There is no doubt that data is the lifeblood of modern businesses. Recognizing this, businesses lay ever-increasing emphasis on not just data collection but also access to the collected data. Widespread adoption of the cloud has dramatically increased the ability of businesses to collect, store, and use data at scale. At the same time, the ease of access that the cloud offers has resulted in better insights, improvements in team collaboration, and greater productivity.
So, more data is being stored in the cloud with every passing day. But data in the cloud is not immune to cyberattacks or data loss. In fact, since the cloud is still a relatively new technology, most cloud users do not fully understand their responsibilities with respect to securing their cloud environment. Consequently, cloud security doesn’t receive as much attention as it should.
It is no surprise that 70% of organizations have experienced a public cloud security incident such as ransomware, malware, compromised accounts, cryptojacking, etc. In addition, organizations that run multi-cloud environments are 50% more likely to experience cloud-related security incidents.
To address this growing threat to data in the cloud, data loss prevention (DLP) has become a critical part of any data security strategy. This blog post talks about what DLP is, its importance, and how to implement a DLP program for your business.
In this post, I cover the following topics:
1. What Is Data Loss Prevention (DLP)?
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a program consisting of systems, processes, and tools that prevent unauthorized access to an organization’s sensitive data. DLP systems classify confidential and essential data, track access and sharing of data, identify violations, and apply remedial measures such as encryption, alerts, etc. to prevent users from inadvertently or intentionally exposing sensitive data.
The policies that define how data can be accessed or shared are called data loss prevention (DLP) policies. These policies are usually shaped by compliance requirements such as HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, etc. DLP policies are essential for safeguarding data in the cloud- at rest, in transit, and in use. They are of huge importance for forensics and incident response and consequently for security auditing and compliance requirements.
2. Why Do You Need A Data Loss Prevention Policy?
As we mentioned earlier, data is the lifeblood of modern businesses. Therefore, it is only natural to do the utmost to protect it. Traditionally, data security involved mostly preventing malicious attacks. However, the current business environment requires far more complex data protection strategies and systems.
Now that data is mostly stored in the cloud and employees can access and share that data much more easily than in the past, accidental loss of data, as well as intentional data theft, has become a much bigger problem. The growing adoption of remote work demands greater ease in and a higher frequency of data access. This makes errors, misconfigurations, privilege creep, and accidental data loss more common, making data security more difficult.
In addition, data security is coming under greater scrutiny from the public and more importantly from the regulators. How you store, access, and share data have become important parts of any business operation. Therefore, a Data Loss Prevention policy must be included as part of your data security and compliance strategy since it not only protects your data but also helps you achieve regulatory compliance.
3. How Does Data Loss Prevention Work?
There are many DLP solutions available in the market and all of them can be broadly categorized into two types:
1. Integrated DLP
Integrated DLP solutions consist of secure web and email gateways, email encryption tools, enterprise content management platforms, data discovery and classification tools, tools, and cloud-based security policy enforcement.
2. Enterprise DLP
Enterprise DLP solutions are comprehensive software solutions for machines, both physical and virtual, providing data discovery, classification, monitoring, and security policy application features.
There are many different techniques used to analyze, classify, and protect data as well as to trigger policy violation alerts. Some of the common techniques include regular expressions, database fingerprinting, statistical analysis, pre-built categorization, etc. The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence has also made DLP more effective and less prone to errors in identifying and protecting sensitive data such as credit card numbers, personally identifiable information, personal health information, etc.
4. How Do You Create A Data Loss Prevention Program?
Here are the steps needed to create a Data Loss Prevention Program:
The following sections discuss each step in detail.
1. Define And Categorize Your Cloud Assets
The first step in improving data security is to identify your assets and classify them into categories. After all, it would be impossible to secure assets and systems if you don’t know they exist.
Identifying and categorizing your assets that need to be protected helps you define the scope and boundaries of your security systems. The classification should be based on the sensitivity and the importance of the associated data and capabilities for business operations. While the identification helps you know what to protect, the classification helps you decide the level of security and specific security controls required by each asset type.
The assets are usually classified into two categories:
Essential Assets such as business processes, information, etc.
Support Assets, which are components such as hardware, software, etc. that support the essential assets.
The financial impact is generally a good gauge for the classification of your assets. However, such a classification can be onerous as it is difficult to measure the financial impact of every asset and the associated business processes, operations, etc. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile exercise as it helps you create a technically as well as financially viable solution to protect your assets.
