Stop Data Loss
Without DLP, organizations committed to protecting information are relegated to simply preventing employees from transferring or accessing data via cell phones, laptops or home computers. While this reduces risk of data loss, it also brings down productivity as employees can no longer work anytime, anywhere.

DLP removes this obstacle by automatically monitoring and blocking endpoint activity that violates security policies. Through continuous online and offline monitoring of managed and unmanaged devices, together with advanced location-aware policies for detecting and blocking events, DLP ensures legitimate use of sensitive data on or off the network.

With DLP, organizations can prevent customer data from being sent or transferred outside and safeguard intellectual property from being printed, faxed, copied or otherwise handled in violation of corporate policy. Additionally, many DLP tools also immediately notify organizations of policy violations to promote user awareness and education.

Manage Data Security
Deploying an endpoint DLP solution requires installation of a small agent on every endpoint. If deployment to an endpoint is unsuccessful, the solution must be able to alert the organization on where and why it failed. When new endpoints are added, the DLP solution must be able to scale accordingly, without increasing complexity.

While endpoint protection is imperative in today’s networked world, many organizations consider data loss prevention a company-wide concern. Consequently, DLP must automatically and consistently enforce security policies across the enterprise, wherever sensitive data may be. A DLP solution that manages data protection policies from a single console and can be deployed across a global enterprise’s network, endpoints and storage systems helps organizations mitigate risk of data loss more easily. A solution with robust policy management capabilities enables enterprises to define policies once and enforce them everywhere.

DLP solutions may also allow organizations to manage data protection policies by leveraging role-based access to the DLP console. In addition, those that leverage advanced detection technology help ensure the highest accuracy by analyzing both content and context on an enterprise scale. This not only strengthens data loss prevention but also maintains a low total cost of ownership.

Perhaps one of the most valuable benefits of DLP implementation is that it enables enterprises to optimally align remediation steps with regulatory requirements. Should a laptop be lost or stolen, a DLP solution helps the organization quickly and correctly determine what confidential data resides on it. Without DLP, this would require numerous employee interviews, email and backup archive searches, and more—often taking days or weeks and delivering uncertain results.

With today’s highly connected business environment increasingly relying on a productive, mobile workforce, preventing loss of business-critical data has become a greater priority. Organizations must ensure that data is always accessible, yet secure.

By enabling organizations to know where confidential data is, how it is being used, and how to prevent its loss, DLP extends beyond network-focused security approaches of yesterday and focuses on securing data— no matter where it is used or stored.

The author is managing director of Symantec India