One in five businesses that identify a breach suffer from data loss.
While the loss itself may only be temporary, the knock-on effect could impact your business operations, affect regulatory compliance, and strain relationships with your customers.
To push your IT security further and prevent data breaches, you’ll need strong data loss prevention policies.
What is a data loss prevention policy?
As a simple definition, a data loss prevention (DLP) policy outlines how your organisation uses, shares and protects its data.
It highlights how to implement and operate DLP tools, and guides employees in proper data usage. Compliance regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, or GDPR shape these policies.
Why do you need one?
Data loss can be extremely serious, and have real consequences on organisations. The average cost of a data breach is significant, and its increased by more than 12 percent in the last two years.
A DLP policy helps you avoid these consequences and minimise any potential losses by:
- Protecting your data. It might sound obvious, but having DLP policies protects your data by preventing data leakage and accidental loss. DLP policies help you prevent this by governing who’s using your data and how they’re using it.
- Improving your data visibility. DLP policies increase your data visibility so you can monitor and analyse your data, even when it comes from several sources.
- Ensuring compliance. You’ll need to comply with a variety of regulations, depending where you operate. Not complying with legislation like GDPR and HIPAA can result in hefty fines, and a ban on data processing. Having a policy in place will help you remain compliant and explain to your employees the consequences of mishandling data.
Best practices for implementing DLP policies
- Understand and classify your sensitive data. If you don’t know where your sensitive data is, you can’t protect it. Explore data discovery software to improve your visibility, and then classify it into the four common data types—public, internal-only, confidential and restricted.
- Assign individuals to take ownership of the DLP process. In the words of Pete Drucker, ‘Management is going things right. Governance is doing the right things.’ Assigning responsibility to specific individuals will help you specify who owns what data. This will make it easier to drive your policies and protect large quantities of data.
- Write down agreed upon policies and create metrics. Once you’re set on your the content of your policy, write it up formally so it’s set in stone. Next, determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to measure. These will be unique to your goals but might include things like ‘Reduction in average number of incidents per year’ or ‘Decrease in average severity of incidents’.
- Use policy templates where you can. A quick and easy way to get started with DLP policies is to use a template. There are hundreds out there to choose from, such as the ones included in Microsoft’s Purview compliance portal. These templates use predefined rules that detect and act upon specific types of sensitive information. You can tweak these rules to suit your organisation, turn them off completely, or create new ones.
Strong policies equal strong protection
Companies that prioritise incident response, including data loss prevention policies, see a 54 percent reduction in the average cost of a data breach.
Minimise the risks to your organisation by implementing data loss prevention policies using these best practices. That way, you’ll keep your data safe and ensure compliance with regulations.
If you’re worried about data loss, why not reach out to the right people?
Learn how to protect your organisation with the team at HTG. We’ll take you through how to build robust data loss prevention into your modern workplace. Book a chat.
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