Data Loss Prevention

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.

Are you protected against data loss?

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.

Email is one of the most prevalent sources of data loss and leaks. From an email accidentally addressed to the wrong person to messages sent surreptitiously with sensitive attachments, email represents one of the most vulnerable parts of your security efforts to keep data and proprietary information protected. That's why so many companies around the world are turning to data loss prevention technology from Mimecast to protect their most valuable information assets.

Main use cases of Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

The main use cases to prevent data loss prevention include:

• 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 data internal and external to an organization’s use.
• Protect data on mobile devices, removable media, laptops, and cloud-based systems and applications.

Data Loss Prevention best practices

Data Loss Prevention comprises four key elements:

• Management of company policies 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 end points, e.g., laptops, removable media, 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.

Data Loss Prevention protects your corporate data

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a top concern for any organization where sensitive and business-critical information is stored in digital format. Whether its 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.

When selecting a data loss prevention solution, a growing number of organizations worldwide are turning to DLP security technology from Mimecast.

Data Loss Prevention with Mimecast

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.

Data Loss Prevention capabilities

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.

Benefits of Mimecast's Data Loss Prevention 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.

Data Loss Prevention FAQs

Why is Data Loss Prevention important for organizations?

Data loss prevention is important to any organization that stores sensitive and business-critical information in digital format. In other words, just about every organization.

Whether customer data, intellectual property, future business plans, or financial information, it’s far too easy for purposeful or accidental data loss to occur. Such loss can have serious financial and legal ramifications and cause significant losses in customer confidence and corporate reputation.

What is the difference between data loss and data leakage?

Data loss is simply that — lost. Examples include failing to perform a backup or misplacing a laptop. Data can also be stolen through cyberattacks.

Data leakage is the unauthorized disclosure of intellectual property, company or customer data, personal and other sensitive data that isn’t intended for public dissemination. Data leakage usually occurs via web or email communications, but can also occur through lost laptops, optical media, mobile devices, and USB keys.

How does DLP Data Loss Prevention system work?

A data loss prevention system 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.

It is best managed from a single web-based console where universal and granular policies for email and general system security are applied in real-time and continually updated in response to evolving threats.