Data loss prevention is a technique to save sensitive data from unauthorized access. It is now being incorporated in several software as an additional feature. The data generated during various processes gets stored on dedicated servers. The main focus of data loss prevention software is to ensure that important and sensitive data is not misused or granted unauthorized access.
Data loss prevention or DLP adds a preventive layer in the data exchange cycle so that confined data, even if leaked unintentionally, cannot be misused by anyone.
Let us take up an example: suppose an employee who is supposed to send a file via an email to an authorized person but the employee mistakes the email and puts in some other one, this can cause a potential threat and it would even be unintentional. What data loss prevention does is it will detect the wrong or unauthorized email address and would not let the employee send the file. This would save both the employee as well as confined data of the company
Data loss prevention software and tools continuously monitor and control the endpoint activities, filter various data streams on corporate networks, and monitor data stored in the cloud to protect the data at rest, the data in motion, and the data that is in use. Data loss prevention software also provides reporting to meet various compliance and audit requirements and identify potential areas of weaknesses and abnormalities for forensic and provides incident specific response.
Why do you need data loss prevention?
There can be three possible reasons why you may prefer a data loss prevention software. Let us discuss each of them:
- Protection of personal information: organizations these days keep classified information of its employees which are generally personal and very sensitive in nature. As per various security standards, organizations ought to protect this information from leakage. DLP can help in identifying, classifying and tagging sensitive data and continuously monitor activities around such data.
- Protection of IP: business houses may possess certain valuable Intellectual property and several similar rights. It may also have several formulas stored as data. Such data and files can be worth the company’s brand image and financial security and thus should be kept with the utmost security. DLP software with context-based classification will greatly help in classifying important property and rights.
- Visibility of data cycle: an organization may observe unprecedented data flows all around the working cycle and may consider the visibility for a higher level of data security. Dedicated DLP software can help in viewing this data cycle and can solve this need as well.
VPN’s or virtual private network is also a method to add an extra layer of security and privacy to your private and public networks. It has been emerging as a great data loss Prevention tool recently since it ensures non-identification of your IP address.
This has led to the emergence of various tools both free and paid. The best way to recognize which is best for your enterprise is to read their reviews online, like for example https://vpnpro.com/vpn-reviews/surfshark-vpn-review/this link over here entails a detailed review of the famous Surfshark VPN.
What led to the emergence of DLP?
Now it is worth knowing why this concept evolved. A few notable factors were:
- Growth in the role of CISO: chief information security officers (CISO) have become more prominent in organizations. The primary role of such officers is to report to the CEOs about the security measures taken up for securing the data. DLP helps a great deal to the CISO in forming reports of such data protection measures and makes it easy to monitor as well.
- Mandatory compliance rules: various data protection regulations such as GDPR and NYDFS passed by the lawmakers of EU and New York State respectively, have made it complex for organizations to keep up with the ever-evolving data protection policies. DLP as a developing software can help organizations in comprehensively adapting with such changes without necessarily lacking in any respect.
- Several spaces to store data: with evolving technologies such as cloud and remote access servers, it becomes difficult to keep entire data under continuous watch. Hence, DLP would be one such software that could keep a check on all the data no matter where they are stored.
- Recent large-scale data breaches: recently, the news headlines were flooded with large scale data breach incidents. Some of them were unintentional and accidental while others being clever intrusion in protected systems. This gave rise to the importance of DLP software as it can prevent effectively such large scale and costly data breaches with the help of classified protocols.
- Data is often more expensive: have you ever thought why such data is stolen? It is very simple to answer this. Such data is sold in the black market at really expensive price tags. And honestly, people and several organizations do buy such data. To prevent this, DLP is necessary as this would add security to data access.
- Large volumes of data: one might think that what would be the use of a DLP software after the data has already been compromised with. But the theft might only be of a certain portion of entire data. In order to protect the remaining data, one shall opt for DLP software and secure the valuable data.
- Scarce availability of security experts: there are not a whole lot of security advisors and experts available around. This talent is pretty scarce as of now and we don’t see this scarcity going away anytime soon. To aid the existing security resources, DLP would be the best option available. It can also provide remote access and all locations can be covered at once.
Hence, Data Loss Prevention and software based on it is very necessary for a modern organization to operate. While data security is a requirement, network security and privacy is also an important need.
