Endpoint Security for Distributed Offices, Remote & Branch Offices and Mobile Workforce

When we talk about computer security, we mostly talk about network security, antivirus solutions, firewalls etc. But, since last few years a new term has come to the market called Data Loss Prevention or DLP in short. DLP is referred to by many other names as well like data leak prevention or extrusion prevention system etc.

Data Loss occurs not because you have vulnerability in your machine or there is some error or weakness in your computer or your computer network.

Unlike they say in network security:

“You have not installed the latest patches released by Microsoft, so you might fall prey to a hacker!”

Or

“You have a very old version of windows; an RPC DCOM will allow a hacker to get access to a remote shell on your machine!”

Or many other quotes and horror dialogues and terms like zero day exploit and what not.

A DLP guy will tell you something else,

“Look, you have the best of the best patch management system installed, you have hired world’s best company to carry out vulnerability assessment and pen testing, you have a really strong firewall purchased from state of the art technology by Cisco to stop any hacker from penetrating into your network “

But,

“Do you know how many files and what kinds of files were sent from inside your network by your employees in last 7 days?”

Well, I don’t know what the person would reply to this question or what kind of justification he will give to save himself from the obvious facts that, whatever one does for securing the data, as long as that data is in access of the people who work on that data, there is always a possibility of that data getting out of that organization and to a place where it is not meant to be.

If we try to build a list of what could be confidential, there would very little space left to finish the actual story here. Still we list down few really critical ones as follows:-

For Business Organizations,

* Customer Data
* Financial Documents like Balance Sheet, P\L Account, Cash Flow Statements etc
* Patents and Research Work
* Corporate Data
* Trade secrets
* Design/Architectures
* Copyrights
* Algorithms
* Software source code
* Hardware schematics
* Inventions
* Future business plans
* Business model etc

For personal users almost everything is critical starting from birthday party photographs, bank account details, debit card numbers, passwords to your favorite movie clips.

Why Data Loss Happens?

The reasons could be fun or curiosity to peep in to the data , commercial motivation to steal data, accidental situations arising out if you use one of those cool Ajax based email selection drop down menu in the “ To” email box in your Gmail. Sometime, there are no reasons at all. A guy is leaving your organization to join another company and what he feels is that, “since I build this program , I need to take it with me on my USB thumb drives, so that I can show what kind of work I did in my last company”.

The latest technology of communication, data transfer medium, new data transfer protocols and different kind of data storage devices have given wings to the number of threats for data loss.

Talk about communication medium and technologies, you have USB Drives, You have fire-wire, you have got Bluetooth and Infrared and we have not yet started talking about the internet, emails attachments, blogs, Chat and IM, http uploads, ftp etc which can be used to send your confidential data to your competitor in less than a second.

Organizations affected by Data Loss

Along with home users, almost every industry and business today faces the risk of data loss. Following list gives the most critical segments which could face serious data loss :-

* Banking sector
* Financial Sector
* Telecommunication
* IT and ITES companies
* Defense Organizations
* Consultancy Companies
* Government Organizations
* Media/Entertainment

These are mostly those organizations where confidential information is distributed and accessed by large number of employee population.

You still don’t have enough information to get scared of the data loss.

data loss

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