What is Data Leakage Prevention and How Does it Work?
With communication and collaboration on portable devices are becoming the most important for our work lives, the potential for business data to get leaked has skyrocketed. While the Internet is common with the shocking data breach statistics, the fact remains that mainly of the data that’s exposed happened as a result of human error. We live in a time where one and all including every business empire/ organization has got massive amount of data that resides on one or more systems. It could be a government database, a business’ customer list, or even your cloud account, but whatever the storage site, data represents everything we are and do. The data leakage may surely be understood as a likely oversight that results in data exposure either through electronic or physical mediums. In case, the important data is stored on a physical asset such as hard drives or laptops, the data leak can happen from there itself and other way around if the data are being stored digitally, and shared using unsafe mediums such as public Wi-Fi or social media messages, that could also lead to a data leak, as well.
Unfortunately, data is vulnerable to getting lost, whether it’s an accidental mishandling of information or outright theft by a hacker. The explosion of data has only increased the cybersecurity stakes, requiring new methods of ensuring information integrity.
Let’s take a close look at Data Leakage Prevention, what it is, how it works, and how sensitive data gets leaked.
Data Leakage Prevention in Cyber security
Though data leakage can possibly lead to direct monetary losses for the firms considering the downstream effects from reputational damage that harm organizations goodwill the most. Every kind of firm should take action to improve their cyber security protocols as we have been witnessing rise in the cybercrimes in the current scenario.

Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) refers to the practice of detecting, defending and preventing data breaches, exhilaration, or unwanted destruction of susceptible and confidential data. It mainly focuses on the set of policies, products, technologies, and techniques designed for preventing illegal transfer of data outside organizational boundaries.
The organization’s financial data, customer lists, intellectual property and future business plans are among the most valuable information assets.
The main objective of a DLP system is to stop data/ information such as intellectual property, financial data, customer details, or employee data from being transmitted, either accidentally or deliberately, out of the corporate network to any other medium.
The Importance of DLP/How does DLP work?
Data loss prevention is gradually more popular and significant. Businesses and organizations that want to get succeed in the digital world .Data leakage may root customers to lose confidence and business deals to go bad, in addition to fines, legal action and reputation damage. The importance of Data has increased which means that the stakes are higher when individuals or enterprises need to deal with data loss. As a result, Businesses may collapse and die if their data becomes severely compromised. The capability to store data securely and keep it protected from has become significant for the consumer confidence.
With CSSI, DLP tools, you can:
- Protect important data with responsive contact detection of financials, customer lists and personal details.
- Track, control, and restrict the execution of suspicious and high-risk applications and DLP from a single web-based console, every time applying policies across all sites, every kind of servers and email to identify and investigate who has printed what type of data and from where.
- Apply proper data breach prevention security measures for specific users and groups through strict control and flexible content policy management features.
- Use policy-based TLS encryption to guard against eavesdropping when emails are in transit to limit the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, CD/DVD drives, key loggers, and more.
- Mark instances of anomalous user behavior and stop files from being exhilarated via external storage devices and delete or quarantine files, stop USB data transfers, or choose from other predefined active remedies to prevent data leaks
Categories of DLP solutions
We can break up DLP solutions into three different segments:
Data-in-Motion
We require DLP solutions to guarantee and secure that it is not routed out of the organization or to an insecure storage area while transmitting sensitive and confidential data across a network. That’s why data-in-motion DLP uses encryption. Email security is also essential since so many employees use it for business communication. Network DLP solutions are designed to protect the valuable data at the enterprise networks’ perimeter and to monitor network traffic. It also detects any insightful data leaks or information sent out of the company’s network.
Data-in-Use
Data in use mainly refers to the data actively processed by using an application or an endpoint. During the technology, the critical data may get safeguards, such as authenticated users, and controlled resource for access.
Data-at-Rest
In Data-at-rest, DLP technologies protect data found in many different storage mediums, such as the cloud or onsite servers. DLP holds specific controls to guarantee that only authorized users can access this type of data and to track their access in case the data is leaked or stolen. Datacenter or storage-based DLP solutions investigate the data at rest in an organization’s data center infrastructure finding where the secret data resides and lets users conclude if the data is stored firmly or not.
List of CSSI’s Best Data Leakage Prevention Software
- Manage Engine Endpoint DLP Plus
- Manage Engine Data Security Plus
- Symantec DLP
- McAfee DLP
- Force point DLP
- SecureTrust Data Loss Prevention
- Digital Guardian
- Endpoint Protector By CoSoSys
- NinjaOne Backup
- Sophos
- Code42