Overview
Knowing where your data resides is essential to any IT environment. Organizations cannot risk the harmful implications due to loss of data or suffer the penalties from a regulatory violation. In today’s business environment, the increased volume of data makes it a challenge to efficiently manage new or existing data. Nevertheless, it is a problem that all organizations need to address.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is the process and methodology to detect and prevent the unauthorized transmission or disclosure of sensitive information. DLP depends on a combination of people, processes, and technology as its strategic control foundation. These control elements work together to help ensure data is utilized in its intended manner.
Key Benefits
- Prevent data loss
Stop accidental or malicious loss of data by insiders or hackers, even when data is disguised. - Reduce costs
A Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Assessment can lower the costs of investigating data loss and reduce the expense of rebuilding losses due to reputation damage. - Facilitate early risk detection and mitigation
Identifying data loss will help ensure information is in its proper place. - Increase security confidence
Implementing DLP controls assures senior management that proper security safeguards have been implemented, allowing them to concentrate on other critical business issues.
Methodology
Foundstone can help reduce your risk of exposure. Foundstone Professional Services’ Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Assessment identifies sensitive data that has been copied or is currently in transit from its original intended container. The assessment captures and identifies assets on the network, as well as items on hard drives. Foundstone has two assessment services options:
- Data-in-Motion Assessment: Focuses on data traveling through the network. Foundstone consultants index incoming and outgoing traffic in real time to detect the presence of an information leak. Traffic entering or leaving the network is analyzed against a series of information rules to determine where broken business processes may exist.
- Data-at-Rest Assessment: Focuses on where sensitive data resides. Foundstone consultants analyze system repositories, where critical data may have been wrongfully copied from its intended storage place. This may include laptops, desktops, file servers, NAS devices, intranet portals, wikis, blogs, and document management systems. Data stored on these repositories is indexed and violations to corporate policy are raised as incidents for investigation.