Data breaches are increasing, both by number and severity. They happen for a variety of reasons, from cyber criminals to nation-states.

Having a solid security strategy is vital to protecting against these threats. DLP software can help your business achieve this goal.

Increased Security

DLP helps prevent data leakage, loss, and misuse by classifying sensitive information to ensure that only authorized users can access it. This helps protect your company’s sensitive data from unauthorized parties such as nation-states, cybercriminals, and malicious insiders.

DLP solutions can also monitor and filter the data that moves across your network, identifying and blocking inappropriate data transfers. These technologies can also help protect sensitive data being shared or moved to the cloud.

Educate and train employees about how to properly use the tools they have at their disposal and when to avoid sending or sharing confidential data. This can reduce the risk of data breaches and improve employee awareness about when and how to share information.

Implementing DLP is a long-term process, so it’s best to begin by establishing and implementing priorities in phases. A risk analysis and data inventory can help develop these priorities and identify areas where DLP can benefit most.

Increased Compliance

DLP software can help your business comply with numerous data privacy and security standards, including HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR. They also monitor endpoint devices on which your sensitive data is stored, used, and transferred to protect against data loss or misuse by unauthorized users.

Having DLP software is essential to any organization’s data protection strategy. It provides central control over sensitive information and helps identify suspicious data transfers, blocking them to prevent data leaks or exfiltration.

DLP can also help your business meet compliance requirements by detecting data breaches and alerting security teams to potential risks. In addition, it can help you manage sensitive data assets by creating policies, granting access, and reporting on compliance.

Increased Productivity

As more employees use cloud-based storage, BYOD devices, and other services that don’t have a direct connection to your network, the data they access can be susceptible to theft by insiders or malicious actors. An essential part of a DLP solution is preventing these risks from occurring.

A sound DLP system will monitor the movement of sensitive data across all of these different endpoints and prevent it from leaving your organization altogether. It can also track users’ activities to spot when they aren’t following strict policies or when their actions increase the risk of data loss.

DLP solutions will often use various analysis techniques to identify sensitive information content. These include regular expressions, partial document match, and statistical analysis.

These are great first-pass filters but can be prone to high false favorable rates without checksum validation to ensure correct patterns. Another option is database fingerprinting, which looks for exact matches from a database dump or live database. This technique can be slow but effectively identifies structured data such as credit card numbers.

Increased Revenue

DLP software protects your business by preventing the loss or disclosure of personal and sensitive information. This keeps your customers’ data safe and allows you to meet regulatory compliance standards.

DLP solutions are available from industry stalwarts like CA Technologies, Cisco, and McAfee to up-and-coming challengers. They can be configured with various detection techniques, including rule-based and regular expressions and database fingerprinting.

These methods allow you to quickly scan content for specific identifiers and identify violations. You can train your DLP engine to recognize more complex patterns using machine learning algorithms.

Cloud DLP solutions enable you to create central policies that protect your entire enterprise’s data. They ensure your data stays safe in the cloud and help you secure it before sharing it with authorized cloud apps.

DLP is an essential part of an effective cybersecurity strategy. It protects you from ransomware, identity theft, and other data breaches. It also helps you comply with regulations and security standards such as GDPR or HIPAA.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

DLP software can increase customer satisfaction by helping businesses maintain high privacy for their customers’ sensitive data. It also helps organizations comply with relevant data protection standards and laws, such as HIPAA or GDPR and reduces the risk of hefty fines.

Educating employees is another critical component of any DLP program. Employees are often the weakest link in cybersecurity, so they must understand why data loss prevention is essential and how it can protect their personal information and the business.

A good DLP strategy should include a policy to govern how your business handles all data types. The guidelines should be created with input from multiple leaders across your company.

The policies should be documented and reviewed periodically, and they should be enforced at the organizational level. They should also be updated for new technologies and transmission paths that may impact data loss. Keeping these processes consistent and documented is essential for the success of your DLP program. It will also make it easier to train and onboard new employees.