Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solution : A Must-Have for your Enterprise Data Protection

What Is Data Loss Prevention?

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is the practice of protecting and securing sensitive information by detecting and preventing unauthorised access to that data. Companies use data loss prevention to safeguard and secure their information and comply with regulations. A multilayered DLP strategy ensures that sensitive information remains behind a network firewall.

Once DLP was too complex, too expensive, would break business processes, was resource intensive and limited. But not anymore. Today DLP solutions are effective, automated, and within reach of more enterprises than ever. Despite the ability to stop data theft and support multiple compliance regulations, DLP’s history has been one of hype and disillusionment, resulting in a few myths that need to

be dispelled to illustrate further why there are 35+ vendors offering DLP and why you need DLP if you don’t already have it!

An organisation can review and update its data storage and retention policies to maintain regulatory compliance by creating a Data Loss Prevention plan.

Why is it necessary to have Data Protection for Businesses?

Data protection is a huge priority for businesses. When a company fails to protect its sensitive information and allows data breaches to occur, it can face significant reputational and financial consequences. As a result of this lost reputation, an organisation can see a drop in revenue from dissatisfied customers and experience fines for failing to comply with security regulations. When this happens, your business needs to have suitable protection in place to prevent data breaches.

How to implement a DLP Solution in your Business?

Several activities should support every data loss prevention strategy. The framework below provides some high-level guidelines that your DLP framework should follow to ensure your plan works effectively, increasing efficiency and reducing risk.

1. Prioritise your data to minimise the impact of a security breach. Understand which data can give the most significant problem if it is lost. 
2. Apply persistent classification tags to the data to track its use.
3. Monitor all data movement, especially in areas that aren't monitored for known risks.
4. Create a list of the controls that might be required and use them to build an incident response plan. For example, if there is a risk associated with email transmission and you want to monitor it regularly, create a procedure in your incident response plan.
5. Training employees on risk mitigation in the DLP system is an essential step in securing your organisation's data.
6. Data loss prevention is an ongoing process. Start small and expand as needed.

Benefits of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solution

Data loss prevention (DLP) systems help organisations comply with privacy laws and protect sensitive information. 

Apart from this, there are many benefits DLP solutions provide to organisations.

• A data loss prevention solution helps reduce the risk of data breaches.
• A DLP solution helps prevent employees from accessing sensitive information without authorisation.
• It keeps your data safe from ransomware attacks, periodically protecting your files and backups.
• These systems understand how sensitive information can be copied from one device to another and help you take action immediately so that you don't lose control of your most important assets.
• DLP systems can automatically detect and remove sensitive data from documents and other files. DLP system can also help safeguard your organisation from social engineering attacks by alerting you when a user is about to share a document containing sensitive information.

How to enable a DLP solution in your existing framework?

Even a pool of security tools available in the market will not make your enterprise secure if they are not deployed correctly. You need to brace yourself and look out for a practical solution that can perform well with your existing security tools. 

For quick deployment and on-demand scalability, you can consider enabling a SaaS platform like Digital Guardian that enables security across the corporate network, traditional endpoints and cloud applications.

‍Takeaway‍

Cybercriminals have become sophisticated in their attacks, and it is necessary to use professional data prevention solutions to keep your client's data safe. If you are looking for a DLP solution, contact us.