2010-04-05　　　　Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Can Prevent Costly, Embarrassing and Harmful Breaches of Sensitive or Confidential Information

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 6, 2010 – The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that tracks data breaches and helps educate consumers, reports that in 2010, more than four million data records have been lost or breached.* Additional data breaches have resulted in the loss of an additional unknown number of records that often contain Social Security numbers, credit information, employment records, health records and other personally identifiable information. Many of these losses were from financial services organizations, including banks and financial services, as well as from healthcare organizations and government agencies.

As organizations struggle to secure data about their customers, partners, employees and operations, they can take steps to better protect it. One technology proven to help protect such data is data loss prevention, or DLP (http://www.codegreennetworks.com/blog/?p=33). Effective DLP solutions help organizations identify sensitive data that should be protected and then enforce data handling policies to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

“Now why should you care about DLP? Is it just another over-hyped technology? Nope -- we consider it to be one of the most significant security technologies to emerge over the past few years. By adding content and context awareness, we can now protect information based on what it is, as opposed to where it's stored or some silly label someone slapped on it as metadata,” noted Rich Mogull, Securosis.

Research, articles and blog posts from Securosis on the topic of DLP can be found at http://securosis.com/research/research-data-loss-prevention.

In the real world, DLP solutions are protecting data now. Jason Vander Meer of RealTick, the electronic trading industry's premier global, multi-broker, broker neutral, cross-asset Execution Management System and Dan Udoutch talk about DLP in the financial services industry in a new podcast, DLP Case Study: RealTick and Code Green Networks”, hosted by BankInfoSecurity.com (registration required). They review how DLP works, challenges overcome during implementation, and the kinds of data that can be discovered and protected. A number of financial services firms useCode Green Networks TrueDLP™ data loss prevention solution.