Cloud Security

3 Problems Cloud DLP Solves

5 min. read

Today, data is everywhere – in data centers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, public and private clouds, mobile devices, and so on. This data is constantly being used and shared with others. It’s also being transmitted through a multitude of channels, such as mail servers, cloud email, file sharing apps and social media, often outside a company’s view and control.

To protect confidential or sensitive data, organizations must be able to see where it is and protect it against loss, theft, misuse and unauthorized access. One way to do this is to have an effective data loss prevention (DLP) strategy and solution spanning the whole environment, both in the cloud and on-premises. To protect the cloud, they need a new approach – cloud DLP.

Why Companies Need DLP

Companies used to keep all their sensitive data in managed on-premises environments, where it was easier to monitor and protect. Now that most companies have started their cloud journeys (and more of their applications and data are hosted on third-party cloud infrastructure), they no longer have:

A way to quickly find and classify the data they need to protect.
Visibility into, or control over, how or when data is being used, shared, uploaded to the cloud or securely transmitted to third parties.

More importantly, because traditional networks were never designed to work with the cloud or mobile solutions, and because employees are now working anytime, anywhere, on multiple devices, and can access cloud data directly, the conventional approach to protecting data no longer works.

To compensate, many companies have deployed multiple DLP products to address different parts of their network. Unfortunately, this approach is ineffective because:

It requires manual deployment, configuration, fine-tuning and maintenance of multiple solutions, increasing the risks of human error and adding IT complexity.
It results in different and inconsistent approaches to DLP, since every product has its own management console, policy language and data classification, and most don’t talk to each other.
Traditional DLP solutions only protect a single security control point or channel.

Therefore, to secure their data as well as comply with data privacy and protection laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), companies need a solution that can:

Discover, protect and secure their data consistently, no matter where it is or the channel through which it flows.
Help them monitor and manage who has access to their data as well as how their data is used and shared with others.

Next-Generation DLP Is Cloud-Delivered

Cloud DLP is a next-generation solution that provides the tools companies need to protect confidential and sensitive data throughout the organization – in both cloud and on-premises environments – and consistently apply security policies wherever their data is, whether it’s at rest, in use or in motion. It does this by:

Automating the detection and classification of all sensitive data in any form, structured or unstructured.
Protecting sensitive data automatically before it gets transferred to or from the cloud, or shared with other people.
Ensuring sensitive data can only be uploaded to trusted, authorized cloud applications, and only accessed by legitimate users.
Scanning data stored in the cloud to determine what needs to be protected.

Cloud DLP also solves three major problems that traditional DLP solutions can’t:

It simplifies DLP deployment. Cloud DLP embeds data protection into a company’s existing control points and automatically applies the policy across all of a company’s locations and users. This greatly simplifies DLP deployment and eliminates fragmentation.
It improves accuracy. Cloud DLP aggregates three types of information – content, context and character – to help companies make informed data protection decisions. It uses machine learning to scan all data at all times, inspecting and analyzing information flows as well as automatically applying data classification and policy fine-tuning. The result is a more accurate solution that provides deeper visibility into data and continually learns from its mistakes.
It facilitates effective prevention and remediation. Cloud DLP automates decisions and workflows, allowing companies to respond more quickly with fewer incident response resources.

Benefits of Cloud DLP

Some of the biggest benefits of using cloud DLP are that it:

Provides a highly effective and comprehensive DLP solution throughout diverse environments, enabling companies to secure their data no matter where it is.
Consistently supports and facilitates compliance with data protection and data privacy laws.

Click here for more information about cloud DLP.

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