| As a security IT professional for a company, one of your main concerns revolves around protecting your company’s data. Data loss prevention; really that is what everything boils down to. We do backups of our data to protect it. We patch our systems so that data won’t be compromised. We audit activity to prevent unauthorized access. Almost every security measure we take is to safeguard the data that our company uses.
But, are you doing everything you can to protect data? You may be protecting your |
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| data from outside intruders, but what about protecting your data from your own employees? For data loss prevention, you must take a look at every interaction that the data has with an end-user and also every interaction that the data has with other network nodes.
Taking the right safeguards for data loss prevention involves using the right tools to not only prevent data loss, but also audit them so that you can make adjustments to prevent them in the future. The first investment you should make is an auditing hardware appliance. These appliances gather syslog data, event log data, and other security auditing information from nodes everywhere on the network. It will then format it and supply all this information to you in report form for review. This will help you analyze your network and put you in the right direction for data loss prevention. For more important security alerts on the network, the device can send out alerts notifying you of any data leaks, unauthorized data access, or intrusions. Once you know where your main weak areas are on your network, you can take action in locking them down. You will want to do a full permissions audit and review on your data and ensure that no one has access to data that shouldn’t have access. This doesn’t just mean modifying permissions on files on your storage drives. It requires thinking outside of the box. For example, if you send backup tapes offsite to a remote location, then making sure that data on those tapes is encrypted is important. Without encryption, whoever touches those tapes on their way to and from that remote location has access to all the data on those tapes. Or if you send your data to a remote location via the network, is that data stream also encrypted? Are thumb drives and writeable CD’s allowed on the network? If so, are you able to tell if someone copied sensitive information to one? These are all things you must look at for complete data leak prevention. It is all part of your encompassing network security policy. To prevent data loss, you must track that data wherever it goes. Start with an audit of your network and go from there. Data loss prevention is an on going process and should never be taken lightly. |
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Aug
20
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