Data loss prevention.
Data loss prevention is set up to monitor the data
of a system while it's in use, in transit, or at rest.
It does this in order to detect any attempts
to steal the data.
Let's think about when we had data
stored 20 or 30 years ago,
where did they store most of it?
Well, most businesses stored it,
print it off and in a filing cabinet.
And if someone wanted to get that,
they'd have to break into your offices,
open the filing cabinet
and physically take the files.
This limited the amount
of information that somebody could steal from you
because they really could only steal
what they could carry with them.
Then we started allowing people to work remotely
and a lot of the data was stored on laptops.
If you happen to stop for a lunch
and you left your laptop sitting in your car,
somebody could have broken
into your car and stolen your laptop,
and they now have access to all the data that was on it.
The next evolution in data theft occurred when
we started using external hard drives.
These started being used all throughout our offices.
These hard drives could hold large amounts of data.
We could plug it into the network
through our laptop,
and download a ton of information and data.
Then could walk out of the building with it,
but these were kind of large and easy to detect.
Next, we started seeing thumb drives that hold just as much
as these external hard drives,
carrying billions of documents out the front door
without no one knowing it
because they're so small and fit right into your pocket.
But wait, we don't even need to do that nowadays
because we have things like Dropbox
and Google Drive where we get terabytes
of storage available to you hooked up to the network,
and I could sit there and upload everything your company has
and get access to it anywhere in the world.
This is a huge problem for businesses because our data
and our intellectual property is what the currency
of business is these days.
To protect it, we have to use data loss prevention systems.
These systems come as either software or hardware solutions.
The first data loss prevention system we're going to talk
about is an endpoint DLP system.
An endpoint system is usually a piece of software
that is installed on a workstation or a laptop.
It's going to monitor the data that's in use
on the computer.
If someone tries to do a file transfer,
it'll either stop the file transfer
or alert the admin of the occurrence
based on certain rules and policies,
very much like an IDS or IPS would,
but focused on data.
DLPs can be set to detection mode or prevention mode.
The next one we have is a network DLP system.
This is a piece of software hardware that is a solution
placed at the perimeter of your network.
A sole function in life is to check all of the data going
into and out of your network with a special focus
on things going out of the network.
They want to detect data in transit
that shouldn't be leaving the building.
The third type we have is called storage DLP.
This is a software that is installed on a server
in the data centers
and inspects the data while it's addressed
on the server.
This is usually
because they've encrypted it or watermarked it,
and we want to make sure that nobody is accessing the data
at times that they shouldn't be.
For example, if someone starts downloading large amounts
of data at two in the morning,
that's probably against your policy
and the DLP could catch it.
The fourth type of DLP is a cloud-based DLP system.
These systems are usually offered
as a software as a service solution,
and that's a part of your cloud service and storage needs.
They're going to protect your data when it's stored inside
of those cloud services.
For example, our company uses Google Drive
and we have data loss prevention
as part of a cloud service offered by Google.
So in summary,
these data loss prevention solutions are made to be accurate
in a way that they stop data from leaving your network.
They're going to go through and look at data at rest,
data in use, and data in transit to ensure
that it's following the policies you've
set up as a security admin
so you could protect the assets of your company.