Data Loss Prevention Solutions

For the modern business, data is often its most valuable possession. Whether it’s client lists, insights into customer behavior, or intellectual property, this data can make or break a business. As a result, data is often one of the greatest targets of cybercriminals. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are designed to ensure that any sensitive data in an organization’s possession is not accessed by unauthorized users, nor lost or stolen.

Accomplishing this requires a system that is capable of identifying and classifying sensitive data and applying security policies either defined by the organization or based upon data protection laws like GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA. If violations of these policies are detected, the solution should take action to remediate the issue, whether by alerting security teams, terminating the communication, or applying appropriate protection (such as encryption).

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Why Organizations Need DLP Solutions

A DLP solution enables an organization to monitor data flows through and beyond its environment. This can be valuable for a number of reasons:

Compliance: The primary goal of data protection regulations is to ensure that companies control access to sensitive data. Deploying a DLP solution may be a requirement under some regulations.
Competitive Advantage: An organization’s internal data is crucial to its ability to compete in the marketplace. If this data is leaked to a competitor or publicly posted, competitive advantage may be lost.
Intellectual Property Protection: Research and development (R&D) data and other intellectual property could devastate an organization’s competitive advantage and profitability if leaked. Data such as trade secrets has no legal protection, and knowledge of an organization’s future plans can inform competitors’ development and marketing efforts.
Customer Information: Organizations have a responsibility to protect customer data from breach and unauthorized usage. Failure to do so can result in regulatory penalties, legal fees, and brand damage.
Data Visibility: Gaining visibility into an organization’s data flows can help to optimize operations and minimize cybersecurity risk. Understanding how data flows through the network enables an organization to redesign network architecture to minimize network latency and congestion.

These are only some of the advantages that an organization can reap from deploying an effective DLP solution. However, it is essential that the solution an organization selects is capable of meeting its needs.

Choosing the Right Data Loss Prevention Solution

A DLP solution is an important component of an organization’s data security strategy. This system will be responsible for monitoring data flows through the organization and helping to detect unauthorized access and usage of data, and potential data breaches.

For this reason, it is essential to have a clear vision for the DLP solution before evaluating potential offerings. Some important considerations to help with the planning and evaluation process include:

Objective: What goals is the DLP solution intended to achieve? Is it to prevent general data breaches or provide granular visibility of data flows?
Threat Landscape: Will the DLP solution need to defend against internal threats, external threats or both? This can define the deployment locations and required visibility of the solution.
Environments: In which types of environments will the DLP solution be deployed? Will it be deployed on-premises on company-owned infrastructure or does it need to be effective within cloud environments?
Form Factors: How will the DLP solution be deployed? Will it be deployed as a physical appliance, a virtual machine, or is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering the best option?
Visibility: Is content-based or context-based data inspection and classification required? Or will the solution largely be looking for general trends and anomalies?
Classification: Will the data be primarily classified by the DLP solution based upon common classification types (payment card data, personally identifiable information, etc.)? Or will users need to be able to manually classify data as well?
Compliance: What data protection laws and regulations will apply to the data monitored and processed by this solution? What are their requirements and how will a DLP solution help to meet these requirements and affect compliance audits?

Answering these questions sets the scope and expectations for a DLP solution. Using these answers, it is possible to determine whether or not a potential DLP offering meets an organization’s requirements.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is an Ongoing Program

Selecting the right data loss prevention tool is a critical step in an organization’s data security and data loss prevention strategy. However, an effective data loss prevention program is not a single tool or solution. Data management requires a suite of cybersecurity tools and processes that ensures that sensitive data is properly monitored, classified, and secured across the entire organization.

Check Point offers a comprehensive data loss prevention solution for organizations, including email security support. To learn more about Check Point’s DLP solutions, check out our data protection and email security pages. Then, contact us to learn how Check Point solutions can integrate and improve your organization’s data security.