Your confidential data lost or stolen, your business damaged!
Your employees, contract staff and temporary workers may all require access to your sensitive data and information to fulfil their responsibilities. Your customer data, financial information, supplier information and performance metrics are all commercially important and require protection from inappropriate use.
You can ensure that users can only access the information they are supposed to using standard file system or portal access controls. But once these users have the data on their own desktop to perform their tasks how can you be sure that the information cannot be passed on, mislaid or stolen?
While files and data are being used they are trivial to copy and transmit. While most of this activity may be legitimate, your most valuable business information is out of your control and can be used for inappropriate and business threatening purposes, potentially on a massive scale; without you even knowing!
Out of ignorance or accident information and data can easily be:
- Forwarded to the wrong "John Smith"
- Redistributed by users "unaware" of the NDA obligations
- Stored or transmitted without first applying the required encryption
- Put at risk by placing information in an insecure location
- Inappropriately edited or altered
Disgruntled, bribed or blackmailed employees or remote hackers may:
- Maliciously forward data to a competitor by email or internet upload
- Copy data to a CD, memory stick or iPod
- Alter or remove sensitive or confidential information
- Deliver employee or customer data to criminal/dubious organisations
- Steal prospect or customer lists, supplier information or key business metrics
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Firewalls, access controls and encryption can help prevent hackers and other illegitimate users from gaining access, but do nothing to control what legitimate users do with your data.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions can protect your data even from those who have legitimate access to it. The power of DLP comes from its ability to monitor and control what users do with your data; how they use it and how they move and store it. Only by monitoring how your data moves around your network can you know how best to protect it. Only by intervening at the point of use can you ensure that your data remains protected and under your control at all times.
DLP solutions work by applying central policies to monitor and control the use and transmission of data; controlling how data moves across your network, and what is allowed to leave it. DLP works in the background so users do not need to be aware that it is operating, unless they violate or attempt to violate policy rules. This makes it easy for data protection to be applied quickly and easily across your business.
How does DLP work?
A central server is used to manage users, policies and encryption keys. Some DLP solutions only provide network level devices to restrict data movement. More advanced solutions also provide a desktop agent to monitor, and where necessary restrict, user activity.
These systems look at the context of data interactions to determine whether there is any violation, or attempted violation, of policy. The contextual information used can include what the data is, what it contains, where the data came from, where it is being moved to, who is moving it and how.
Violations and related activity are logged for future reference, perhaps for forensic investigation, and can also trigger alerts to security staff. Alternatively violations can be blocked or warnings generated to inform users that data may be being put at risk.
Note: The detailed capabilities of each DLP vendor implementation can vary significantly.
How we can help you
We have experience in deploying DLP solutions and the technical project management expertise to:- identify your information security needs
- manage product installation and configuration
- foresee, avoid and overcome obstacles
- perform business and system integration
- develop and deliver customised training
- ensure the solution delivers the intended business outcomes
Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
