Skip to content
Home / Blog / What Is Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Cybersecurity?

January 14, 2025 | Matt Pacheco

What Is Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in Cybersecurity?

Data loss can be a huge cybersecurity threat for a business. Whether it’s from ransomware, malicious insiders, lost credentials, or through another avenue, data loss can result in decreased revenue, compromised trust, regulatory fines, and irreplaceable downtime. For these reasons and more, data loss prevention is an essential part of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy. We’ll cover what data loss prevention (DLP) is, how it works, types of DLP tools, and how to choose and implement solutions that will work for your business needs.

What is Data Loss Prevention (DLP)?

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a cybersecurity strategy that helps prevent sensitive data from being exposed, lost, or stolen. Implementing DLP improves data continuity and data availability, and enhances business operations.

How Does Data Loss Prevention Work?

The process works by identifying and classifying sensitive data. Classifications might include the type of data—for example, is it personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, financial data, or something else? Data can also be classified based on its sensitivity level. Essentially, this is equivalent to how large of an impact it would make if this data were to be compromised in a breach. Data can also be categorized based on whether it is subject to certain industry regulations.

Next, DLP solutions will monitor data movement through network traffic, endpoints, the cloud, or storage. This is done to find and prevent unauthorized data transfers or access.

Data can then be encrypted in transit and at rest, which makes it unusable for entities that aren’t authorized to access it. Decryption will only occur when authorized users try to access the data.

The Importance of DLP in Cybersecurity

Data loss prevention (DLP) serves a key role in a business’s overall cybersecurity strategy. Organizations can protect their sensitive data against different types of common threats with DLP solutions, including insider threats, phishing attacks, cloud malware, avoiding ransomware, and unauthorized access.

Protecting Sensitive Data

By identifying, classifying, and protecting sensitive data, DLP solutions can help protect organizations and end users. Tools can monitor how data is normally used to pinpoint anomalies, acting automatically to prevent access.

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

For industries that are subject to privacy regulations like CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA, DLP solutions can help organizations maintain compliance. DLP solutions come with comprehensive data protection measures and can also audit data usage, two features that are important in data protection regulatory frameworks.

Mitigating Threats

DLP solutions can protect against both internal and external threats.

Sometimes, threats come from within. DLP solutions can monitor for suspicious employee behavior that may be indicative of malicious actions or simply acts of negligence.

Phishing, malware, and ransomware are common attack vectors for cybercriminals. With phishing, bad actors may pretend to be another person or organization to compel email or call recipients to share sensitive information. Malware can infect or even encrypt data—ransomware can be used to capture data in exchange for payment of a ransom. DLP solutions can block malicious files or reduce access to critical data to mitigate the impact of these infiltrations.

Unauthorized access of sensitive data can come from one user’s compromised credentials. Implementing strong access controls and monitoring user activity through DLP solutions can detect anomalies and prevent successful unauthorized access attempts.

Securing Systems and Infrastructure

Implementing strong access controls and detecting problems before they snowball are key to safeguarding data. DLP solutions can also monitor network traffic to better secure an organization’s infrastructure and systems.

Types of DLP Solutions

There are four main types of DLP solutions: network, endpoint, cloud, and storage. Organizations can also choose to use an integrated option.

Network DLP

Network DLP solutions identify sensitive data and prevent it from being transmitted by monitoring network traffic. These tools can inspect file transfers, emails, and web traffic and monitor user activity, data governance, and how data is being transmitted. If there are issues with data handling or violations of established access policies, these can be found through network DLP solutions.

Endpoint DLP

Endpoint DLP tools monitor data on individual devices. These can include desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Users can be prevented from copying, exporting, or transferring sensitive data. They can also be kept from printing certain materials. Endpoint DLP solutions can even monitor clipboard activity.

Cloud DLP

Data that is stored in the cloud can be better safeguarded with cloud DLP solutions. If your organization uses tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive, cloud DLP solutions can scan the data and monitor user activity.

Storage DLP

Storage DLP can protect important data saved on various storage devices, including network shares, databases, and file servers. They can use encryption, data classification, access controls, and other safety methods to prevent data leaks and other forms of unauthorized access.

Integrated DLP

In many cases, it may be appropriate to use an integrated DLP solution, which uses multiple DLP technologies to offer protection against data compromise through the protection of cloud, network, storage, and endpoint environments. These integrated tools can centralize the management of data security policies and make it easier to identify threats.

Implementing DLP Solutions: Steps to Deploy

Organizations should follow these four steps when it’s time to implement and deploy DLP solutions.

  1. Assessing Organizational Needs: Start by identifying sensitive data in your organization that requires additional protection. As previously mentioned, this could include financial data, PII, intellectual property, or anything else your business deems sensitive. Determine what the risks are if this data was to be lost or leaked. Would you experience a hit to your reputation, fines, or other financial losses? Once you understand your needs, set goals for security based on your risk tolerance and overall business strategy.
  2. Selecting the Right DLP Tools: Data loss prevention tools offer different features, deployment models, integrations, and customer support services. You’ll likely want to choose a tool that has features such as monitoring, classification, data discovery, and encryption. DLP tools can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises—they can even be hybrid. Learn more about different vendors to determine which one has the best reputation and customer support. For the best chance at successful adoption, the data loss prevention software should integrate easily with your organization’s current security infrastructure.
  3. Deployment and Integration: Once you’ve chosen a vendor, you can install and configure the tool to meet your organizational needs and objectives. Your security team should develop security policies that can be enforced around access controls and data usage. You should also train employees on how to support the DLP solutions through best practices, such as practicing strong password hygiene and learning how to spot and report suspicious activity.
  4. Monitoring and Management: After everything has been implemented, your business should monitor user activity and traffic for signs of unauthorized access and data loss. Many tools can report on activity and send real-time alerts to security teams on policy violations and other incidents. As you see activity coming in, your team can adjust DLP policies and review the incident response plan that can be used to address data breaches and other security incidents.

Best Practices for Data Loss Prevention in Cybersecurity

To boost your organization’s data protection efforts, follow these best practices:

  • Conduct regular audits and assessments: Find vulnerabilities and potential threats quickly by regularly assessing your organization’s security posture. Keep a routine patching schedule and simulate attacks through penetration testing to find and strengthen weak areas before they can be exploited.
  • Implement strong access controls: Users should be required to use strong, unique passwords and can log in using multi-factor authentication (MFA). To limit risk, keep user permissions limited to only what is needed for their job role. Review access levels and revoke privileges for any changes in roles and functions.
  • Conduct employee training: Employees can be a strong protective element for your organization. Ensure they are educated on common cyber threats and how to handle potential suspicious activity. Your security team can even simulate phishing attacks to determine which employees need more training.
  • Encrypt data: Use strong encryption algorithms to ensure data remains secure, and encrypt data both at rest and in transit to limit unauthorized access.

Protect Critical Data with a Custom DLP Strategy

Crafting a custom DLP strategy that’s right for your business is one of the proactive security measures you can take to protect your critical data. How do you know if you’ve done enough to keep your data safe? By working with a partner like TierPoint, you can initiate proactive measures that continually protect your data. Learn more and reach out to one of our security experts today.

Subscribe to the TierPoint blog

We’ll send you a link to new blog posts whenever we publish, usually once a week.