As an IT and security professional, you understand that data can be a powerful competitive advantage for your business. Today’s successful businesses share sensitive data across multiple platforms—clouds, networks, email servers, applications, endpoints, and among users. As this data moves beyond your company’s internal boundaries, it becomes more prone to exposure, making it increasingly difficult to track and protect.
According to Statista, as of 2023, the average cost of a data breach in the United States amounted to $9.48 million, up from $9.44 million in the previous year. The global average cost per data breach was $4.45 million in 2023.
The financial impact of a data breach can be overwhelming to any business—network downtime, service disruption, breach investigation, legal actions, reputation damage control, loss of productivity, and the effort spent to improve security measures. Beyond the financial loss, a data breach can also severely damage the trust between an organization and its customers.
Modern Businesses Need a Modern Data Protection Approach
The nature of doing business in today’s hybrid work environment exposes data in many ways. For example, flexible work environments that enable employees to work from any location result in data traveling from on-premises to off-premises more frequently and in higher volumes. Data is also stored and shared across an array of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications accessible by users from any device. Additionally, the volume of data is increasing rapidly, and figures are growing each year.
In a hybrid workplace, employees accessing the web from remote and home offices, as well as corporate networks, are exposing sensitive data every day. Company data can be accessed, uploaded, and downloaded by hundreds or even thousands of managed and unmanaged endpoints, increasing the risk of data breaches with potentially catastrophic consequences for the business.
This is why every organization with a cloud-first strategy and hybrid workforce must ensure they implement cutting-edge Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology and policies to protect sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial documents, medical records, credit ratings, trade secrets, and other types of intellectual property, no matter where it goes.
What is Data Loss Prevention (DLP)?
DLP is typically implemented as a key component of an organization's overall data security plan. It’s a set of software tools and data privacy practices designed to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information and protect critical data from threats. DLP is not just a piece of technology. It also requires participation and ongoing monitoring from a dedicated security team. Sensitive data must be marked by the security team so the technology knows what it should and shouldn’t allow to be moved. DLP requires that your security team classify the different types of content within a data object before it goes about applying automated protection policies.
Data loss can happen in a number of ways. Threat actors, or even insiders within your company, may be trying to exfiltrate sensitive company data. Under normal circumstances, you would have no idea someone was taking your data, and unless they attempt to ransom the data or sell it later, you might never know it was taken in the first place. With DLP, you have visibility on data movement and can be notified if anyone attempts to access or move your sensitive information, and you can have granular control over what is and isn’t allowed by your users.
Hughes DLP solution
Hughes offers advanced cloud DLP capabilities through its Hughes Managed SASE solution, stopping exfiltration of sensitive data and securing sensitive data consistently everywhere across the enterprise. Hughes DLP can be applied to outbound email, websites, SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), CRM tools (i.e. Salesforce & Hubspot), and a wide range of other commonly used applications.
Hughes DLP is designed to enable zero trust data protection, allowing an organization to control what data is deemed sensitive and prevent it from leaving the company’s network. For example, if a user attempts to email or send sensitive data to their own personal device through any means, DLP will prevent them from doing so, ensuring sensitive data will not leave the organization’s network without its authorization.
Key advantages of the Hughes solution include:
Comprehensive protection: The DLP provides comprehensive coverage and unified data protection policies for every location where data is stored, used, or transferred. The centralized cloud service is delivered across network in-line, SaaS at-rest, SaaS in-line, IaaS, private applications in the data center and in the cloud, branch offices, the remote workforce, email, and on users’ endpoints.
Precise and reliable: The solution provides accurate and reliable detection of all sensitive data in any form with the lowest degree of error possible. This is achieved through a broad set of detection technologies and advanced classification tools, several thousands of data identifiers and file types with contextual detection policies, highly scalable exact data matching (EDM), fingerprinting of structured and unstructured documents, machine learning (ML)-based image classification, advanced optical character recognition (OCR), and AI/ML data classifiers to aid data discovery and identification.
Easy-to-use: Hughes DLP uses a modern cloud architecture that doesn’t require on-premises components, making it easy to deploy and maintain with a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Centralized policies are delivered consistently everywhere the service is enforced. Always-on and up-to-date protections replace the need for lengthy manual software updates typical of legacy DLP solutions.
Is Your Sensitive Data Really Safe?
Does your business have a cloud-first strategy? Do you have a distributed business with dispersed offices? Is your organization using a hybrid workforce model? Does your business store and share data that is highly regulated? Is your business still using legacy security tools such as VPN?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, it’s time to consider implementing a robust data loss prevention strategy, including technologies and processes to continuously monitor for unusual behaviors and other signs of insider threats or shadow IT.
A trusted managed services provider like Hughes can deploy, manage, and support your DLP system and all crucial security elements necessary to keep your sensitive data, network, and users safe from cyberattacks. Hughes can also augment your existing security staff to maximize their productivity and impact.