Published 14/11/2023 – est. 5 minutes to read.
The digital age has significantly increased the volume of data organisations use in their day-to-day business, leading to a sharp rise in data breaches and Data Loss incidents. Protecting sensitive data has never been more essential to business operations, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a crucial component of any comprehensive data security strategy.
Azure Purview is Microsoft’s data governance solution, providing a powerful platform to help you safeguard organisational data effectively. In this blog, we will explore the importance of Data Loss Prevention and how Azure Purview can help you accomplish it.
So, what exactly is Data Loss Prevention?
Data Loss Prevention ( DL) is a set of tools and processes used to ensure that sensitive data is not lost, misused, or accessed by unauthorised users. So basically, it prevents staff from oversharing or accessing sensitive data, whether accidentally or intentionally.
If you are thinking about why DLP is important to your business, you have to look no further than a 2023 study by Verizon, which found that “small instances” of data loss (losing 100 files or less) cost businesses on average between $18,120 to $35,730 and that large-scale data loss (100+ million records) cost an average of $5 million to $15.6 million!
It is also important to note the difference between a Data Breach and a Data Loss event. Data loss is typically accidental and results from various non-malicious factors that lead to the loss, deletion, or destruction of data. At the same time, a Data Breach is a deliberate, unauthorised intrusion into a system or network by malicious actors with the intent to access, steal, or disclose sensitive data.
While the two terms describe different types of events, they sometimes overlap. For example, data breaches will occasionally involve the destruction of data after it has been stolen. Additionally, threats like ransomware, which effectively destroys data through encryption, are sometimes referred to as breaches because of the malware’s ability to bypass security measures.
Introducing Azure Purview
Azure Purview DLP is Microsoft’s answer to Data Loss. It is a centralised software tool that classifies regulated, confidential, and critical business data and identifies violations of policies defined by organisations or within Microsoft’s predefined, policy-driven policies for regulatory compliance (to name a few, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR).
The key to implementing Azure Purview DLP successfully lies in correctly classifying data and configuring policies within the Platform itself. Data classification within Azure Purview allows a client to map out all its data assets and categorise them by assigning unique logical tags or by data sensitivity.
Azure Purview Data Map provides automated classification as you scan your data sources, making DLP extremely easy in certain cases. Policy configuration within Azure Purview allows an organisation to create a rule governing how classified data can be shared or stored inside and outside the organisation’s network, and, once deployed, it will be enforced across the entire IT estate.
Essentially, to protect your business from Data Loss with Azure Purview, all you need to do is tag your sensitive data, then create an enforceable rule that controls how the data can be stored or sent.
On top of this, any instance of data failing to be sent due to DLP policy restrictions will trigger notifications to a staff member tasked with monitoring the Purview DLP platform, ensuring complete transparency into how data is sent, stored, and used across the organisation.
Using Azure Purview DLP is straightforward: it is easy to enable, requires no agent installation, and provides built-in protection for Microsoft 365 cloud services, Office applications, Microsoft Edge, and endpoint devices. Azure Purview DLP controls can also be implemented in Chrome and Firefox, as well asd across various non-Microsoft cloud applications, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
In Summary
All in all, Azure Purview is an extremely well-designed tool and should enable you to build a robust network infrastructure that is protected against most data loss risks.
This blog gives you a brief overview of Azure Purview DLP and how it can protect your organisation from the Pitfalls of Data Loss. If you are interested in learning more about this topic or any other cybersecurity-related topic that could help your business’s security posture.
To evaluate your Data Loss Prevention, conduct a Cloud Security audit, or discuss our services, connect directly with our technical team:
Telephone: 0161 706 0244
Email: info@cybersecurityspecialists.co.uk
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