Cloud is the New Frontier for Data Loss Prevention Tools

According to IT analyst firm Gartner, the market for data loss prevention tools increased

to $670 million in 2013, up from $300 million just 3 years earlier. While many

companies have deployed a DLP solution to enforce compliance policies for email, the

next frontier according to experts is where employees share and collaborate on

information today – in a vast array of free or low cost cloud services.

The average company uses 759 cloud services, and this number is growing 20 percent

each quarter. Just 7% of these services maintain the type of security controls required by

most enterprises for on-premise software, exposing corporate data in the cloud to risks

not seen in the IT stack used by companies. However, experts don’t see the growth of

cloud slowing anytime soon.

With all that data moving to potentially risky services, IT security teams are scrambling

to extend their data loss prevention tools to cloud services. One approach, companies can

use a cloud security platform to act as a broker between the DLP solution in place and the

thousands of cloud services available. These solutions can automatically broker traffic to

the cloud and enforce policies.

Commonly, companies configure policies to alerts users of policy violations or block

certain types of highly sensitive information being uploaded in the first place. “When it

comes to data in Box, Jive, Google Drive, or Salesforce, companies want the same

controls their Data Loss Prevention Tools provide for data on-premise,” according to

security researcher Paul DeFabrio.

When a user uploads a document containing social security numbers to file sharing and

collaboration platform Box, for instance, they should receive an alert and the file will be

replaced with a tombstone, indicating it was removed for a compliance violation. “That

type of user education is common with the leading data loss prevention tools on the

market today,” says DeFabrio.