Minimize your corporate data leakage risks with Data protection has always been an object of serious attention by enterprise security executives and compliance officers, but the recent privacy laws will undoubtedly elevate data protection to the boardroom due to the potentially serious consequences of noncompliance. What makes it even more challenging is that companies of all sizes are adopting cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office 365, to give their employees greater flexibility and easier access to core business applications. As regulations and corporate needs place increasing demands on IT to ensure safe data handling, deploying necessary protective solutions can seem daunting. Some data loss prevention (DLP) products require substantial effort to deploy and typically have large ongoing consulting costs. Some DLP products leave it up to IT to know about all the data that needs to be protected, adding administrative burden and causing false positives. Others rely on the IT administrator to manage disparate consoles across multiple environments—endpoints, network, and the cloud. When are “good enough” products not good enough?
Data loss prevention (DLP) makes sure that users do not send sensitive or critical information outside the corporate network. The term describes software products that help a network administrator control the data that users can transfer.
DLP products use business rules to classify and protect confidential and critical information so that unauthorized users cannot accidentally or maliciously share data, which would put the organization at risk. For example, if an employee tried to forward a business email outside the corporate domain or upload a corporate file to a consumer cloud storage service like Dropbox, the employee would be denied permission.
Organizations are adopting DLP because of insider threats and rigorous data privacy laws, many of which have stringent data protection or data access requirements. In addition to monitoring and controlling endpoint activities, some DLP tools can also be used to filter data streams on the corporate network and protect data in motion.
