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When developing a risk mitigation plan, companies must consider a DLP solution (Data Loss Prevention).
Essential for compliance, DLP protects sensitive data from leaks, breaches, and unauthorized access across various platforms.
This article explores DLP solutions, their limitations, and their relevance for your business environment.
What is a DLP solution?
DLP (Data Loss Prevention) detects and prevents data leaks and exfiltration through continuous monitoring and company-defined security policies.
It operates at various levels, including network, endpoint, and storage.
A DLP solution must fulfill four core functions:
- Monitoring. Inspects data-in-transit and data-at-rest to ensure security.
- Filtering. Identifies anomalies and unauthorized access attempts.
- Reporting. Logs events for audits and incident response planning.
- Analysis. Provides forensic insights for security teams to mitigate risks.
DLP data feeds into DLP Ops, which includes triage, reporting, and escalation to enhance cybersecurity response.
Open Source and Paid DLP Solutions
An Open-source DLP solutions offers a cost-effective alternative to commercial options, making them accessible for small to medium-sized businesses.
While these solutions generally have no initial cost, they require considerable IT expertise for customization and maintenance.
This can lead to higher total ownership costs due to ongoing management needs.
Looking for the right DLP solution? Explore this list of open-source and paid solutions.
1. MyDLP
MyDLP is a free-to-use Data Loss Prevention solution that sports out various data-inspection features such as IM, FT (File Transfer), web, mail, printers, and removable storage devices.
MyDLP Key Features
- Administer and enforce Data Loss Prevention policies.
- Collect and display all event logs in a single dashboard.
- Create, reshape, and manage different roles.
- Integrate with Microsoft Exchange.
- Blacklist emails that contain BCC addresses outside the company.
- Deploy or update new policies via Microsoft AD or SCCM.
- Filter and block data flow carrying sensitive information.
- Cloud-native.
- Scan sensitive data to ensure compliance with data security regulations.
MyDLP is a pretty good place to start if you’re new to Data Loss Prevention. You should keep in mind that MyDLP also has a pay-per-use pricing tier that can unlock more cool features. Generally, Comodo’s solution is very intuitive and user-friendly.
However, most users reported that the tool has a couple of shortcomings when it comes to in-depth suspicious behavior analysis. I guess it’s understandable, considering that MyDLP is many things, but not a forensics tool.
2. SecureTrust’s DLP
The Data Loss Prevention tool offered by SecureTrust comes with a predefined set of risk and policy settings, covering every known violation and\or suspicious behavior. Not free of charge, mind you, but you can get a 30-day free trial if you ask nice enough.
SecureTrust also comes with a feature that allows users to set up their own ground rules; you’ll be able to create new policies based on existing ones, redefine violations, add more suspicious behavior patterns, and more. What sets apart SecureTrust from its competitors is the product’s emphasis on analysis.
This DLP solution can cover everything from email attachments, web attachments, internally-shared documents, sudden chances in access governance policies, and more. SecureTrust monitors and protects data during transfers across networks, devices, and cloud services, ensuring sensitive information is secure.
Another cool feature offered by SecureTrust is the autoblock on violation detection. Basically, whenever the software detects an attachment or file that could potentially violate a predefined or company-defined policy, it blocks it. Very simple and deadly efficient.
3. CoSoSys’ Endpoint Protector
Despite its rather off-putting name, Endpoint Protector by CoSoSys is a Data Loss Prevention designed to identify policy violations, protect customer and employee information, and, of course, intellectual property.
Unfortunately, EP is not free-of-charge, but the 30-day free trial option’s always on the table. On the features side, Endpoint Protector boasts something called content-aware protection which is basically a real-time, data-in-transit scanner.
EP’s data sniffer can peek at everything from clipboard clips, removable media devices, screen captures, Outlook content, Skype conversations, and Dropbox file and crosscheck those content with a pre-or user-defined security policy checklist in order to detect suspicious behavior or potential policy violations.
It also ensures data security across various platforms, including external devices like USB drives and mobile devices, preventing unauthorized data transfers and access. Member of Gartner’s DLP Magic Quadrant, EP’s definitely the right choice if you’re looking for a powerful DLP solution with a set-and-forget interface.
4. Nightfall
“They come at night with policies and data protection” or “for the night’s dark and my network is protected against APTs and data loss”. Regardless of what you like the call it, Nightfall looks (and feels) like a very promising DLP solution.
Cloud-native by choice and design, Nightfall does a very neat job at securing all IaaS and SaaS platforms, considerably reducing the chances of cloud data leakage. According to the product’s website, the 100+ pre-tuned security policies make Nightfall a competitor few could topple.
These policies cover Standard PII, Finance, IDs, Crypto, Network, Health, and much more. Nightfall is particularly effective at protecting sensitive information, including financial data, ensuring compliance with data security standards while preventing data breaches and unauthorized access.
5. Commvault’s Orchestrate
The last item on our list is Orchestrate, Commvault’s answer to Data Loss Prevention, secure backup, containerization, data management, and more. Now, the reason why Orchestrate is last has something to do with how it operates. This is a pro’s tool -web-based interface only, lots of testing and optimization.
On top of that, Orchestrate does indeed support data management and recovery automation, but there’s a lot of scripting involved so definitely not a popular choice among sysadmins looking for a set-and-forget DLP solution.
Orchestrate excels at protecting an organization’s most sensitive data, ensuring that financial records and personally identifiable information are safeguarded against breaches.
Moving beyond DLP software for Data Security
Data Loss Prevention should be construed as an addition to your cybersecurity and not something capable of replacing one or more of the components that make up your cyber-defense grid.
For instance, a DLP solution relies on a firewall’s AMC to figure out if inbound or outbound connection requests violate internal security policies or if they originate from potentially malicious sources.
DLP touches on every aspect related to cybersecurity: internal threat mitigation, forensics, data recovery, incident response, remediation, and so on. Most importantly, DLP solutions help protect sensitive information by safeguarding it from unauthorized access, leaks, or breaches across various platforms.
Now, before choosing the right DLP solution for your company, make sure that you create the proper security context – what’s acceptable and not acceptable in terms of email security, data classification, role-based access governance, endpoint-level security, MDMs, perimeter security, AP (access point) security and the list goes merely on.
Implementing robust DLP solutions is crucial to safeguard customer data, including sensitive information such as credit card numbers and intellectual property, ensuring compliance with data security standards.
Since we’re on the topic of building up the wireframe capable of supporting your DLP solution, allows me to make a couple of recommendations on behalf of Heimdal™.
Threat Prevention – Network & Threat Prevention – Endpoint, two of our award-winning products, will ensure that your DNS traffic is as clean as the proverbial whistle. What about access governance?
With Heimdal™’s Privileged Access Management and standalone Application Control software, you can easily curate rights within your organization, black or whitelist application on session elevation, and automatically de-escalate rights on threat detection.
Covering the email vector are Heimdal Email Security and Email Fraud Prevention – deep-attachment scanning, real-time protection against business email compromise, vendor email compromise, and altered VoIPs. For true endpoint protection, we recommend Heimdal’s Next-Gen Antivirus & MDM – lightweight, capable of tackling both known and unknown malware strains, and with a market-leading detection rate.
Want to find out more? Check all our cybersecurity solutions
Fine-tune your policy enforcement software, cover all your attack vectors and stay safe. If you have any questions about DLP solutions, don’t forget to reach out via the comments section.