In the current rapidly evolving digital environment, data has emerged as the most important and also the most risky asset any organisation can possess. Be it financial data, company secrets, employee and customer records, data is present during all operational and value chain processes at any company.

As evident, the value of data for an organisation increases the associated risk in the event of cyber theft, internal company fraud or data loss due to human error. Hence, such loss of organisational data has led to the formulation of data loss prevention (DLP) strategies as a principal feature of the most recent and modern cybersecurity initiatives. The essential part of implementing an effective DLP policy hinges on the fact it should not limit or constrain the productivity of the organisation.

Finding the right balance for both IT and Security teams means striking a good balance between flexible enough data protection to keep business operations running smoothly and adaptive protection that doesn’t impede user trust and create workarounds to accelerate data workflows. With the right amount of protection, DLP tools that safeguard sensitive data may restrain the occasional data leak. How do organisations find that right mix?

Why the biggest DLP tools in the industry are a waste of time.

Traditional DLP tools have one thing in common. Most are a little too one track minded. They don’t consider the wider organisation. For example, if an employee has sensitive financial data and needs to share a spreadsheet with a business partner, DLP isn’t able to see the business objectives and will prevent the employee from sharing what they need to share.

DLPs are also known for being “overblocking,” which is all of the DLP tools business users have no control over. Employees turn to just about anything in order to get their work done. Without DLP tools, the work environment will actually be more secure. Unmonitored channels are the biggest threat to organisational data breaches.

False positives can lead a security team to experience alert fatigue. If DLP systems trigger alerts on activity that is part of normal business operations (i.e., the flow of transactions), the system could overlook a legitimate threat. Instead of this one-size-fits-all system, organisations need to find better solutions that understand further context.

Incorporating Contextual Intelligence, Contextual Behaviour, and Smarter DLP Technologies

Modern DLP solutions aim to incorporate user behaviour analytics and contextual information to identify potential risks. Instead of generating alerts on sensitive data movement, these tools identify patterns based on data, purpose, and time accessed.

Consider the following scenario. A finance department employee logs on from a different country to conduct large volume downloads of customer data. A contextual DLP system would identify this behaviour as abnormal and trigger a response. Instead of blocking the action, the system may require higher authentication hurdles and may alert a security analyst.

Mimecast, a well-known player in the cybersecurity space, offers data loss prevention software designed to combine behavioral analytics with contextual intelligence. Organizations leveraging data loss prevention software and tools provided by Mimecast benefit from systems that can differentiate between risky and legitimate activity in real time. By continuously learning from user behavior, these solutions become more precise over time, reducing false positives while improving both security and productivity.

Seamless DLP Integration with Modern Workplace

With the accelerating digital transformation, the way people work has also changed, resulting in the creation of hybrid, decentralised work environments dependent on the cloud with tools like Slack, Google Workspace, and OneDrive/SharePoint for collaboration and file storage. However, the distributed architecture of modern workplaces presents unique complexities for DLP.

With modern DLP tools, the DLP vendor should be able to operate without negatively impacting the daily utilisation of the platforms. Simplistic access to collaboration space with data should be provided to employees to reduce needless contextual alerts and data access constraints. Therefore, many companies prefer integrated DLP solutions that are unobtrusive to end user actions.

An example of this capability is Mimecast, which allows customers to apply cross-platform DLP policies to email and cloud platforms to discover and protect data, maintaining employee productivity and limiting organisational data flow with integrated monitoring.

Best DLP Adopters

In sharp contrast to plain old DLP systems that apply the same rules indiscriminately, risk-based DLP systems apply custom rules to individual users and actions and incorporate user risk scoring. For example, a user identified as a low risk routine user may experience little to no restrictions, while an identified as high risk user may experience significant restrictions, including, but not limited to, data downloads and access from different locations.

This type of system offers greater flexibility while achieving the same security, and security compliance is typically improved as users are offered more confidence in their ability to work and the system needs to be activated less in order to limit the users’ ability to work. Employees are treated as data protection partners instead of people who need to be controlled. Compliance increases, and instances to work around security controls decrease.

Advanced security features supported by machine learning and behavioural analytics are coupled with the flexibility of policy management to security objectives and business objectives. Best DLP Adopters Document Loss Prevention Best DLP Adopters Data Loss Prevention.

Data Protection, Compliance, and Regulation

Data protection, for most organisations, is not just about protecting sensitive data, it is about keeping the organisation compliant. Data protection regulations such as CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA pose several challenges and risks to organisations. Ignoring compliance subjects the organisation to the risk of being sanctioned, being sued, and incurring reputational risks that may be long-lasting.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are designed to assist organisations to comply with data protection regulations by helping organisations to classify data, understand data flow, and to implement data governance policies in relation to data processing. DLP solutions also assist organisations to demonstrate due diligence by providing data processing policy compliance audit trails, incident report logs, and data processing policy compliance enforcement logs. DLP solutions also reduce the time taken to respond to data loss and data breaches.

Security solutions such as Mimecast are designed to give organisations centralised operational oversight and reporting for the purposes of increasing organisational risk visibility to enable the organisation to reduce risk in an operationally efficient manner. This is especially important in the development of an organisational data governance model in the data protection, data privacy compliance, and data loss protection solutions in the Finance, Healthcare, and Legal sectors.

Security Awareness is Key

A Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution is an organisational tool and as such the most important element of the DLP solution is the people. Employees form the first layer of the organisation and are the weakest link in the organisational chain that needs to be considered when developing a DLP solution.

Organizations are required to move away from basic awareness campaigns and generic training and invest in ongoing security training. Employees need to learn what is classified as sensitive data, how to manage and share sensitive data, and what might happen to them as a result of data mishandling. Employees should also be taught how to identify phishing, social engineering, and how to identify social engineering and phishing as well as various other suspicious activities.  

Many security-focused companies, Mimecast, for instance, prioritise user training as an integral part of DLP. Mimecast includes user simulated phishing and training as part of their DLP to increase user awareness. With data security, companies aim to increase employee involvement to foster a protective culture in an organisation.  

Data Loss Prevention as an Enabler of Business Growth

It is fair to view DLP as a restrictive element but when done right, DLP should always be an enabler. Business owners are able to focus on developing and adopting new technological initiatives as well as developing and adopting new collaborative business initiatives as long as they know their sensitive data is well protected.  

DLP is the best security investment for a resilient and growing organisation. With today’s technological advancement in digital DLP, high-quality protection, user-centric and intelligent automated policies, leaves room for movement, therefore bringing business-focused momentum back to the organisation.

Tools such as Mimecast assist companies in changing how they speak about DLP. To empower teams to work however they want, these tools have intelligence, integrations, and risk controls that protect critical data in the background.

Conclusion

Sensitive data needs to be kept safe, which is especially difficult in the current age of collaboration, cloud solutions and moving data. DLP is about more than just closing off access to data. Now it is about the context of the data, the purpose behind user actions, and the environment in which the data exists.

Future DLP solutions will be intelligent, behaviour-aware solutions. With these solutions, companies will be able to keep data safe and secure without hindering business. With these tools, companies will be able to achieve the ultimate goal of business and data security.