There are two realities shaping how IT and security teams think about data protection today: Corporate data is increasingly being housed in the cloud versus on-premise and the modern workforce is becoming more mobile. As such, the need for protecting sensitive data in the cloud from any location has grown exponentially.

In addition to the complexities of cloud-based work and a distributed workforce, organizations must also consider the risks of insider threat and data loss, both of which continue to grow year after year.

Consider some of these sobering statistics:

• • Between 2020 to 2022, there was a 60% increase in insider threat incidents overall, with 67% of companies experiencing 21 or more incidents a year.¹
  • In 2022, negligent insiders caused 56% of insider incidents, malicious insiders caused 26% and 18% were a result of credential theft.¹
  • On average, 33% of all folders used by a company are accessible by every employee, and every employee has access to nearly 11 million files.

Many organizations are exploring a Zero Trust architecture to help mitigate the risks listed above. But what solution in your ecosystem is protecting your organization’s sensitive data against unauthorized access, loss or misuse?

That’s where modern Data Loss Prevention (DLP) can help. DLP is a set of technologies and techniques that enable sophisticated data classification, policy creation and user behavior risk assessment to help safeguard data and assets in complex environments. They also offer tailored data loss prevention policy and reporting to ensure compliance with industry regulatory standards, such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. And finally, DLP solutions offer the ability to monitor and respond to data loss incidences more quickly and effectively.

With that overview, let’s look at the top five reasons why it may be time to consider Security Service Edge (SSE) solutions to modernize your data loss prevention program.

1. 1. Discover sensitive data everywhere. Visibility is crucial when it comes to protecting data. In fact, it is common for a business to find that up to 98% of the cloud applications users are accessing are not managed by IT², a.k.a. “shadow IT.”

When you deploy a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), you can spot shadow IT and see where all sensitive data resides and how it is moving across the corporate environment.  With this deeper visibility, IT gains greater insight to develop and evolve the policy program that protects against data loss.

1. 2. Reduce insider risk. With the increase of insider risks, implementing data loss prevention capabilities that activate Zero Trust principles is critical. SSE solutions, like a Next Gen Secure Web Gateway (NG-SWG), enable your security team to detect user anomalous behavior, intentional data exfiltration and policy violations. With the help of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), which you can find built into a NG-SWG, you can automatically identify and block risky insider behaviors, such as bulk downloading of sensitive corporate data.

1. 3. Minimize false positives. Legacy DLP solutions commonly produce an overwhelming number of false positives, which leads to incident triage fatigue and requires large teams to manage. Modern data loss prevention solutions, such as a NG-SWG, deliver detection of data loss risk with the lowest degree of error possible, minimizing the number of false positives requiring investigation. With fewer false positives, you can increase your team’s effectiveness and decrease costs.
      

1. 4. Minimize accidental data exposure. As data is increasingly being stored in cloud-based infrastructure (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud), the risk of unintended misconfigurations that inadvertently expose sensitive data grows. In fact, almost half of cloud infrastructure misconfiguration leads to sensitive data exposure. This is where a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) SSE solution can help by continually scanning for misconfigurations so issues can be remedied quickly.

1. 5. Coach users on safe data handling. Training users on data best practices is a critical component to an effective data loss prevention program. With SSE solutions, you can leverage tools to alert and coach users real-time on data loss risks when performing questionable activities, with options to proceed, cancel or request a justification for the action. This can help prevent unintentional data leakage, as well as improve risky behavior in the future.

So, as organizations (re)evaluate their DLP programs, consider an SSE solution to modernize. Through our SafeData portfolio, Dell offers several data loss prevention SSE solutions to protect across every network, cloud, endpoint, email and user, including a Next Gen Secure Web Gateway, powered by our partner Netskope. Dell also recently introduced a new endpoint DLP solution that enables full visibility and policy enforcement on data-in-motion between endpoint and external USB storage devices.

Protecting your data from advanced threats is a complex challenge. Through Dell SafeData, customers can reduce the risk of potential data breaches with a variety of SSE solutions. Please reach to learn how this expanded offering can bolster your data protection model as you navigate a Zero Trust journey.

¹ 2022 Ponemon Institute Cost of Insider Threats: Global Report, August 2022.

² Netskope Research Labs, anonymized data.