Anything and everything that caused significant data loss for a business in the early days could not help you (or us) find the source of the problem very easily.
Times are changing and now you have Microsoft Data Loss Prevention here to help.
Great, now you can sleep at night!
What is Data Loss Prevention?
Data Loss Prevention is a part of the Office 365 suite of online services that are available for you.
With Data Loss Prevention there can be policies set up that use the existing templates such as HIPAA, US Financial Data, PCI Data Security Standard or other templates that come from other partners of Microsoft.
Data Loss Prevention has made securing your data easier as it makes the process of deploying and customising DLP policies for supporting and enforcing IT security policies streamlined and easy to manage.
The feature was originally developed to prevent sensitive data from being insecurely sent in your emails.
DLP protects your data by scanning email messages for sensitive information that may be subject to your policies or regulations that have been set up.
Data Loss Prevention is not only a powerful but also a user-friendly tool within the security policy compliance arena.
It can be managed, regulated and setup by knowledgeable IT Professionals (like us) after consultation with you and after looking at your business processes.
Now onto more of the reasons for why you should care.
Do you really need to have Data Loss Prevention?
In the following ways, DLP can help in solving three main pain points of your business.
- If your business collects and stores personally identifiable information, protected health information or payment card information, then you can protect your customer’s sensitive data with the help of DLP. It can identify, classify and monitor activities surrounding this data.
- If your business has information or intellectual property that, if it fell into the wrong hands, could put your business’s financial health and/or brand image at risk, DLP can help to classifying the information in either structured or unstructured forms and therefore protect against unwanted exfiltration of your data.
- If you’re trying to increase the visibility of your data going back and forth, DLP helps by providing a comprehensive solution that can track your data on your network, cloud and also to each of your endpoints. It supports your business by giving you the details on how users and other individuals are interacting with your data.
If you’ve read through to here and it’s a big ‘YES, I want to protect my data!’ but you’re not sure where to start?
Give us a call today and we can discuss how you can secure your data 07 5526 0278
If you’re not quite convinced yet that you need to protect all of your business data, read on as we start to discuss what how DLP works in a little more detail.
How does Data Loss Prevention work for you?
It’s possible, when you start to use Data Loss Prevention Policies to protect so much of your business sensitive information across so many areas of your network.
Over time, complacency can creep in and a business can let its guard down for a short time and it’s at that time the worst can happen.
Databases can be copied; personal information can be leaked or even new product information might be emailed to an address outside of your business.
All of this can be monitored if needed and this is how DLP can work for you.
Read on to learn more, you may be surprised what important data you do have stored in your systems currently when you think about it!
Identify Sensitive Information
Information which is sensitive and located across many locations such as SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and OneDrive for business.
As an example, if any credit card number is stored in OneDrive, it is possible to identify, locate and monitor the document that contains the card details and then protect it with DLP.
Prevent Accidental Sharing
If you happen to share information or a document with someone by mistake.
You can rectify the accident straight away.
If a confidential document happens to be shared with people outside your business by accident or on purpose, you can quickly block the access to the document or block an email from being sent.
Being proactive in this instance would be the best line of defence for protecting your document, you could place rules on documents before anyone else has access to them to prevent accidental sharing in the first place.
Monitors and Protects Information within Excel, PowerPoint and Word
Just like SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, there are also some capabilities inside desktop applications as they identify and apply the Data Loss Prevention Policies.
The DLP functions to monitor and detect the content whenever it is added or subtracted in your desktop programs.
Can you afford not to have security for your data?
With the rise in the businesses who are well aware of the dangers of data loss (we work with many of them), they have already found the right solution to protect their data.
However, for those who are unaware about the financial loss and reputational damage that can be caused with the absence of data loss prevention, here are some final reasons for you outlining why you need to start to protect your data today.
- If your business doesn’t have DLP, you will never be sure about where your company’s confidential data is stored and who is accessing it. It will remain impossible to protect and control the sensitive data within your business.
- If your business has not implemented DLP, it can open you up to massive data breaches which then can lead to bad publicity, loss of the strategic customers and even legal actions for not having your own security measures in place.
- If your business does not safeguard sensitive information you might be liable to pay substantial penalties for noncompliance with strict privacy regulations.
- If your business does not have DLP for monitoring and reducing the risk of data loss, it’s possible for your employees to use unsecure lines of communication which can massively increase the risk of data loss and possible security breaches.
- If your business is not implementing DLP, there may be uncertainty about the level the protection in your current cloud application and storage if you are using it. Data Loss Prevention can automate the process of encryption at rest and also in motion to help prevent the possible transmission of data to a third-party.
So what are you waiting for?
It’s evident that DLP brings in a lot of value for you and is worth investing time and money to prevent and stop any data loss scenario that can cause so much pain in a short amount of time.
Data breach is one of the common practice that a business can face regularly.
Microsoft’s Office 365 provides a service of Data Loss Prevention that works towards controlling the mechanism and practice of data loss in the first place.
It functions by limiting the data flow and reducing the access to information in the first place.
Protecting as you go.
The data loss prevention policies are beneficial for all the types of businesses (no matter the size) to identify, track and protect your sensitive information.
The creation and documentation of DLP policies are easy and low risk and you can get Greendata to help you guide you in the right direction.
On the run, your business can craft policies, implement them and then check the kind of violations that are going on within your business straight away.
Crazy huh!
After finding any loop-holes and continually tweaking you can create the right DLP policies that are unique and suit your business.
No two businesses are alike and what you deem important may not be so for others.
So if you haven’t protected your data yet or hadn’t even given it thought, the time to act is now before it’s too late!
Call us today (07 5526 0278) or send us a message on our “Let’s Connect” page.
