What is data loss prevention? A guide to DLP

What is data loss prevention (DLP)?

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a set of practices designed to secure confidential business data as well as detect and head off data loss resulting from breaches and malicious attacks. Most of these practices focus on email, which is the primary source of data leaks and loss.

Why is data loss prevention important?

Data loss prevention is critical to any organization where sensitive and business-critical information is stored in digital format. Whether it's customer data, intellectual property, or future business plans, data loss can lead to financial and legal ramifications, eroding customer confidence and damaging corporate reputation.

Types and causes of data loss

Types of data loss

• Data Breach: Unauthorized access to sensitive information.
• Data Leakage: Unintentional exposure of private data.
• Data Exfiltration: The transfer of sensitive data outside the organization without approval.

Causes of data loss

While there are five primary causes of data leakage, the most common is human error. Whether by falling for a phishing attack, using shadow IT to circumvent cybersecurity safeguards, or simply uploading the wrong file into a public Slack channel, simple mistakes and lapses of judgment are the cause of a major of data loss incidents. The other causes are:

• Insider threats: Malicious employees or other authorized users who deliberately exfiltrate or compromise data
• Cyberattacks: Hackers who target sensitive data by exploiting vulnerabilities in systems, deploying ransomware, or tricking users into sharing information
• Hardware failures: Unsecured, misconfigured, or obsolete technology can create system malfunctions or crashes
• Software vulnerabilities: Caused by anything from weak passwords and lack of two-factor authentication to encryption failures or unsecured integrations

Strategies for effective data loss prevention

Data loss due to malicious or inadvertent leaks can be a serious problem for organizations today. Whether it's intellectual property, customer data, or sensitive financial information, data loss can have negative impacts on customer relationships, business competitiveness, corporate reputation and your bottom line.

Main use cases to prevent data loss prevention

• Comply with federal/state government requirements and regulations.
• Comply with customer requirements and standards.
• Manage sensitive data and enforce compliance with security policies.
• Protect against cybercriminal and malicious hacking.
• Identify and classify sensitive internal and external data for an organization’s use.
• Protect data on mobile devices, removable media, laptops, and cloud-based systems and applications.

Key elements of data loss prevention (DLP)

• Management of company policies: Establish clear and procedures for how data is accessed and used, how to report data loss and how to remediate violations.
• Inventory: Maintain location and security level of data contained on file servers, databases, email systems, websites, applications, laptops, mobile devices, and workstations.
• Monitor: Inspect and control data exchanges in network communications and endpoints, e.g., laptops, removable media, and printers.
• Enforce: Develop and enact measures to secure data across endpoint, network, and storage systems.

These elements are best practiced if they are:

• Prioritized: You can’t protect everything. You must protect data that represents the most danger to business continuity and privacy. Focus first on areas where data loss is most likely to impair operations and reputation.
• Unobtrusive: Security should not come at the cost of diminished productivity, employee frustration, and/or system performance.
• Flexible: Modular solutions scale to accommodate new business and organizational needs, ensure fast deployment of enhancements to address evolving environments, and add new controls to address evolving security issues.

What are the benefits of DLP?

DLP, or data loss prevention, encompasses strategies to safeguard corporate information from unauthorized access. By employing effective tools and controls, organizations can ensure the secure management of their data, bolster data privacy, and minimize the likelihood of breaches.

In addition, DLP providers can:

• Enhance compliance with regulations like HIPAA or GDPR by classifying and managing sensitive data efficiently, simplifying compliance audits.
• Improve data visibility and provide insights into how data is used and transferred across the organization, allowing for better data governance and policy enforcement.
• Mitigate insider threats by flagging suspicious activity, reducing the risk of intentional or accidental data leaks. 

Types of data loss prevention solutions

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a top concern for any organization where sensitive and business-critical information is stored in digital format. Whether it's customer data, intellectual property, future business plans, or financial information, it’s far too easy for this information to be purposely or accidentally leaked via email. Data leakage can have serious financial and legal ramifications and cause significant losses in customer confidence and corporate reputation.

