Does Your Compliance Solution Include DLP Best Practices?

According to a recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, a typical data breach costs a company $128 per document, averaging out to almost $5 million in total per incident. In short, big numbers for what appear to be small incidents.

Often, this type of data loss does not begin as malicious - it may simply be as a result of user error or system difficulties. Consider the case of Clarkson University. In 2008, a glitch on the public drive of the University's internal file server allowed everyone on campus access to the personal information and social security number of all students in the database. The data leak was caught and rectified almost immediately thanks to an honest student who gained access.

Incidents like these, in combination with the high costs of aggregate data loss, speak to the need for ensuring that a data loss prevention solution follows what are known as industry best practices. These include defining DLP needs and setting a focus for a DLP program, as well as making any DLP solution both unobtrusive and comprehensive.

In order to achieve compliance with these best practice guidelines, many companies have turned to network security systems that not only operate without the need for added hardware or software, but that can also actually reconstruct data that has been transmitted, rather than simply select random files for further analysis. This recording and recompiling of data allows businesses to better address the volume and nature of their data loss.