Overview of Cisco Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Cisco Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a comprehensive set of technologies, products, and techniques designed to prevent sensitive information from leaving an organization’s network, thereby protecting intellectual property, financial data, and other confidential information.
What Cisco DLP Does
Cisco DLP is integrated into various Cisco security solutions, including Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Email Security Appliance, to monitor, detect, and block the unauthorized flow of sensitive data. This is crucial in today’s digital landscape where data can be leaked through multiple channels such as email, instant messaging, website forms, file transfers, and other electronic communications.
Key Features and Functionality
Data Protection Across States
Cisco DLP protects data in three primary states:
- Data-in-use: Safeguards data being actively processed by applications or endpoints through user authentication and access control.
- Data-in-motion: Ensures data is not routed outside the organization or to insecure storage areas during network transit, often using encryption.
- Data-at-rest: Secures data stored in various mediums, including cloud storage, by controlling access and tracking user interactions.
Advanced Detection and Enforcement
- Intricate Detection Techniques: Uses rules, regular expressions, and predefined patterns to identify sensitive content such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and other confidential data. It also evaluates the context to minimize false positives.
- Real-Time and Out-of-Band Scanning: Inspects data in real-time via Secure Web Gateway (SWG) proxy and out-of-band through SaaS API-based scanning, ensuring comprehensive coverage.
Policy Management and Reporting
- Flexible and Customizable Policies: Allows administrators to create and manage policies using over 80 pre-built dictionaries and customizable data identifiers. Policies can be unified across in-line and out-of-band inspections.
- Comprehensive Reporting: Provides detailed logs of data violations, including event type, severity, identity or file owner, destination, rule, action, and timestamp. Additional event details can be accessed for further analysis.
Compliance and Risk Management
- Compliance Enforcement: Helps organizations meet various government and industry regulations by enforcing strict data security policies and preventing unauthorized data leaks.
- Risk Management: Assigns risk factor scores to potential violations and performs actions based on predefined severity levels, ensuring proactive risk mitigation.
Integration and Deployment
- Unified Cloud Security Platform: Cisco DLP is part of the Cisco Umbrella platform, which integrates multiple security services, including secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, DNS-layer security, and more. This provides a holistic approach to data security and compliance.
- Easy Deployment and Management: Designed to be easy to deploy and manage, with a user-friendly interface for setting up and managing DLP policies and rules.
In summary, Cisco Data Loss Prevention is a robust solution that leverages advanced technologies to protect sensitive data across all stages of its lifecycle, ensuring compliance, preventing data leaks, and safeguarding an organization’s reputation and assets.