For years, organizations have struggled with protecting their sensitive data from public eyes. It’s not just about cybercrime, though that threat is constantly rising. IT misconfigurations and simple human error are also a challenge to defend against.
The rise of behavior-based technologies has made it significantly easier for MSPs to launch and manage data loss prevention (DLP) services, which take a proactive stance against both accidental and malicious data leakage — and provide a holistic overview of data flows across the organization. Naturally, this is an incredible value for your clients.
If you can answer “yes” to any of the following questions, the time is right for your organization to adopt DLP solutions as well:
1. Your clients handle high-value data
Data leaks are never ideal, but some information can be especially catastrophic if lost or exposed to public eyes.
High-value data — like trade secrets, intellectual property and personally identifiable information — is regularly targeted by money-hungry cybercriminals. This is the motivating factor for more than 80% of breaches. But even if a leak can be blamed on simple human negligence, the consequences are just as real.
Your clients’ sensitive data can easily be leaked through network channels as well as peripheral devices. A robust DLP offering offers significant protection against all such leaks — whether intentional or accidental. Failure to do so can result in severe financial and reputational harm to any organization.
2. You’re looking to grow your business with new revenue streams
Research shows that most MSPs expect cybersecurity to represent their primary revenue stream in the coming years. But with the majority of service providers now offering some form of managed security services, standing out from the competition has become a primary challenge.
The rise of behavior-based DLP helps you to differentiate your portfolio with new revenue streams available to clients of all sizes. While these solutions were once unrealistic for MSPs and smaller organizations — due to high service delivery costs and the need to painstakingly map policies to clients’ unique and ever-changing business processes — behavior-based technologies minimize complexity of management. This enables you to more easily offer DLP to organizations of all sizes and generate additional revenue streams that deliver real value.
3. You have clients in highly regulated industries
If your clients work with and/or store personally identifiable information (PII), patient health information (PHI), cardholder data, or any other form of especially sensitive and regulated data, they’ll require a higher level of data protection that backup alone can provide.
Data privacy regulations like the GDPR and HIPAA generally include severe fines for data leak events. They also require organizations to report any such breaches of confidential info in a complete and timely manner. Modern DLP services — in addition to slashing the actual risk of leakage — provide you with a holistic view of data flows within your client organizations, making it easier to analyze and understand any such incidents after the fact.
4. You have clients in the public sector
As far as cybercriminals are concerned, healthcare facilities, educational institutions and government agencies are particularly attractive targets. Why? Because not only do they handle sensitive information, they must also make large portions of it publicly accessible. That means a greater potential attack surface.
Modern DLP solutions use behavioral analysis to enable smarter ways of securing this data. You’ll be able to support the availability of sensitive data in the right contexts, while preventing it from reaching the eyes of unauthorized users.
5. Your clients have cyber insurance — or are considering it
It’s one of the hottest topics in the cybersecurity space, and for good reason. Your clients are turning to cyber insurance to limit their liability in the event of a data breach — an event that can otherwise be catastrophically expensive.
The cost of these policies is variable, and it depends on factors like industry, revenue and the proactive measures that the organization has taken to keep their data secure. By demonstrating that DLP services are in place, your clients can often negotiate more agreeable insurance premiums. In some instances, this may even be a basic condition of the clients’ policy, one required to keep them in good standing.
Smarter security through DLP
Whether lost accidentally or due to nefarious activity, data exfiltration can lead to irreparable financial harm through severe regulatory fines, the loss of trade secrets and a general undermining of customer confidence.
For larger businesses with an existing security team — especially one that has relevant experience in this space — adopting on-premises enterprise DLP software will bring powerful benefits. Those who currently lack this expertise may find it more economical to work with an MSP, as establishing your own DLP initiative from the ground up (including training and configuration) can be complex and costly otherwise.
For MSPs themselves, advanced DLP solutions empower you to prevent data leakage from client workloads via both network communications and peripherals — with unmatched simplicity of provisioning, configuration and management. Continuous monitoring of data flows ensures holistic protection of sensitive information, makes it significantly easier to maintain regulatory compliance, and can even support lowered cyber insurance premiums.
This guest blog is courtesy of Acronis. Read more Acronis guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.
