Today's digital age has produced unprecedented amounts of data. Much of this data is considered sensitive, such as personal information about customers and employees, financial data, and intellectual property. This data is an organization's lifeblood and the organization has been entrusted to keep it safe. In another day and age, this information was printed on paper and secured in a locked file cabinet. These highly valuable zeros and ones race from one place to another, more vulnerable than ever. Thus, it has become incumbent on organizations to implement comprehensive data loss prevention (DLP) solutions.
DLP is a set of technologies and processes that monitors and inspects data on the corporate network to ensure sensitive data is not lost or stolen.
A DLP tool should always be part of an organization-wide data protection initiative, which gets business and IT leaders together to identify what constitutes "sensitive data" for the particular organization, and agree upon how this data should be used and what a violation would look like. These guidelines can then be translated into a set of rules within a DLP tool.
While many organizations have an incentive to deploy DLP to be compliant with regulations and to avoid fines or even restrictions to their business operations, data loss bears much broader financial and reputational risk, such as losing customers, incurring brand damage or even facing legal ramifications. With a well-defined DLP process that is bolstered by well-managed supporting technology, organizations are able to significantly reduce these risks.
