Data Lifecycle Protection – the Key to DLP

• Accurately identify all documents requiring protection by their actual business value —including all copies and versions
• Map data to its business processes to understand how data is being used and then create effective DLP policies
• Mitigate business risk and dramatically reduce the cost of information security operations
• Facilitate effective communication between IT, security and business users to better define and protect sensitive data
• Leverage a single solution across your diverse management and compliance projects

The Data Leak Prevention (DLP) Challenge

Data leaks are a key concern for any business.  It is important to make sure that sensitive information, such as customer, medical, personnel, financial, proprietary technology or business strategy information etc. doesn’t get into the wrong hands.  In fact, failure to adequately protect this information can have significant adverse consequences on the near- and long-term health of your business.

But most large organizations have millions of documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails and other unstructured data scattered across distributed systems and repositories all over the world. And this data doesn’t just sit still. It is constantly being shared, copied, re-purposed and emailed—making the business even more vulnerable to both deliberate and inadvertent data leaks – whether deliberately or inadvertently.

The abundance of tools available for encrypting, limiting access to and distribution of data, or protecting endpoints dont fix the root causes of the problem. Data loss results from poorly designed policies that are created without sufficient understanding of and visibility into what data to protect, where this sensitive data actually is, and how it is actually being used on a day-to-day basis.

How can you accurately identify files requiring protection, given the tremendous proliferation of unstructured data - particularly multiple copies and versions - across your environment?  How can you recognize and fix existing business practices that put your business data at risk? How can you make sure that the protections you implement don’t interfere with the necessary and legitimate use of sensitive data by the business? How can you extend data leak protection to new business information over time?

The Nogacom Solution

Nogacom delivers an effective solution and methodology to fully understand your unstructured data so that you can then implement the right policies, products and business practices in place to protect your business information throughout its lifecycle - from creation to retirement.

Assess your data.  First, with NogaLogic, you can automatically identify and classify all sensitive unstructured data that needs protection - based on its business context, and get a clear understanding of how it’s used throughout its lifecycle.  Through this process you will:

• Identify all documents requiring protection, including all copies and versions —regardless of file formats, file names or storage location—based on their business context and use
• See  when and by whom documents were sent to both understand their legitimate business use and identify any potential security gaps
• See where sensitive data is currently being stored
• Determine what protections are already in place for various types of unstructured data

Define your data protection policies.  Once you have this granular understanding of where sensitive data is and how it is being used, you can then update business practices as well as define DLP policies that control access to and distribution of this information.  For example, you can define a policy that automatically restricts distribution of all copies and versions of a strategy document to a pre-determined set of users.  Or you can define a policy that automatically migrates those documents to a special secure server for DLP fingerprinting.

Enforce and monitor.  Once you have defined your DLP policies, NogaLogic can integrate with data security control tools which will enforce them. NogaLogic can automatically apply your DLP policies to any relevant new or updated documents on an ongoing basis, while also monitoring the effectiveness of these policies in the real business world.

Measure your success.  Over time, you should continue to measure the effectiveness of your DLP policies and business practices - as you discover instances where sensitive data has not been properly protected—or, conversely, where those policies have impacted legitimate business use.  You can also use NogaLogic ’s reporting capabilities to watch for potential misuse of sensitive data and, if necessary, to perform security forensics. You can then respond by fine-tuning your policies, changing business practices, educating users, or by making a conscious decision to accept certain known risks in order to gain certain known business benefits.

To effectively protect your sensitive unstructured data assets across the enterprise contact Nogacom today >>>