What To Look For When Selecting a DLP Solution For Your Business?

What To Look For When Selecting a DLP Solution For Your Business

According to IBM, the average data breach cost organization’s an average of $3.86 million per incident. However, organizations are only becoming more and more reliant on their data, not only because of its rising asset value but also its operational importance in distributed working environments. Taking steps to mitigate the loss of data can not only prevent organizations from incurring massive upfront costs, but also stay within the good graces of the public as well as regulatory and compliance frameworks. In this article, we’ll discuss one particularly effective type of countermeasure: Selecting a DLP Solution and discussing considerations you need to make before adopting it.

 

When used correctly, a DLP solution can be an integral part of your data breach response, helping you improve on key cost-saving metrics. LIFARS handles data breaches with military precision and ensures that root cause is found, eliminated, and detailed forensics are performed to discover all compromised information.

 

What is a DLP Solution?

Short for Data Loss Prevention, a DLP solution is a combination of technologies, procedures, and contingencies an organization has in place to minimize critical business data loss.

Although it’s tempting to only think of implementing a DLP Solution in terms of a cyberattack resulting in a data breach or data theft, DLP solutions help organizations plan for other eventualities as well. For example, data loss sustained as a result of software errors or a physical threat to a data storage system, such as fire, flood, or other failure.

Data loss can occur at various points throughout your systems. A comprehensive DLP solution will protect loss of data that’s in-use, transported over the network, or in storage. Advanced DLP solutions today use techniques, such as classification, fingerprinting, and exact data matching combined with centralized management, policy retention, and enforcement capabilities.

Beyond simply preventing the loss of valuable data, DLP solutions are becoming increasingly critical as a compliance and regulatory safeguard.

 

What to Look for When Selecting a DLP Solution?

What are Your Primary Data Protection Objectives?

Different types of businesses and organizations may have different reasons for valuing and protecting their data. Two of the most obvious would be to protect intellectual property and sensitive consumer information. However, a DPL can also help you maintain better visibility across your data assets as well as maintain proper regulatory compliance, e.g, for PII (personally identifiable information) protected by regulations like HIPAA.

Establishing your top needs will help you prioritize your overall DLP according to endpoint, network, discovery, or cloud solutions.

What Protections Do You Need and Where Do You Need Them?

This can be a complex process that may be completely unique to your technological stack, daily operations, and potential vulnerabilities. For example, one of the key determinations to make is how does information most commonly enter/leave your network? And, how does information travel or assets communicate laterally across your network?

This will help you identify pivotal endpoints where data breaches might originate or critical fault points in your data isolation. From email to USB ports to FTP or cloud services, all potential weaknesses that can be strengthened by a DLP must be identified.

Can the DLP Solution Provide Data Protection in the Cloud?

Data loss prevention is increasingly challenging in a distributed, cloud-based future where networks have a much wider and diverse attack surface. The same flexibility and diversity of cloud ecosystems that make it so valuable is what can also lead to enhanced threats if not managed properly.

Information can be accessed, downloaded, uploaded, and shared much more easily outside of what’s typically considered an organization’s secured perimeter.

However, properly configured DLPs can provide enhanced data security in the cloud. In these environments, proper work and investment must be made to achieving a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture.

Is the Solution Scalable and Flexible?

Data security needs are evolving by the day, driven by both the changes in the types of data organizations handle and the techniques and tactics used by cybercriminals to access it. Just  because a DLP solution is purpose-fit for your requirements today, doesn’t mean it will stay that way for the medium to long-term future.

You need to be able to configure flexible policies and procedures that should be easy to update and implement frequently without disrupting your business or users every time. A DLP solution also needs to be able to scale as your cloud architecture grows and expands and to scale with scale SSL inspection, for example.

 

Sources:

How Do I Select a DLP Solution for My Business?

IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020