Data Loss Prevention (DLP) measures allow you to protect your important information, including compliance documents and details. Practicing them can lower your worries of facing security risks and losing your confidential data. This article lists 10 highly effective DLP measures that can help you protect your compliance files like a child (with maximum assurance) and tells you how you can be certain about the effectiveness of your DLP strategy. After reading it, you’ll have complete confidence and control over the security of your compliance documents.

10 Highly Effective DLP Measures to Secure Your Compliance Files

Some highly effective DLP measures are identifying and classifying the compliance documents, updating the software, using data encryption, allocating roles, limiting access to the data, using anomaly detection, educating the stakeholders, automating the DLP processes, running regular security audits, etc.

1. Identify and Organize the Compliance Documents

To ensure data protection, you must identify and organize your compliance documents by leveraging the DLP policy. The DLP policy contains information regarding how your organization labels, shares, and secures data without making it visible to unauthorized users. Along with this, you can use ComplyNexus to automatically classify and securely store your compliance documents.

2. Keep Your Operating System and Applications Updated

You should keep your operating system, software, and applications updated to ensure that none of the cyberattacks and zero-day vulnerabilities can affect your system. Know that outdated applications don’t come with advanced security measures, putting your sensitive information at risk of loss.

However, don’t forget to consider patch management by testing all patches for your infrastructure. It will ensure that zero vulnerabilities are introduced into your organization.

3. Encrypt Your Data

In 2023, over 65 percent of respondents mentioned that their company had already implemented multifactor authentication, backups, password management, and encryption to protect data in the cloud and on-premises. (Statista)

Data encryption ensures that even if unauthorized users gain access to your confidential files, they won’t be able to view the content inside them.

4. Allocate Roles and Limit Access to Information

You should allocate roles, unique data attributes, and unique user attributes to your organization’s employees and stakeholders. Next, implement fine-grained Identity and Access Management (IAM) to ensure that the data is accessed only by the users who qualify for the role, user attributes, and data attributes requirements.

It might sound like an overwhelming task, but implementing it becomes a lot easier when you use ComplyNexus offering fine-grained IAM. It further allows you to access your data through its AI chatbot interface.

5. Automate Your DLP Processes

Although manual DLP processes might give you satisfactory results, you might find it challenging to scale them as your organization grows with time. To cope with this problem, you can use an AI-driven compliance document management system like ComplyNexus – automate your DLP processes and scale them as per your organization’s needs.

6. Constantly Monitor the Compliance Documents

Constantly monitor the compliance documents. Whether they are being extracted from the sources, shared among the remote compliance teams, or simply searched and accessed to prepare evidence, etc., you must stay aware of their position at every step.

Considering the importance of monitoring the documents for security purposes, ComplyNexus comes forward as a secure platform for managing, sharing, and accessing your compliance documents.

7. Educate Your Compliance Teams

Educating your compliance teams is a crucial DLP measure that you shouldn’t miss. Everyone concerned with your organization’s compliance process in any way must be aware of their role in keeping your compliance documents secure.

8. Use Anomaly Detection

IBM states that today, anomaly detection leverages machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically identify unexpected changes in a data set’s normal behavior. Based on this, anomaly detection can help you with the identification of possible data leakage sources, and eventually guide you to achieve protection against them.

9. Conduct Regular Security Audits

Regular security audits can help you gain knowledge about the effectiveness of your recent security practices, giving you a clear picture of the areas that need further protection and the ones that are secured perfectly.

10. Use Write-protected Disks

If you haven’t yet started using a cloud-based compliance document management system, keep your compliance documents in write-protected disks to ensure that you don’t lose your important information during the data deletion attempts.

You might also like to read: How ComplyNexus keeps your compliance documents secure on the cloud.

Have an Incident Response Plan in Place

Along with applying DLP measures, you must also have an incident response plan in place. It will ensure that in case of any sudden data breach events, you don’t panic. Instead, your organization knows the steps to reduce the damage caused by the data breach, minimize the risk of reputational and legal consequences, and instantly return to business as usual.

A typical incident response plan includes the following steps:

• Identification: Identify the data breach details.
• Isolation: Isolate the affected system to prevent further data loss.
• Notification: Notify the concerned people and regulatory authorities about the nature of the data breach and possible solutions.
• Investigation: Figure out the root cause of the data breach.
• Remediation: Execute corrective actions to prevent data breaches in the future.

Note: ComplyNexus cuts down the need to have such a plan in place due to its highly secure environment.

How To Know If Your DLP Strategy Is Working?

You can know if your DLP strategy is working by having a look at the recent data breaches. A reduction in data breaches confirms that your plan is working. Here are a few more ways to confirm it:

• Track alignment with the data handling policies.
• Observe the number of security incidents and time-to-response.
• Conduct regular audits to ensure that all data security practices meet the regulatory requirements and internal policies.
• Collect feedback from the compliance teams on the effectiveness of the DLP best practices.

Conclusion

With this article approaching its end, you must have gathered enough knowledge and clarity regarding data loss prevention measures. Check out the DLP measures discussed in this post below:

• Identify and classify your compliance documents.
• Encrypt your data, and implement fine-grained IAM.
• Automate your DLP processes, and regularly monitor your compliance documents.
• Train and educate your compliance teams, and use anomaly detection.
• Conduct regular security audits, and use write-protected disks.

Start implementing them today, while considering ComplyNexus as your secure platform for compliance document management. Remember, protecting your compliance documents is as important as meeting different compliance requirements, policies, and standards.