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What is Data Loss Prevention?
Data loss prevention (DLP) refers to the tools and processes generally deployed in order to prevent the loss of valuable or sensitive information. DLP tools help companies ensure that mission-critical information is not accessed, misused, deleted, modified, or lost thanks to unauthorized and/ or unscrupulous users. DLP software is a handy tool that helps organizations classify highly regulated, sensitive, and mission-critical data. The tool is also very helpful in detecting all potential policy violations as pre-set by the organizational architecture where it is deployed. DLP software can be configured as per your unique business needs and can be made to follow exact regulatory compliance of pre-defined frameworks such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR.
Privacy or security violations, if any, are immediately rectified with the help of DLP-enforced remediation. The software can use a combination of alerts, encryption, and other security and preventative measures that prevent all actions that may lead to employees accidentally or maliciously leaking data that could compromise the security of the company. Data loss prevention software and tools are used in a number of monitoring and security use cases such as comprehensive monitoring and control of all endpoint activities 24*7*365, effective data filtering, and monitoring of cloud data. Essentially, it protects company data irrespective of whether it is currently in use, in motion, or at rest and enforces compliance with all applicable regulatory frameworks. For companies, there is also the added advantage of DLP software providing comprehensive reporting capabilities in order to easily and conveniently meet all regulatory compliance and business auditing needs. The Data loss prevention capabilities within Microsoft Solutions can also reveal all potential weak spots in your network architecture, anomalies in traffic patterns, and facilitate easier and in-depth forensics analysis and incident response.
6 Effective Ways to Enhance Data Loss Prevention in Office 365
Policy alerts can come in very handy for organizations
One feature that companies overlook many times is to make use of the policy notifications feature in Microsoft 365’s Compliance Center. Enabling this notification can ensure that your organization is always able to meet all your data security policies and obligations. This also prevents employees from unwittingly committing policy violations. If they’re sharing confidential information at any point in time, enabling policy tips will produce a pop-up containing a warning for users about the dangers of sharing sensitive business information with unlisted contacts in the company database. Since the warnings are preemptive in nature, this can help employees stay careful when sharing any information outside the corporate network that helps mitigate the risk of data leaks as well as continuously train and remind users of the safe data policies and habits in place in the organization.
Ensuring the protection of mobile devices
Work has gone mobile as both employees and clients have enthusiastically adopted mobile devices as their main drivers for work projects. For organizations that have BYOD policies in place, it is more common for employees to use personal smartphones and tablets to access the company network and all assets and data contained within. Since employees are able to make use of all work email, calendars, contacts, documents, and other business data of a critical nature – it is up to the business to ensure the security of all data being accessed and shared there. One way of doing this could be through the installation of mobile device management features for Microsoft 365. This feature comes in very handy as it serves as a comprehensive dashboard for companies to manage security policies and access permissions/restrictions. In cases where immediate action is required (if the device is reported to be lost or stolen), IT administrators are even able to remotely wipe all business data from users’ mobile devices. For comprehensive mobile device management solutions, please contact check out our Cybersecurity Services for Boston or Rhode Island.
Use multifactor authentication
This should become second nature to any organization as password-based authentication is proving increasingly ineffective. The same applies to your Microsoft 365 accounts and you can improve the security of your accounts with multi-factor authentication. This makes it very difficult for malicious actors to access company accounts as the verification is done both through user credentials as well as OTPs or SMS codes sent to devices that employees actually own.
Make use of session timeouts
Forgetting to log out from Microsoft 365 accounts is a very common occurrence among employees. Unfortunately, this seemingly innocuous habit can open up your network to a plethora of security risks as the user computers or mobile devices essentially remain unlocked. Any unauthorized user can gain access to these devices in their unlocked state to access company accounts, and commit a variety of nefarious activities while also posing under the cover of another employee. They could deliberately leak sensitive information, commit data theft, compromise the user or the network in a variety of ways. Session timeouts in Microsoft 365 can help guard against all such dangers as every single user interaction is cut up into sessions lasting a set amount of time (say, 10 minutes), after which. the users are automatically logged out of email accounts, and internal networks.
Make use of role-based access controls
This is a brilliant little Microsoft 365 feature that allows granular control over access to business data. Using this feature, IT administrators can easily limit and control the flow of sensitive data in the organization network through access management. Users are only granted access to specific company information required for the fulfillment of their specific job roles. This prevents executive-level documents from being read or accessed by junior staff who have no need for that data in the fulfillment of their specific duties and actively prevents accidental or malicious data leaks.
Encrypt emails
With the rising rates of cybercrimes and ransomware attacks, companies must exert themselves to always encrypt classified information. This prevents hackers from making use of your data even if they manage to breach your defenses and gain access to Microsoft 365. Part of our IT Support in Boston and Rhode Island is to provide comprehensive data encryption services.
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