Data loss prevention and data monitoring are both essential services in today’s world. Almost every business has an online component and data is the currency. In order to leverage that data and gain insights from it, the data must be protected. It’s not always realistic to prepare for every attack or for every eventuality. However, it does help to be prepared against the most common threats and to monitor systems for irregularities.
That’s where sensitive data monitoring and loss prevention come in. Both protect data from theft or misuse.
What is the Importance of Data Loss Prevention and Data Monitoring?
The volume of data that is being generated across the world is predicted to reach 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. Protecting such data is becoming a necessary service around the world.
Data loss prevention and data monitoring are two services that are predicted to become more and more valuable.
Data Loss Prevention
Data loss prevention basically prevents the havoc that comes with data loss. Cyberattacks and phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, and hacks are all too common now. To prevent the theft of critical data, it’s important to minimize a company’s access points, restrict access, and employ authentication.
Data is the new oil is a phrase that is tossed around everywhere today, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Companies can leverage data to create new products, push their services and products to new people, and gain key insights.
More than that, data is critical for governments and public organizations as well. They use it to run their operations, tax individuals and businesses and enforce the rule of law. Data that is stolen from them can result in anarchy.
That’s why hackers go to such great lengths to steal this data. They can use it not only to get ransom but to exploit vulnerabilities of individual users or employees.
Data loss prevention benefits basically revolve around three pain points. These are common pain points for organizations that want to protect not only their own data but user data. These include personal information protection, intellectual property protection, and data visibility.
Data loss prevention technology can enable the monitoring of location and usage of data according to defined policies. It can also prevent accidental disclosure or theft by employees who have access to sensitive data. It can also help to prevent lawsuits, a loss of credibility and reputation, and most of all, a loss of revenue.
Real-Time Data Monitoring
Sensitive real-time data monitoring isn’t just a routine exercise. If done correctly, it will help you stop security threats completely. It may not catch intrusions right at the time they happen, but it will detect them. Tracking data in real-time allows unusual activity to be detected and irregularities to be found.
Security professionals are given the ability to watch over and manage organizational data access. This way, they can design complete profiles of all the people that are given access to a system. They can map their activities and find any irregularities in their behavior over time. Hence, if something irregular or unusual does happen, it can be detected and the appropriate actions can be taken.
A log of data is maintained in which every activity is timestamped and matched to a specific profile and access point. Every activity is timed and assessed. If something unusual happens, monitoring it actually reduces the likelihood that it will cause everlasting harm.
9 Benefits of Data Loss Prevention and Data Monitoring
The basic benefits of real-time data monitoring and data loss prevention are clear; saving money, maintaining credibility and reputation, etc. However, there are several others that you may not think of.
1. Personal Information Protection
Most companies today gather data on their customers to form profiles. These profiles allow them to segment data and identify which products and services resonate with particular demographics. However, this data can be and has been the victim of several leaks over the last decade. Companies have been the targets of leaks where gigabytes of information have been leaked that include phone numbers and addresses.
Protecting personal information is very valuable for a company today. It ensures that they maintain credibility and repute. Personally Identifiable Information can also be dangerous in the wrong hands. People’s credentials can be used to exploit them for money as well. The most detrimental leaks can be of Protected Health Information or Payment Card Information. These can be more readily used to blackmail people or to financially damage them.
2. IP Protection
For those companies that handle data relating to intellectual property like trade secrets, data protection is very important. That information, if leaked, can cause lawsuits and great damage to a company. Data loss prevention benefits include the blocking of such attempts against a company.
Not only does data loss prevention include preventing data hacks and theft, but it also includes classification. Data of the utmost importance can be classified as critical and systems can be automated to protect it immediately in the case of a hack.
Classification also allows data to only be accessed through certain access points, certain profiles, and certain devices. This reduces the chances of the data being stolen or even accessed by malicious forces.
3. Data Visibility
This benefit combines both data loss prevention and real-time data monitoring. When your company monitors the exchange of data within a system, it can monitor activity. This leads to time stamping and associating each activity with a profile or device. That way, a map or a profile can be developed for every single person’s behavior.
This way, tracking data on endpoints, networks and the cloud can be of tremendous use. Every single activity can be monitored for deviations from the norm. individuals within your organizations can be effectively monitored for irregularities in their behavior. If something unusual is detected, that profile’s activity can immediately be shut down or its access can be revoked.
