Key Considerations When Purchasing Data Loss Prevention Software

Data loss can significantly affect your organization’s operations and productivity. This is something that you never want to experience. Data loss prevention (DLP) software is meant to protect crucial data from theft or loss. DLP solutions leverage various techniques to prevent the loss of your data. This includes encryption, monitoring, policy enforcement, and classification.

The risk of data loss and the resultant events never goes away. Data loss prevention should be incorporated into your overall cybersecurity plan since it helps you prevent breaches and maintain productivity in case a breach occurs. DLP software protects intellectual property, corporate data, and customer data.

Often people use the terms ‘data leak’ and ‘data loss’ interchangeably. You should distinguish the two for you to understand what data loss prevention software is. A data loss incident tends to become a data leak incident once media containing crucial information gets lost and then accessed by unauthorized individuals. However, data leaks can occur without losing any data.

How Data Loss Prevention Software Works

DLP software prevents the loss of data by using standard and advanced security measures. Likewise, the software leverages its access control and encryption capabilities to safeguard data from breaches of loss.

Standard Measures Used by data loss Prevention Software

The standard security measures that DLP software use include intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and antivirus software. As you might notice, these are readily-available security products used to protect networks and computers against unauthorized intrusion. Firewalls, for instance, prevent unauthorized access to your network. On the other hand, intrusion detection systems detect any attempts by outsiders to breach your network. Insider attacks that lead to data loss can be averted using antivirus software, which scans the network to detect malware than can lead to data leaks and loss.

Advanced Security Measures of DLP Software

Data loss prevention software also employs advanced security measures. These include chronological reasoning algorithms and machine learning to detect abnormal access to data and unusual email exchange. Honeypots can also be used to identify the presence of unauthorized individuals with malicious intent. Another standard advanced security measure employed by DLP software is user-activity monitoring, which detects abnormal data access. When these measures are used to identify unauthorized activities in a network, steps can be taken early enough to prevent data leaks and losses.

Designated Systems

Thanks to advances in cybersecurity, we now have designated systems that can detect and avert unauthorized attempts to copy or transmit sensitive data. Often, this is done intentionally or unintentionally by individuals who have authorized access to the data in question. Designated systems measures that data loss prevention software use includes structured data fingerprinting and exact data matching.

Types of Data Loss Prevention Software

Network DLP Software

This type of data loss prevention software is typically installed at the outlet points of your network. It analyzes the network’s traffic to identify any sensitive data that might be sent with disregard to your organization’s security policy. If abnormal activities get detected, they will be reported to the central management server for analysis.

Endpoint DLP Software

Endpoint data loss prevention software run on internal user-end servers or workstations. Just like network DLP software, end-point technology monitors both internal and external communications. Therefore, you can use it to monitor the flow of information between types or groups of users. Likewise, endpoint DLP can control Instant Messaging and email communications. The most significant benefit of endpoint DLP software is that it can monitor and control users’ access to physical devices. Nonetheless, you will need to install the software on each device, which is tiresome.

Data Identification DLP

This data loss prevention software uses various techniques to identify sensitive or confidential information. The data identification process enables organizations to establish what exactly they should look for. Generally, data is classified as either being structured or non-structured. This software can help you make this distinction when encrypting your data, thus enabling you to prevent losses.

Data Leak Detection

Whenever data distributors give out data to third parties, there’s a possibility that some of the data may end up in unauthorized locations such as users’ laptops. Data leak detection DLP software can help you identify the source of such leaks. Once this is established, it will be easier to contain the leak before it leads to data loss.

Data-loss prevention software is a must-have for all organizations. The tool helps you to tighten up your network’s security stance. With the software in place, you also have a recovery plan should a data leak occur. NuEduSEC’s Secure Web Filtering & Enhanced Visibility solutions can help you point potential data loss areas in your network. This enables you to seal off the loopholes, thus preventing costly data losses.