solutions protect against data leaks is by preventing data exfiltration, which can occur when criminal organizations use malware or other methods to steal information from companies. These attacks can cause damage to a company’s reputation and brand.
Finally, a DLP solution can protect against intellectual property and other trade secrets that may be shared in documents or email messages. These types of sensitive data can cause financial loss and legal issues.
DLP is an effective tool for protecting against data leaks, but it is essential to understand how it works and implement a policy to ensure it’s implemented properly. It is also crucial to educate stakeholders about the dangers of sharing sensitive information and how they can mitigate these risks.
Preventing Data Loss
A DLP solution can prevent data loss by analyzing and controlling the flow of sensitive information across your network. By enforcing security policies, it can block, flag, audit, encrypt or quarantine activities that violate company information security policy.
A good DLP software solution will also provide data visibility to help you track what information is being accessed or transferred. This enables you to understand how much sensitive data is in use and can help you comply with compliance regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS or GDPR.
Another critical feature of DLP solutions is detecting and blocking sensitive data before it leaves the network, email or web. This can protect your company from breaches and other issues that could cause significant financial damage.
Data loss prevention software can be deployed at the network edge, in endpoint devices or the cloud to monitor data movement in real time and to prevent leaks of sensitive information. It can also control USB ports and enforce policies to limit egress from your network through various protocols such as email and browser uploads.
DLP software can solve three main pain points for organizations: personal information protection and compliance, intellectual property (IP) protection and data visibility. It can help companies comply with regulations by identifying, classifying and tagging sensitive data and adding necessary security controls.
Educating Employees
Data breaches are a global threat. Adversaries from nation-states, cybercriminals and malicious insiders target your sensitive data for various motives, including corporate espionage and personal financial gain.
DLP software is an excellent first step to protecting your organization against these threats, but it also needs to be a part of an overall data security strategy. Educating your employees about data protection is essential. This includes classes, training and awareness efforts such as emails and write-ups that explain why you need a DLP policy and how it works.
Establishing roles and responsibilities help clarify who is responsible for activities related to your DLP solution. This allows checks and balances to prevent misuse of policies and sensitive data.
For example, consider including role-based access control to restrict access to specific files or systems only to those who need to see them. This prevents insider breaches, unauthorized access to sensitive information and fraud.
A DLP solution can also identify and track data in transit and at rest. This can be especially useful in protecting intellectual property and confidential information stored on file servers or other storage devices.
A DLP solution should provide visibility into all endpoints connected to your network or cloud services. It can monitor data flows to prevent leaks and other security incidents. This can help your organization meet various compliance standards, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS or GDPR.
Tracking Data
Data breaches can be devastating for your company, as they can put you out of business and cost a lot in fines. DLP solutions can help you track data breaches to protect your business. They can also help you manage and protect your data across multiple endpoints.
The first step to implementing a DLP solution is identifying the data types you want to protect. This can include intellectual property, confidential information and data regulated by government agencies or other organizations.
Next, you need to evaluate the risk associated with each data type. Then, it would help if you created policies that protect that data, either by blocking access or restricting the transfer.
For example, you may need a policy allowing only employees to transfer PIIs through cloud applications or email. This way, you can prevent employee data leaks and reduce the likelihood of a security breach.
Modern DLP tools can also use anomaly detection to identify users violating policies. This can be done by analyzing user behavior and identifying changes that might indicate malicious intent. Some of these programs even use machine learning to identify abnormal activity. This can be a more accurate way to detect data breaches than traditional labeling methods.