Mr. James is the CEO of the corporate business. Recently, his business faced a serious issue. The data of his company was targeted by hackers. After the hacking, the company faced a heavy loss.
After this incident, Mr. James decided to execute data loss prevention best practices. These practices include defining roles, restricting data access, and others. Let us explore this domain more.
Table of Contents
What is Data Loss Prevention?
Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of software and tools which ensure that sensitive data is out of danger. It also ensures that data can not be misused or accessed. It is the process of detecting and preventing data from hacking.
Data loss prevention organizes data and safe it for future use. You can also say that DLP is a set of strategies for preventing people from accessing sensitive information who don’t need it. Employees don’t send sensitive or critical data due to this strategy.
· Data Loss
In data loss, sensitive data or information gets leaked due to the lack of data organization and security. Data loss can be a ransom attack, data leakage, and hacking.
● Causes of data leakage
- Insider threat
- Extrusion by attackers
- Unintentional or negligent data exposure
· Reasons to protect data
- Keep personally identifiable information
- Protect intellectual property
- Access to necessary data
- Secure mobile workforce
How Does Data Leakage Occur in an Organization?
Data leakage is the illegal transmission of critical data from an organization to an outside destination. The leakage of data occurs during online services. It happens on the web and by email usually.
It can also emerge in data storage devices such as optical media, USB keys, and laptops. Following are some important points relating to data leakage in an organization:
· System Error
Sometimes, we are using faulty software. All such software is at risk of hacking. So, software issues are the common causes of data leakage.
· Malicious or Careless Users
According to a survey, about 33% of data loss occurs due to insider incidents. These losses increase up to 25%. We need to educate people about possible threats of cyberattacks.
· Misconfigurations by IT Pros
After the outbreak of covid 19, most businesses shifted to remote work. When workers access the data online, the data is at risk. Microsoft misconfigured security rules for customers and it lead to a data breach.
Data Loss Prevention Best Practices
· Identify and classify sensitive data
It is necessary to identify the critical data across the network to protect your data. Data discovery technology is a strategy to scan data. This scanning helps you to protect crucial data. Data discovery engines usually use regular expressions for their searches.
Data discovery and classification are two strategies that control user data access and avoid storing data in an insecure location. It will reduce the risk of data leakage and data loss.
All critical or sensitive data treat with a digital signature that denotes its classification. You can protect it according to its importance to the organization. You can use the third-party app to protect it from illegal access..
· Use Data Encryption
Data encryption is one of the essential strategies to handle and secure data. All business data should encrypt at rest or in transit. Portable devices should use encrypted data if the device has critical data.
Encrypting file system (EFS) technology is helpful for this purpose.
Microsoft also offers an encryption technology named Bitlocker. Bitlocker complements EFS by providing an additional layer of protection for data storage.
· Clarify Roles
Every person in the data prevention strategy has proper knowledge about their roles. We need to specify the data owner. The IT officer needs to take responsibility for security incidents.
· Automate as much as possible
The more DLP processes are automated, the more broadly you will be able to display them across the organization. Some DLP process has limited scope and can not scale to meet the needs of any but the smallest IT region.
· Use Anomaly detection
We also need to detect abnormal behavior of workers. Some modern DLP solutions supplement simple statistical analysis and correlation rules.
· Educate businessman
The strategies of data leakage prevention are not enough. We need to take steps to educate our business owners and the CEO. It will help us to safeguard our sensitive data.
Data Loss Prevention Benefits
Data loss prevention offers you the following benefits:
- Establish and classify data according to sensitivity
- Point out the location of sensitive data that resides on your network
- It helps you put specific policies around your most sensitive data without authorization
- It provides us the visibility into what’s going on with the data
- It produces an effective barrier against both outsider and insider threats
Data Loss Prevention Software
Following are some recommended software. These applications help provide data protection:
- SolarWinds Data Loss Prevention With Arm
- CoSoSys Endpoint Protector
- CrowdStrike Falcon Device Control
Final Thoughts
Every business owner needs a cyber security expert to protect against hackers. If someone denies this sector, no doubt they will face cyber attacks.
Whether you are a business or an individual, you must always follow the best practices to ensure the data is safe. We hope the article has helped you to know the basics of data loss prevention best practices.
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