You will also be able to see exactly where, when, and who is accessing your data. You’ll be able to see where it’s being stored, and transferred. This can include financial data, intellectual property, personally identifiable information, and even metadata.
4. Revenue Loss Prevention
With data loss and data, breaches come fines, negative exposure, and lost revenue. You can lose your credibility, lose customers, contracts, and lots of future business. Data breaches are making headlines today with alarming frequency. They wreak havoc on a company’s revenue, shares, and can incur legal action both from customers and regulatory bodies.
According to certain studies, months can go by without a company realizing whether they’ve been compromised or not. Sensitive data monitoring prevents this from happening. With real-time data protection and monitoring, every single activity is monitored closely.
Hence, you can catch a hack in the act and prevent access or shut down the system immediately. This will prevent any major loss of revenue and reputation. While it’s that simple, it’s sadly not the protocol that is followed in several companies around the world.
5. Alleviating Damages
While data loss prevention and monitoring can’t always guarantee that a breach will be stopped, they can alleviate damages. A breach can be detected at the earliest with data monitoring in real-time. That way, the damages resulting from the breach can be minimized. Access to the profile that has been breached can be revoked. A specific area of a system can be shutdown.
This way, any access to critical data can be minimized. Thus, the theft or scrambling, or destruction of data can be reduced.
This way, any data loss or revenue loss can be minimized as well. This can do wonders for the reputation of a company in the long run. First, the breach will cause minimal damage to its credibility. And second, the company will be able to learn from the breach and enhance its security for more dangerous threats.
6. Maintenance of Forensic Data
Data logs are for more than just mapping a profile and timestamping activities. They’re for gathering evidence not only for external intrusions but for internal abuse of power.
Data monitoring offers 360-degree monitoring for emails (both personal and work accounts), instant messages, keystrokes, applications, and documents. With data loss prevention technology, you can filter web surfing, limit activities, and reduces access.
This allows companies to keep a history of forensic data that can point to the culprit if an inside job does take place. This can at least give them a head start when it comes to investigating data theft.
7. Prevention of Data Misuse
Since data monitoring includes monitoring all types of endpoint activity on the corporate network, it can block activity. This includes emails, attachments, confidential data, etc. It can also enforce policies on the transfer of data and the use of removable data devices like memory sticks. It can even limit activities like printing, copying, pasting, etc.
Third-party vendors, contractors, and partners can thus be prevented from leaking your data. This can occur both inadvertently or intentionally. Basically, any undesirable actions and individuals can be prevented from leaking any critical data.
8. Governance Automation
Not only does data loss prevention and real-time data monitoring save money by preventing external threats but by maximizing efficiency. Data loss prevention capabilities can improve technical and organizational efficiencies and promote compliance.
It can provide methods for better information governance as well as for automation. It can provide updated policy templates and maps which address very specific requirements. This way, both compliance and regular processes in a system can be automated. When a policy need is identified, data loss prevention can make changes as simple as enabling the right policy template.
9. Maintaining Brand Value/Data Compliance
If important data is leaked, it damages more than a company’s reputation. There have been cases where leaks have been revealed and companies have been slapped with fines for not having adequate cybersecurity.
Today, the world is adopting increasingly stringent privacy and security laws for data. The GDPR was only the first step. Today, dozens of nations around the world including Brazil, the US, the UK, China, and India are working on their own versions. Companies will have to take data protection and data loss prevention more seriously now.
That’s why it’s so important to invest in data loss prevention and monitoring today. There are so many companies that have lost their brand value and share value because of poor security practices.
In the case of Yahoo, it led to their value severely plummeting throughout the years. Right before they were acquired by Verizon, they were being valued at close to $4 billion. At one time, they were valued at nearly $45 billion.
By enabling data loss prevention and real-time monitoring at your company, you’ll also improve brand value. You’ll gain a competitive advantage against other companies by ensuring your data can’t be stolen or misused. Companies that can get data protection and privacy can enhance their brand reputation and resilience boosted at once.
Data is the most valuable asset for an online business today. If you want a capable team of data loss prevention and data monitoring specialists, contact Cyber Tech Connection today.