Since the turn of the millennium, data has gradually replaced people as an organization’s most valuable asset. If you don’t agree with this sentiment, it would be instructive to ask yourself this question: what is the one thing that, if taken away, would irreparably cripple your business? The answer is most likely your data, especially sensitive data about your business and your consumers.

Yet, this data increasingly finds itself in compromising places beyond traditional perimeters. The migration to cloud was well underway before a worldwide pandemic saw organizations adapt through remote working and BYOD, both of which possess significant data loss risk. These shifts have pushed the perimeter to never before seen limits. What you need in this scenario is a data loss prevention (DLP) solution that protects your most sensitive data from its biggest threats.

But what is your data’s biggest threat? Let’s go back to data and people, because even though data is an organization’s prized asset, people are the biggest threat to its security. 74% of all breaches involved a human element, and the three biggest reasons for data leaks all involve them:

• Exfiltration of data by external attackers, using methods like stolen credentials, phishing and DDoS attacks
• Insider threats from any employees, former employees, contractors or associates looking to cause harm to your company
• Negligence as a result of weak security protocols and poor cybersecurity training programs 

Once data is leaked, the inverse happens – it ends up becoming a threat to the people involved in your organization, especially your customers. According to IBM, it costs companies an average of $183 per compromised customer record, and that figure goes up when you consider the hefty industry-specific compliance fines related to regulations like HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS. All this leads to the average cost of a data breach reaching $4.45 million in the year 2023, which means a single data breach could be fatal to an SME’s operational status.

So, it becomes imperative for an organization to secure its data, while dealing with all the complexities that come with it. This is where DLP comes in.

What is a DLP Solution?

DLP is an organizational security solution that identifies & helps prevent unsafe use, sharing or transfer of sensitive data. Additionally, should data loss occur, it possesses a swift response strategy to mitigate the impact. One thing to note about DLP is that it doesn’t consist of just one software, but a myriad set of tools, ranging from firewalls, endpoint protection tools, monitoring services, antivirus software and data access programs incorporating the principle of least privilege. 

Moreover, state-of-the-art DLP solutions (like the ones we provide) utilize AI, ML and automation to detect and contextualize anomalous activity for your infosec teams. All these tools are packaged into a comprehensive data loss protection solution that helps to secure sensitive data and protect intellectual property.

You can probably tell by now that data security is a vastly complex process. Here are the five steps in crafting an effective DLP:

Step 1: Identification & Classification 

To start securing your data, you must first understand it. Here are the typical categories through which we identify organizational data:

• Data-in-motion that travels across your network
• Data-in-use at your endpoints
• Data-at-rest that is sitting idle in storage 
• Data-in-cloud across all the 3 aforementioned stages

And once data is identified, one must classify it. The two distinctions we maintain are:

• Described, which involve classifiers that help identify and look for data like PII
• Registered, which creates a fingerprint for matching data like intellectual property

All these classifications adhere to regulatory requirements involving data storage, giving you a strong reference point for your compliance strategy.

Step 2: Risk Assessment

Let’s start by telling you a hard truth: DLP cannot be implemented at a single go, nor is it recommended to do so. It should ideally be done in a piecemeal, progressive way. That begins by acknowledging that not all organizational data is created equal, and you would be better off shaping your strategy to protect your most sensitive data.

So, how do you go about doing that? The 80/20 rule of DLP is an exercise that helps identify factors like the 20% of data critical to your organization, and the 20% of the channels & endpoints most likely to be exploited. Once that is done, risk is calculated through a simple formula:

Risk = Impact X Rate of Occurrence (RO)

The RO measures how often, over a set period of time, data is being used or transmitted in a way that puts it at risk of being lost or compromised. Once this step is done, you will have a good idea of the data you should be prioritizing when it comes to security.

Step 3: Monitoring & Protection

The work done in the first two steps converts into actual practice here. It all starts with access control, ideally with the principle of least privilege that gives users (and machines) access to only the assets required for them to effectively conduct their duties. It is important to not have too many preventive measures that hinder productivity, otherwise you’ll have employees actively trying to circumvent and sidestep security measures to get work done.

Instead, let them do their work and have a mechanism that consistently monitors their actions. Having a risk-adaptive approach to DLP puts an emphasis on user behavior and contextualizes all possible actions to reduce false positives across the board. 

Step 4: Response

A solid DLP strategy recognizes that data leaks can always happen, irrespective of all the preventive measures you have in place. In such situations, immediate response helps mitigate a lot of the damage in terms of brand image and bottom line that an organization can suffer. Yet, we live in circumstances where it takes organizations an average of 204 days to identify data breaches, and an additional 73 days to contain it.

AI & ML could be a differentiator in providing you a critical advantage when it comes to response. With strict policy enforcement embedded into them, such tools will effectively enable encryption and isolate data quickly in such cases.

Step 5: Evolution & Education

For a DLP solution to continue functioning effectively, evolution & education play a key part:

• One must reevaluate the solution at least twice a year based on the learnings and insights received. This is done to keep up with emerging threats and incorporate tools to your stack best suited to combating them.
• Your infosec team must be well-versed with how to optimize the DLP solution. For it to succeed, human intervention is a must.
• But finally, a key component of preventing data loss is organization-wide employee education. 86% of data breaches involve the use of stolen credentials, so it is important to inform them about the various ways they can be targeted, and measures they can undertake to thwart such attempts.

Overall, there are many benefits to having a comprehensive DLP solution as one of the main tools in your organizational security:

• • Expedited incident response that quickly identifies network anomalies & unusual user activity
  • Complete adherence to myriad compliance standards applicable to your industry and location
  • 360 degree visibility into your enterprise’s network and endpoints through a unified dashboard
  • Reduced financial risk associated with data loss or leaks
  • Decreased chance of reputational harm

We at iValue Group have partnered up with industry leaders Forcepoint for the DLP solutions  we provide. Forcepoint’s DLP solution has the most pre-defined templates – 1700 policies applicable for regulatory demands of 90+ countries and 150+ regions – in the market, helping you effortlessly manage your compliance requirements. Moreover, as we alluded to earlier, it incorporates a risk-adaptive approach that takes an active rather than reactive approach to threats by concentrating on IOBs (indicators of behavior) over IOCs (indicators of compromise). You can read much more about its risk-adaptive approach in our blog “Understanding Risk-Adaptive Protection in DLP“.

So, if you are looking for the best DLP solution to effectively safeguard your data, the first thing to do would be to contact iValue Group.