Data Loss Prevention

Data security isn’t just about protecting your business from outside threats, but internal ones too. Rogue employees looking to make some money on the side could make a tidy sum online selling your sensitive information or your customers’ personal data. All they would need to do is send sensitive information to their personal email address or upload corporate files to a personal account on a cloud platform like Dropbox.

If your customer’s data is divulged and you did not take adequate steps to prevent it, you could find yourself being held responsible and fined by one of the UK’s data regulation bodies. It will also damage public trust in your business and harm your reputation for years to come.

The amount of sensitive data stored on businesses’ networks is increasing every day, and it is the responsibility of each organisation to protect their data.

Hackers may use phishing scams to get team members to hand over sensitive data, or an employee might accidentally copy and paste sensitive data into an email without realising it.

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a series of software tools and best practices that, when properly implemented, help protect sensitive information held by your organisation from being lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorised users.

• DLP allows you to define policies around different classifications of data within your organisation. For example, you could set a policy which prevents data marked as “sensitive” from being transferred outside of your network.
• These policies can be set up to align with the correct data protection requirements of different regulations. How you wish to configure this will vary depending on your industry and the type of data you hold.
• DLP enforces these policies through notifications, data encryption and other preventative actions whenever violations are recognised. This helps to prevent end users from unintentionally or maliciously disclosing data that could jeopardise your business.
• Effective DLP aims to secure data while it is at rest, in transit and during its use. Endpoint data access is monitored as well as the storage of your data in the cloud.
• DLP provides visibility for sensitive data across your network and simplifies the process of reporting to meet compliance and auditing standards.

The four main benefits of DLP are personal data protection, compliance, intellectual property protections and data visibility.

• Data Protection
  DLP can locate and classify data like addresses, phone numbers and other personally identifying information. DLP can help to protect this data as well as help with the reporting of this data for auditing purposes.
• Compliance
  If your business collects and stores any personal or identifying information about its customers, you are likely subject to multiple data protection regulations which require you to take adequate steps to protect that data. All UK businesses are governed by the GDPR, and every business which takes credit or debit card payments is covered by the PCI. Both these regulations have different data protection requirements.
• Intellectual Property Protection
  If your business has valuable intellectual property or sensitive information about your business operations, it is vital that you protect it. DLP solutions that use context-based classification can help to categorise intellectual property and implement policies to control how it can be viewed, altered, or shared.
• Visibility
  Endpoints, networks, and cloud data can all be viewed and tracked with a comprehensive business DLP solution. You will be able to see how individual users in your company interact with data and change your policies accordingly.