It’s essential for every company, regardless of its size, to have a data loss prevention policy to prevent their sensitive data from being compromised. The data loss prevention policy should pivot to protecting essential and sensitive data such as customer information, medical records, financial data, and so forth.
A data loss prevention policy is the process of using both tools and various technologies to put a plan into place to provide your organization with only the best protection. The majority of the data today stored on company hardware and software is sensitive; therefore, by adhering to the top data loss prevention best practices, you can prevent data leaks that could harm your company.
As you continue reading below, we’ll discuss the nine data loss prevention best practices that every business should do when protecting their sensitive data.
What is Data Loss Prevention, and Why is It Important?
Data loss prevention is using specific tools and steps to ensure that you don’t lose sensitive data, that files aren’t being misused, and that no unauthorized users can access your system data. Data loss prevention can help your organization protect sensitive data across several internal and external systems. In addition, it can also allow you to comply with HIPAA.
Adhering to the best data loss prevention practices is vital for protecting sensitive data. With a Data Loss Prevention policy, your organization can ensure that you and your employees have the proper understanding of data protection, know how to safeguard your files, and govern your sensitive information.
Data Loss Prevention is essential when protecting your mobile devices, computers, and internal and external servers. With information security, you can prevent unauthorized users from gaining access and prevent the destruction of your files. The main points of information security include:
- Security of infrastructure - Protecting your system is the primary priority regarding sensitive data. With the best protection, you can prevent unauthorized users from gaining access and data leaks and insert the best protection for your cloud environments.
- Communication security - Using cryptography ensures that only authorized users can access your sensitive data.
- Response plan - How your business can perform remediation, respond, and manage an attack or other events will be determined by the response plan you have set into place.
- Recovery - Your organization should create a recovery plan for your systems and hardware if you experience a cyberattack.
9 Best Data Loss Prevention Best Practices
Here are the nine best data loss prevention best practices your organization can use to protect its sensitive data.
1. Determine & Categorize Sensitive Files
To ensure your sensitive data is protected efficiently, you should know what kind of data you possess as a business owner. With proper technology, you can scan your data to create a report that allows you to view what information is in the most need of protection. In contrast, all information is essential to protect; some are more sensitive than others.
Using data technology can allow you to control who can have access to your information and prevent storing your sensitive data in unwanted areas. By using these data loss prevention best practices, you can reduce the risk of data loss. When dealing with sensitive data, this information, in particular, should require a digital signature that signifies how essential it is to your organization.
In addition, third-party resources, such as CyberLynx, can allow you to create your report and classify your sensitive data more accurately. As your sensitive data is stored and transferred, you can update its classification. However, proper security should be created to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access.
When following our data loss prevention best practices, your organization can create a firm data loss prevention policy.
ACLs
ACL stands for Access Control List and performs by creating a list of who can access sensitive data depending on its importance level. For example, regular employees may have access to websites from your organization’s computers or have access to third-party resources that are installed. However, there are certain websites and software that are forbidden for other employees, which are referred to as blacklists.
2. Encrypt Your Data
All organizations should encrypt their data as a vital component of business operations. By inserting data encryption into your hardware and software, you can help prevent the loss of sensitive data, even if a hacker accesses your devices. An encryption file system is the most essential way to encrypt your data.
While the encryption file system operates, authorized users are provided copies to view and adjust the files. With an encryption file system, unauthorized users cannot view content and will receive an error message. By having an encryption file system set into place, you can prevent a data breach within your organization.
3. Strengthen Your Internal & External Systems
No matter where you store sensitive data, you should protect it at all costs. Strengthening your internal and external systems is one of the critical data loss prevention best practices to follow to prevent hackers from gaining access to your data. With many workers working remotely, protecting your external systems is also essential since they are more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
However, you’ll want to ensure employees can access networks with zero issues when strengthening your internal and external systems. Hence, a balance of function and security is a must.
Secure Your Operating Systems
One of the most essential data loss prevention best practices is to ensure you secure your operating systems. From day one, many operating systems come with unwanted services that hackers use to gain access to sensitive data. When securing your operating systems, ensure you only have the services the organization and employees need to fulfill their duties.
If you notice a service on your operating data that is not being used, disable and remove it immediately. In addition, you can also use operating systems baselining to create security for employees if they need access to an additional function that is not regularly used. With baselining, you can enable these functions as required.
4. Test Your Infrastructure
One of the many data loss prevention best practices is to test your company’s infrastructure. Ensuring that your operating system, hardware, and software are updated is essential to protect your sensitive data and prevent unwanted access from hackers. Testing and updating critical areas of your organization’s infrastructure should be conducted thoroughly to ensure no data is compromised and there are zero vulnerabilities.
5. Automated DLP Processes
One of the most essential practices of data loss prevention is automation. Automating your data loss prevention process will allow your organization to function comfortably without worrying about cyberattacks. Manual data loss prevention processes are much harder to meet the standards in addition to performing the daily functions of running a business, especially in small business environments where resources may be limited.
6. Identify Employee Roles
As a vital component of a data loss prevention policy, identifying employee roles within your organization is essential to protecting sensitive data. With this step of your data loss prevention policy, you should identify the data owner and which information technology security employees are responsible for conducting investigations in the event of a cyberattack.
7. Identify Suspicious Activity With Detection
To identify suspicious activity within your organization, you can use anomaly detection. Anomaly detection identifies any unusual actions on your systems and other devices. By creating a plan of your organization's daily operations and normal functions, you can accurately detect any abnormal activity that may result in losing sensitive data.
8. Roll Out in Stages
To prevent overwhelming your organization, a data loss prevention plan works best when rolled out in phases. Through creative, strategic steps, you can prioritize your most important data and channels for communication.
In addition, you can also create data loss prevention software on a case-by-case basis rather than implementing modules all at once. To assist in prioritizing these areas, a risk analysis works best.
9. Train Essential Staff
By conducting employee awareness courses or guides, you can increase the knowledge of company security and procedures when it involves data loss prevention. Some ways you can train your essential staff are through educational courses, emails, PowerPoint presentations, online training, etc.
By training your authorized employees in data loss prevention, you can increase their understanding in the event of a cyberattack and how to follow the best data loss prevention practices when they occur.
Data Loss Prevention Best Practices: FAQ
1. What are the best practices for Data Loss Prevention?
The best practices for data loss prevention are determining and classifying sensitive files, encrypting data, strengthening internal and external systems, testing your infrastructure, creating automated processes, identifying employee roles, and identifying suspicious activity with anomaly detection.
2. What are the 3 types of data loss prevention?
The 3 types of data loss prevention are network data loss prevention, endpoint data loss prevention, and cloud data loss prevention.
3. What are the 5 steps to successfully implement data loss prevention?
The 5 steps to implement a successful data loss prevention policy are identifying and classifying your data, being aware of the risks, developing procedures, creating a data loss prevention solution, and monitoring your data usage.