Alternatively, instead of associating absolute dollar values to your assets, you may instead classify them based on their relative financial impact, i.e. low, medium, high, etc. At this stage, you should also identify the asset owners so that the responsibilities and accountabilities are clearly established right from the start.
2. Defining Data Security Requirements
To have effective security systems, you need to know what you are protecting against. A good starting point for this exercise is your organization’s security strategy where you must have identified relevant security threats to your organization. Once you have identified the threats, you will likely notice some vulnerabilities and security gaps in your systems. This brings the question of how do you decide which vulnerability to fix first.
Threat modeling gives you an understanding of how attacks work and allows you to prioritize vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. The combined knowledge of your system vulnerabilities and the strategies of attackers enables you to make informed decisions, focusing on specific vulnerabilities that attackers need to exploit to breach the system.
After identifying and prioritizing potential vulnerabilities and security gaps, the next step is to fill those gaps. Different threats and vulnerabilities will call for different security controls and you may have to use different combinations of security controls to meet your security and compliance requirements.
3. Draft DLP Policies
Once the above steps are completed, you will have a clear understanding of the assets that need to be protected as well as of your organization’s security requirements. This will help you create policies on who can access data, how the data can be accessed, and how it can be shared.
For example, sensitive information such as social security numbers and banking information would be restricted to the payroll department. Additionally, you may also add security features that prevent the copying or sharing of sensitive information.
4. Have A Backup And Recovery Plan In Place
A data backup and recovery plan is one of the most important steps for data loss prevention. Data loss can occur in many ways- from accidental to malicious, internal to external espionage, and backups are the closest you can get to an infallible protection system.
Automatic backups and cloud storage options have made data backups and recovery very easy. For example, organizations that use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 already have the ability to easily set up automatic backups with just a few clicks. Even for companies that work with large repositories of data, there are many cloud backup solutions that offer easy-to-use data backups.
5. Use A Data Loss Prevention Software
Data Loss Prevention solutions are software that can catch and block any attempts of sharing sensitive information with unauthorized users inside or outside your corporate network. They allow you to automate policy enforcement, monitoring, and detection.
Data Loss Prevention software solutions are generally of three types:
1. Endpoint DLP
Endpoint DLP solutions are those tools that monitor devices such as desktops, mobile devices, servers, etc., and prevent sensitive data from being exfiltrated or shared from those devices.
2. Network DLP
Network DLP solutions are those tools that enable you to monitor, analyze, and control the flow of network traffic and data, allowing you to establish and enforce security policies and mitigate data loss risks.
3. Cloud DLP
Cloud DLP solutions are those tools that protect your data, stored in the cloud, using encryption, access control, and other security measures. Advanced DLP solutions are also capable of data identification, classification, and removal of confidential data that is shared with cloud environments or applications.
6. Harden Your Internal Security
It may come as no surprise that more data loss incidents occur due to employees than through external attacks. Insider threat, be it malicious or unintentional, is one of the biggest threats to data security. Often, data leakage can occur without anyone even realizing it. For instance, forwarding an email with sensitive information to someone who shouldn’t have access to it or losing your laptop is also considered data loss or data leakage.
Therefore, implementing security best practices to secure your network is a critical step for your DLP program. Here are some of the best practices that help you harden your internal security:
7. Regularly Audit Your DLP Policies
Whether you realize it or not, new vulnerabilities are popping up in your systems all the time- be it through the unsanctioned SaaS application being used by an employee, a missing patch from a user’s machine, or a new regulatory requirement. Some of these may be new ones, while others may be old ones that were missed in previous audits. In any case, regular audits of your DLP policies give you the opportunity to locate vulnerabilities and risks in a timely manner and mitigate them before they cause data loss.
Conclusion
Modern organizations collect and store a lot of data and it is only natural to be concerned about data security. Even though most organizations have some data security measures, at the very least, there are still many areas of concern, especially with respect to data loss and data leakage. An effective Data Loss Prevention program will help you address most of such concerns and to mitigate associated business risks.
Securing data is essential for the sustainability of any organization. If you are in need of assistance with data protection or IT security in general, reach out to us by clicking the button below to find out how we can help improve the security of your data and IT infrastructure in general.
This post was first published in the IT Elevate blog: How To Create Data Loss Prevention Program For The Cloud
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About The Author
Hari SubediMarketing Manager at Jones IT
Hari is an online marketing professional with a focus on content marketing. He writes on topics related to IT, Security, Small Business, and Mindfulness. He is also the founder and managing director of Girivar Kft., a business services company located in Budapest, Hungary.