While data loss prevention technology exists, most solutions are difficult to implement and manage, requiring a disproportionate amount of time from overburdened IT administrators. Some solutions also harm productivity by introducing controls that make it difficult for employees to quickly access the data they need to do their jobs. A superior data loss prevention strategy must not allow the cost of prevention to outweigh the benefits and, in the event of a leak, must also provide tamper-proof evidence for disciplinary action and legal proceedings.

There are a few types of data loss prevention solutions and tactics your security team can use:

• Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) Software: CASBs enforce security policies between cloud service providers and customers. That said, shadow IT and the use of unauthorized cloud-based services threatens threaten a CASB’sCASB’s effectiveness.
• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) Solutions: UEBA is a category of security solutions that help security teams pay close attention to an organization’s network activity by gathering, compiling, and analyzing what employees and contractors do daily. UEBA solutions can be expensive and challenging to understand without adequate training.
• Security Education and Awareness (SEA) Training: Employees are your first line of defense. Teaching and testing them on data prevention best practices can help limit exposure. But cyber attackers are constantly finding new ways to circumvent security measures that employees likely don’t know about.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Software: While these tools prevent data loss in local drives, they don’t perform well in the cloud environment due to the continuous digital product employees create, the need for complex policies and a one-dimensional view of data.
• Insider Risk Management (IRM) Software: This technology, termed by Gartner , employs a modern approach to DLP by mapping and securing sensitive data across quickly changing work environments to overcome the challenges presented by a cloud-first strategy. IRM-based systems help security analysts make sense of an organization’s wealth of data and then make reasonable, informed judgments about whether certain activities are dangerous or not.

Awareness of all the possible mechanisms for protecting your data can help you evaluate what solution would work best for your organization. 

Mimecast's data loss prevention solution

Mimecast offers a leading data loss prevention solution in Mimecast Content Control and Data Leak Prevention. Using flexible policies based on keywords, pattern matching, dictionaries and file hashes, Mimecast’s service scans all outbound and inbound email to identify and block potential leaks.

With Mimecast, data loss prevention can be easily managed from a single web-based console where universal and granular policies can be applied in real-time. Mimecast Content Control and Data Leak Prevention can apply security policies consistently to all email traffic.

Because any part of an email may contain sensitive information, Mimecast examines the subject lines, headers, HTML, body text and attachments, searching for defined words in text patterns along with inappropriate images.

When a DLP policy identifies a suspected leak, Mimecast offers a range of possible actions including holding it for review, blocking the email, copying the email to a group, adding content, or delivering the email through secure channels.

How Mimecast enhances DLP

Mimecast’s data breach prevention solution enables organizations to:

• Minimize risk by seamlessly integrating data loss prevention with Microsoft Exchange or Office 365TM.
• Protect against both honest mistakes and malicious intent.
• Apply relevant email signatures and legal notices to all outbound email.
• Set granular policies and controls for specific users and groups.
• Share sensitive information externally using Mimecast’s Secure Messaging service.
• Support legal and compliance needs with tamper-proof evidence about leaks.

Learn more about data loss prevention with Mimecast, and about Mimecast solutions for data loss prevention in Office 365 and for whaling security.

Key benefits of Mimecast's DLP solution

When you choose to prevent data loss with Mimecast's data leak prevention software, you can:

• Prevent valuable and sensitive information from leaving the company due to purposeful or accidental data leaks.
• Simplify compliance with regulation such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA and GLBA, and respond to compliance requirements with granular content and DLP policies.
• Eliminate the risk of document metadata such as comments and tracked changes leaving the organization.
• Enable a fast and seamless rollout of data loss prevention technology throughout your organization, using Mimecast's cloud-based service model.
• Provide administrators with central control over data loss policies.
• Reduce IT burden with easy-to-use data loss prevention tools.

Learn more about combatting data loss with Mimecast, and about why customers consider Mimecast the most secure email provider.