The Best Ways to Implement Data Loss Prevention Plan

Data loss and data breaches is the worst nightmare for any business, especially if it involves sensitive data belonging to other individuals. Many businesses have different types of sensitive data, such as Personally Identifiable Information and intellectual property stored on their internal network. Therefore, it’s very important for these organizations to implement a strong data loss prevention strategy to safeguard the same from being misused. Reports say that the number of cybercrime incidents around sensitive data is constantly on the rise and is reassuring the need to have a reliable data protection approach for all businesses.

Data loss prevention or DLP refers to using high-end tools and technologies to avoid data breach and data loss. This is one of the main prerequisites in order to become a successful name in the modern digital world because the ability to provide a secure and safe data storage option adds to the business’ credibility. While data breach refers to the transfer of sensitive information to unauthorized parties outside the business’ network, data loss refers to losing the information due to a malware attack, hardware failure, or accidental removal. Taking appropriate data loss prevention measures would help rule out many of these incidents that can easily ruin a business’ reputation.

Generally, businesses employ adequate actions to protect their customer’s and client’s personal information as well as their company’s intellectual property. Implementing data loss prevention approaches also helps comply with the industry regulations as well as improving data visibility. Likewise, a robust data loss prevention plan can also work to deal with behavior analysis, insider threats, and other such issues in the most appropriate way.

Note that even large enterprises such as Yahoo and Equifax have been victims of data breaches in the past, which is why adopting the best data loss prevention strategy is a must for all businesses today to earn customer trust. The ever-evolving nature of the IT infrastructure and the growing use of electronic means to store personal data makes it mandatory to take the right measures in order to stay safe and protect yourself from data breaches and data loss. Below are some of the practical ways in which you can implement a strong data loss prevention plan for your company.

Categorize Different Types of Data

Modern DLP tools can help sort data based on different categories, which makes it easier to manage and monitor how the data is used. For instance, categorizing data using explanatory tags, such as “credit card details”, “intellectual property”, and “regulated data”, can make it very simple to track data use. Although the list of categories would vary from business to business, categorization works as the starting point for a successful DLP implementation.

Similarly, you should also prioritize the data under different types to understand the impact it would have on your business in case of a data breach or data loss. For instance, the project design files would be the most important data for a manufacturing company. As you should always give more priority to such business-specific data, categorizing them differently from consumer data would be helpful in implementing the most adequate data loss prevention approaches.

Set Specific Roles and Responsibilities

In order to make sure that your DLP implementation works to your benefit, you should clearly define the roles and responsibilities of your staff members that are in charge of managing the data loss prevention plan as well as of those who use sensitive data in your company. This would ensure that all the employees who are allowed access to the data are handling it with care and caution.

Many of the modern DLP solutions have pre-configured rules for different staff members based on industry regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA. Nonetheless, you can also craft custom policies that are applicable to your company to define the roles and responsibilities of your employees handling sensitive data. At the same time, you should also appoint someone to regularly check for data loss or data breaches and take the appropriate steps to manage the incident.

Figure Out the Risks

It is very important to figure out when the different types of business’ sensitive data are at risk of a loss or breach. Usually, there are three states when sensitive data is at most risk. These three states include; when at rest or stored, when in use, and when being transferred. To employ the data loss prevention plan effectively, you should use the best tools and techniques to deal with the risk at all these states.

Stored data or data at rest refers to the information saved in your company’s file systems, databases, or cloud storage centers. You can use powerful cryptographic algorithms in order to encrypt and secure data in this state. Likewise, using policy-based rules to notify you of the data loss or data breach can be beneficial when its stored on remote servers or other locations. You can also use network DLP technology to monitor network traffic and data transfer, which allows you to take the appropriate policy-based actions to safeguard sensitive data. At the same time, endpoint DLP solutions would be helpful to track user behavior and restrict certain actions such as copying the files to a USB drive.

Implement the DLP Plan Cautiously

You should first identify a particular category to implement the data loss prevention strategy and apply the action to it only. It would be best to cover a part of the most sensitive data initially and see how it works before employing the approach to secure all of your business’ critical data. This is very important to make the process go smoothly and ensure that your ongoing business operations are not affected by the newly adopted policies.

As data loss prevention combines high-grade tools and technologies with new security policies and a different approach to managing the data in your company, it can be expensive as well as a time-consuming project. That is why you should also be able to explain the value of implementing the DLP plan to stakeholders in order to make them aware of how it would benefit your company overall.