Benefits Of Data Loss Prevention For Companies

Cloud computing movement is tremendously growing and has conveyed incredible alteration in the Information Technology sector. It is the use of a remote servers’ network hosted to store, manage and process information using the internet, instead of having a local server or a private computer. Massive amounts of storing area and resources are being offered to cloud users through Cloud storage. Unfortunately, the obtained data is weak towards a various of internal and external threats which challenges the data reliability. Because of cloud’s apparent open nature, it raises vulnerable security, privacy and trust considerations. Sadly, the adoption of cloud computing speeded before applicable technologies gave the impression to tackle the related challenges of security. Whereas accessing shared resources in cloud information should address security and privacy, particularly once it involves managing sensitive information. In this report, I will be discussing how Data Loss Prevention helps companies in checking, blocking and locking data at its finest. Furthermore, DLP advantages and limitations will be examined along with other solutions.

There are three categories of data leakage in which data leakage can take place as an unintended leakage, intended leakage and malicious leakage. An unintended leakage can happen when a user unintentionally sends a private information to the wrong person or party. This action usually happens without the user intended wish. A popular example would be an employee sending an email to customer or a supplier and attaching a zip file and mistakenly sending it over. An intended leakage can happen while the user doesn’t know about the organization’s policy, he sends a private information to a third party, another user or to himself. A good example would be, an employee creating a new file, coping data to file and renaming it. A malicious leak commonly occurred as the user already knows about organization’s policy and intentionally sneaking private information out the organization. For instance, when an employee is selling a collection of client’s emails to an external advertising company. In this case, malicious leakage is committed. An optimum solution for data leakage would be Data Leakage Prevention. It is an important step for Cloud Computing in order to protect companies’ confidential information. So as to resolve cloud security risk concerns, cloud service providers and companies must work hand in hand in order to obtain information safely and securely.

Companies in all sectors face the risk of having sensitive information being stolen as internet offenders are being more technological advanced, prepared and financed than ever. Most companies have already applied specific methods of combined DLP and this amount will be almost doubled to ninety percent by the end of 2018, as said by Gartner. Basically, DLP allows an organization screening, examining and preventing all outgoing confidential information and safeguarding important information on hand, in-transfer, and on endpoints to minimize the probability of information stealing or unlicensed disclosure. The main goals of DLP are to protect important information and personal data as not to be kept, used and relocated insecurely. Encryption is being applied in order to make sure that sensitive data are being transmitted to authorized cloud applications to protect companies that have embedded storage of cloud. It is a great risk as companies keep shifting to the cloud and staff do their jobs from many sites, data being accessed from many places at any time. Information and data must be safeguarded and protected in the cloud, not only on their systems and appliances in companies due to the fact of having Shadow IT which means that employees are getting to work on unpermitted services and cloud storing applications. As for the prime benefits of using Data Loss Prevention Solutions are, one, beforehand data is being shared in the cloud, it incorporates with cloud storage providers to scan servers, detect, and encode information. Two, stored information is being skimmed and audited in the cloud at any occasion.

Third, actively implementing prompt, block, encode to significant information. information owners and administrators are being informed once information is placed at threat. As for the cloud data safeguard challenges, when companies don’t apply Data Loss Prevention solution, it is being left to the cloud storage providers to apply some sort of protection to the sensitive data. Countless of problems can happens as a result of this action. Cloud storage providers can simply not provide encryption, authentication, or strict access control for the sensitive information. As a result, information will be at risk due to the carelessness of security levels from company’s side and cloud storage provider’s side. As cloud service providers are facing enough problems dealing with security matters, organizations must depend on utilizing DLP service and other security actions, instead of placing faith in cloud services providers.

There are several criteria an organization can choose their Cloud Data Loss Prevention providers based on primary features being offered. One, Sensitive data to be encrypted before being upload on the cloud. Two, having certain control actions as examining, modifying, warning, impeding and eliminating remediation actions. Third, logging and reporting activity being detailed. Fourth, spreading information security through the cloud via API integration. There are many real-life examples of sensitive data protection, one of them is that Honda was a subject of data violation in which two million customers were affected. Honda’s portal was stolen from database and this resulted in compromising customers’ sensitive data including names, email addresses, vehicle identification numbers and credentials. The information was extracted from a marketing company with a cloud-based service provider in which the company was responsible for Honda’s marketing activities. This action has affected the reputation and image of the company negatively.