What is Data Loss Prevention and what are its benefits?
Mar 14, 2022 | 42Gears Team
Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions have become an essential element of today’s business due to a growing number of security issues such as cyberattacks, data breaches, data privacy compliance, and regulations.
Today, no company is immune to data loss. Every business that encounters data loss, experiences devastating effects on its bottom line. According to a Data Breach Report 2021 from IBM, the global average data breach costs rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021. Data loss not only impacts financial health but can also result in loss of productivity, customers, reputation, and revenue.
Therefore, it is important to have a data loss prevention strategy in place that can protect your intellectual property and ensure that the company’s confidential data is safe and can be accessed by authorized users only.
What is Data Loss Prevention (DLP)?
Data loss prevention is a set of technologies, strategies, and processes that help organizations detect and prevent data breaches while ensuring authorized access to sensitive data. DLP identifies violations of regulatory compliance and enforces protective actions, remediation with alerts, and encryptions to prevent them. DLP also prevents end-users from sharing confidential data outside an organization.
DLP software/tools help protect the data while it is in use, in transit, and at rest.
Data in use: Data used by services or applications are considered as data in use. DLP tools can encrypt sensitive data that are in use. DLP also prevents the transfer of such data to unauthorized storage locations such as personal emails, social media sites, and the cloud.
Data in Transit: Data moving from an internal or external network to an endpoint destination are considered as data in transit. DLP tools encrypt the data in transit using encrypted transport protocols like TLS or VPN.
Data at Rest: Data at rest refers to the data stored in the cloud, endpoint devices, databases, and backup tapes. DLP tools can protect data through encryption, data retention policies, and access control.
What are the benefits of DLP solutions?
Internal and external threat detection
DLP solutions can effectively prevent malicious insider threats to disrupt data by continuous monitoring and detection. All data copied to USB devices or sent outside the organization’s network can be encrypted. DLP software is helpful in detecting outside attacks through antivirus scans, which can detect Trojans installed on endpoint devices. It can also mitigate the risk of malware entering through email attachments using antivirus. DLP can also limit outside access to the internal network using a firewall.
Being compliant with regulations
DLP tools help organizations to be compliant with ever-changing regulations. Just being aware of the rules and regulations isn’t enough, organizations need to follow them in their day-to-day operations and stay updated. Many regulatory authorities like CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) mention the guidelines for data collection, data storage, data access methods, etc. DLP helps to adhere to the compliance guidelines while protecting your data.
Provide visibility over the data flow
DLP solutions help organizations to have better visibility into information going outside the organization’s network. It prevents users from sending any sensitive information outside the network without authorization. Plus, by continuous monitoring, DLP can detect malicious activities and prevent data breaches in real-time.
Centralized management of data and assets
DLP solutions help IT admins control all sensitive data and intellectual assets centrally, which enables them to set organizational policies accordingly. Additionally, it helps IT admins have more control over who can grant or revoke access to data or assets based on policies and compliance rules.
Conclusion
Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions are crucial for your organization to stay compliant with regulations, and to protect and secure sensitive data and intellectual property. DLP ensures that the company’s sensitive data can be accessed only by authorized users, preventing data mishandling, and loss of data.
42Gears DLP is a reliable solution that helps companies detect and prevent data breaches, exfiltration, or unwanted destruction of sensitive data. It identifies violations and helps in enforcing protective measures, set up remediation with alerts, encryption of data, and more. All these measures help prevent security threats from entering the organizational network.
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