Building Resilient Data Protection: The Benefits of Automated DLP

In today’s digital world, all organizations deal with various types of sensitive data, including personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, intellectual property, and trade secrets. Data breaches or unauthorized access to this information can have severe consequences, including financial loss, reputational damage, legal liabilities, and regulatory non-compliance. Implementing data loss prevention (DLP) measures help safeguard sensitive data and minimize the risk of data loss incidents. 

DLP is a set of strategies, policies, and technologies designed to prevent unauthorized or accidental loss, leakage, or exposure of sensitive data. It includes the identification, monitoring, and protection of sensitive data to ensure its confidentiality. 

With so many different DLP solutions on the market, each designed to address different aspects of data protection, it can be time intensive, costly, and hard to hire enough resources to detect and remediate all possible data leakage and exposure across an organization’s disparate security solutions. Pairing DLP systems with a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform can exponentially enhance your incident response capabilities by streamlining the detection, investigation, and remediation of data loss incidents leading to enhanced security, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. 

For example, when a DLP system detects a policy violation or potential data breach, a SOAR platform can automatically trigger predefined response actions, such as isolating affected systems, blocking data transfers, or notifying security teams. This reduces response time and minimizes manual effort while ensuring consistent incident response.  

However, there are numerous other benefits to combining the capabilities of SOAR with your favorite DLP solutions including: 

• Streamlined orchestration of security tools: SOAR platforms act as a central hub for integrating and orchestrating various security tools and technologies. By integrating DLP with SOAR, organizations can leverage the capabilities of both systems in a coordinated manner. SOAR platforms facilitate the seamless flow of information between DLP and other security tools, such as security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, endpoint protection platforms, or threat intelligence feeds to enable cross-tool automation, correlation of security events, and more effective data loss prevention and incident response workflows. 

• Automated Workflows and Playbooks: SOAR platforms allow organizations to create and automate workflows and playbooks that define the steps to be taken during incident remediation. By integrating DLP into these workflows, organizations can define specific actions to be triggered when DLP policy violations or data loss incidents occur. For example, a playbook could include notifying relevant stakeholders, initiating forensic investigations, quarantining affected data, or generating compliance reports. This automation reduces the manual effort involved in incident response while ensuring consistency throughout the process.  
• Reporting and Analytics: SOAR platforms provide comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities, offering insights into incident trends, response effectiveness, and overall security posture. By integrating DLP with security automation, organizations can generate consolidated reports that combine DLP-specific events and response activities with other security incidents and events. This holistic view helps organizations assess the effectiveness of their data loss prevention measures, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. 

By leveraging security automation and SOAR platforms for data loss prevention, organizations can achieve real-time threat detection, faster incident response, consistent policy enforcement and compliance, and seamless integration with their existing security infrastructure. It also helps protect sensitive data, maintain customer trust, and safeguard business continuity in an increasingly digital and interconnected world. 

Watch this on-demand webinar to see how one organization used SOAR to automate critical steps within their DLP workflow for faster, more streamlined incident response and remediation.