Why Your Organization Needs to Implement a Data Loss Prevention System

The typical email user sends 41 emails during a normal workday, or roughly 10,250 emails each year. That means than in an organization of 2,000 users, 20.5 million emails will be sent. Add to this the large and growing proportion of email users who also use instant messaging clients and wikis, post to blogs, use personal Webmail accounts for business purposes, check email from home, send files through FTP systems, take work home and on the road on USB thumbdrives, transport corporate data on mobile devices, and use collaboration tools of various types.

Now, consider that most of these communications and files are sent and transported without any sort of monitoring, encryption or oversight. The result is that organizations are deploying a growing array of tools and endpoints for employees to become more efficient. And, at the same time, they are creating a growing number of opportunities for information to leak out of an enterprise in unauthorized and potentially damaging ways.

There are many well-publicized (and some not-so-well publicized) examples of sensitive data that has been sent through email and other tools in an authorized or mistaken manner. The vast majority of these data breaches are inadvertent, but the opportunity exists for malicious users to send confidential and sensitive data, as well. Organizations must implement DLP systems to protect themselves against the growing array of threats they face from inadvertent and malicious data leaks.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF DATA LEAKS CAN BE SERIOUS
The consequences of a data breach can vary widely: a confidential memo sent by a senior manager to the wrong client may carry with it no negative ramifications; the client may simply delete the email and the breach will simply be forgotten. However, data breaches can carry with them very serious consequences, such as the revelation in February 2008 that that the Hannaford Brothers chain of supermarkets lost more than four million debit and credit card numbers to hackers.
A 2007 study by the Ponemon Institute found that the loss of customer records costs $197 per record, and that the average business loss for a large organization that suffers a data breach is $4.1 million. The bottom line is that organizations must implement Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems to protect themselves against the growing array of threats they face from inadvertent and malicious data leaks from email, instant messaging and other systems.

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