What Is Data Loss Prevention and How Can I Protect My Business?

In the digital age, one of the most common questions for organizations is: how to guarantee data protection?

With the growth of devices connected to the Internet worldwide, the risks related to the loss of personal and business data are latent. This, in turn, could bring severe consequences for organizations, such as the exposure of personal or financial information, damage to reputation, or even non-compliance with regulations and laws.

Just a few years ago, in 2020, the world had 14 million devices, and forecasts point to more than 18 million by 2025¹. So information security is a central issue.

The reality is that prevention is more important than trying to stop a leak when it’s already happening, which is why solutions such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) are shown as one of the resources that provide more visibility and protection for data currently.

So, in this article, we’ll show you what Data Loss Prevention is, how to protect your company from data loss, and how an edge computing DLP solution can help you in this mission.

What is Data Loss Prevention?

According to Gartner², DLP is “a marketplace of technologies that includes offerings that provide visibility into the use and movement of data within an organization.”

DLP helps organizations protect their confidential and critical information against data-related threats, such as risks of unintentional or accidental data loss and sensitive data exposure.

One of the objectives of DLP is to prevent data exfiltration, that is, to avoid the unauthorized exit of valuable or confidential data from an organization to a place external to it. For example, via e-mail or instant messages.

DLP uses monitoring, alerting, warning, blocking, and other remediation tools and may include techniques such as:

• Data identification and classification
• Data monitoring
• Encryption
• Security politics

What to Expect From a Data Loss Prevention Solution?

A proper DLP solution should provide the ability to reduce risk to your most critical assets, monitor application data, and mitigate high-risk communications while maintaining legal compliance.

Solutions such as an edge computing platform allow you to implement DLP practices for websites and applications based on detecting confidential information, analyzing content in depth, and configuring tools that let you detect content according to your privacy protection policies. business data.

An efficient DLP solution can cover two essential aspects:

1. Data security: It protects access to confidential information and creates a security perimeter through:

• Inspection of HTTP traffic regarding confidential data (restricts extensions, HTTP methods, among others)
• File exclusion
• Restrictions and control of user permissions to devices, domains, and networks for sensitive data
• It allows filtering by words in BODY, PATH, and Headers (it searches for certain words or phrases and blocks them)
• Definition of a number of requests

2. Visibility: A DLP solution must provide a complete view of an organization’s data through:

• Traffic monitoring in real time
• Fault identification
• Implementation of the business rules that best adapt to any technology
• Information classification
• Automation to prevent data leakage
• Provision of logs and event control

DLP Use Cases

Compliance

DLP solutions allow companies to apply policies to sensitive data on devices or across the entire network and ensure its security.

Let us remember that companies must comply with government regulations and regulations, such as the Law on Privacy and Protection of personal data, as well as the regulations of the financial sector.

DLP is an ally of the security team, and today it’s a requirement for information access control. An implementation based on the access flow and real-time data monitoring guarantees the necessary resources to control access to information.

Data leak

Preventing data leak or exfiltration is one of the main goals of DLP. This implies that it’s possible to issue alerts, identify sensitive data, and apply restrictions to unauthorized users when there is a risk of leaving an internal network or being revealed on a website or application.

Protection of sensitive documents

DLP can help protect the financial and personal information of a company’s customers, such as credit card numbers and social security. It alerts when this information is moved, copied, or shared across devices or networks.

For example, e-commerce Dafiti, using advanced firewall rules to protect APIs, desktop and mobile applications, currently protects its customers’ credit card details and credentials, allowing it to operate in an environment safer purchases and comply with important requirements such as PCI DSS.

Conclusion

DLP is a set of technologies and practices that can certainly help protect an organization’s sensitive information.

If you want to get the benefits of this, learn about Azion’s edge computing solutions that are helping companies to protect their data:

• Azion’s Rules Engine: an ally of the Network Layer Protection solution, creates access to confidential information and a security perimeter, blocking HTTP methods, paths, headers and filtering by GEOIP.

• Origin Shield: Creates a security perimeter between the edge and the APIs, allowing only traffic coming from Azion.

• Real-Time Metrics and Data Stream: Provides detailed Insights with an efficient real-time visualization of the performance, availability, and security of your applications.

​​To learn more about how to protect your data, you can create a free account and try the edge or talk to an expert.  

Sources:

¹Forecast number of mobile devices worldwide from 2020 to 2025 (in billions) (Statista)

²What is Data Loss Prevention? (Gartner)