By Vishal Dhupar

BANGALORE,INDIA:The current economic condition has added increased pressure on financial institutions to ensure enhanced risk management and transparency whilst providing a more efficient cost and overcoming hurdles as a result of the ever changing and consolidated financial ecosystem.

Information is at the nerve centre of such institutions today and enterprises must ensure they have effective control to ably manage and secure this information.  This will enable them to be protected from internal and external threats in turn keeping their reputation intact, to comply with regulations and policies and to acquire new customers while retaining existing customers.

Today, banks are operating in environments that are highly regulated and security of customer data is a priority. Security and privacy of information remains a deciding factor for customers to choose providers.  As a result, data loss prevention (DLP) technologies are becoming increasingly imperative amongst financial institutions. Some of the other drivers for DLP include demonstration of scrupulous data protection standards and protecting the reputation through negative media coverage resulting from a data breach.

The increased anticipation of protection indicates that there is more to lose. In fact, a recent study by Symantec has shown that Indian enterprises rate cyber security as their primary issue and cyber attacks cost Indian enterprises an average of over INR 58 lakh.
 
Aside from the issues related to a reputation breach or competition, the financial services industry hoards one of the largest amounts of data. Today, large institutions have petabytes of data. This data is scattered across the organizations with various functions and used by different individuals.

Additionally, with the mobile workforce becoming more prevalent, enterprises are using their personal devices for corporate purposes, either at the workplace or while working remotely. Consequently, enterprises are left with the challenge of understanding where their sensitive data resides and how it is being used in order to lessen the risk of data breaches. Moreover, new avenues to keep customers satisfied such as upholding high service levels and flexibility along with online and mobile banking, introduce new complications while protecting customer data. These have made data loss technologies all the more relevant and critical.

With DLP, financial institutions are able to protect their confidential data by:

• Permitting the connection of only authorized laptops, desktops and other devices to the bank’s network

• Preventing employees from transmitting confidential documents and other information through corporate or Web email

• Encrypting backup tapes and disks to curb data usage in the case of fraudulent access  or loss of data

• Preventing sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users while being stored
  Reporting the risk of exposure of confidential information across departments  of the financial organization

• Complying with industry standards and financial data security policies and regulations
  Creating a culture of security

Today, the most efficient enterprises are using DLP to rectify employee behavior as well as to advance their defense posture. Example:  DLP prevents an email containing sensitive and confidential information from going out and the sender is notified about this act.

Additionally, reports of policy violation incidents are provided to the DLP solution enabling the identification of users by the IT team who require special training or support. Through this, the DLP system gives the financial institutions another means to enhance the level of security awareness across an enterprise.