Email Data Loss Prevention

Protect sensitive data from loss, misused, or unauthorized access by detecting and preventing disclosure or unsolicited inbound data leakage via email.

What Is Email Data Loss Prevention (DLP)?

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Email Data Loss Prevention, or content security solutions are designed to protect sensitive information from accidental or intentional data loss through email. These solutions can detect, monitor, and block any sensitive information from being sent outside the organization's network. Without robust controls, sensitive or valuable data can be leaked accidentally or targeted by malicious actors looking to exfiltrate it for monetary gain. And these threats can come from within the organization (e.g., insider threat) or from the outside in the form of ransomware and other cyberattacks.

The loss of sensitive or valuable data is something any organization, regardless of size, industry, or geography, must avoid. Data privacy and data protection laws, such as CPPA, GDPR, HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act and others, require organizations to maintain secure environments and always apply the appropriate level of data protection, no matter where it’s located or how it’s shared. Failure to keep data secure can result in fines for non-compliance.

To avoid data leakage and exfiltration, organizations apply Data Loss Prevention (DLP) practices and tools to safeguard their business-critical data, often with a Secure Email Gateway appliance. DLP focuses on minimizing the risk to the organization by detecting and preventing unauthorized disclosure before the data breach occurs.

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what is email dlp?

How do DLP Software Solutions Work?

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When looking at how to prevent data loss, technology is often the last line of defense. Its role is to apply the organization’s data security policies consistently over all egress points, identify possible violations, and take the appropriate remedial actions. Traditional DLP solutions are inflexible in the way they operate, making them difficult to configure and implement. 

Typically, the solutions “stop and block” any action deemed to have risk implications, often incorrectly mistaking legitimate daily actions as an exfiltration or data loss threat. This generates large numbers of false positives which can easily overwhelm the IT security staff who need to action the alerts and frustrate users who can’t work productively.

More than Stop and Block

The Email DLP solution from Fortra Email Security provides much more than just traditional stop and block functionality. In place of this, it:

Lessens risk of data loss, exfiltration & more

It does this by intelligently inspecting structured and unstructured data within email messages, files transferred to and from the web or cloud, making sure the appropriate security policy is always automatically applied.

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The solution understands both content and context and adapts its behavior accordingly. Policies can be set so that certain individuals, teams, or departments have more flexibility than others. For example:

  • The CEO is authorized to send sensitive data to the CFO, so the data is automatically encrypted to protect it while in motion.
  • When the HR team sends sensitive data to an unknown third party, the solution recognizes that this could be an unauthorized transfer. But rather than block the communication, it automatically removes the sensitive data from the message, allowing a safe version to continue unhindered.
  • The user is alerted to the fact that a policy violation occurred, but business is not interrupted. This significantly reduces the numbers of false positives that occur and removes any risk.

This automated process is made possible by a unique technology called adaptive redaction.

What exactly is Adaptive Redaction?

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Adaptive Redaction technology sets Fortra's Clearwift apart from other vendors. It occurs during the content inspection process in real time, when our Deep Content Inspection engine deconstructs files down to their constituent parts. 

If it identifies sensitive or valuable information or any cyber threats, it automatically removes, deletes, or sanitizes the files as per the rules set by the organization. The solution then reconstructs the files, allowing them to continue without delay. The inspection capability is not limited by zip/encryption, file size, analysis timing delays or multiple embedded document layers.

Its Four Main Options

Data Redaction

To keep organizations compliant, sensitive and valuable data is automatically removed from messages and documents before they are transferred, sent, or received. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality extracts text from image-based files.

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Document Sanitization

To prevent data harvesting, hidden metadata such as comments and revision history is automatically removed from documents, along with author, user, and server names. Anti-steganography technology wipes images clean too.

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Encryption

Email encryption is the process of encrypting or disguising the content of email messages, protecting sensitive information from being read or accessed by anyone other than the intended recipient. There are various encryption options.

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Structural Sanitization

To stop malware, ransomware and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) from infecting the network, files are sanitized of active malicious content, such as embedded macros and scripts that would trigger when a document is opened.

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How does Clearswift's Email DLP Differ from Other Solutions?

FLEXIBLE POLICY DESIGN

Allows organizations to measure the effectiveness of DLP policies before they are implemented, refined, and finally deployed to comply with industry regulations. 

UNIQUE ADAPTIVE FEATURES

Automatically detects scanned documents and images, and removes sensitive and hidden data.

MINIMIZES FALSE POSITIVES

Avoids unnecessary disruption to daily business by improving efficiency, and lowers IT overhead costs.

CONTINUOUSLY REMEDIATES

Mitigates non-compliance with governance policies and data extraction by unauthorized individuals or malware.

Dig deeper into Clearswift's Email Data Loss Prevention solution

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Complementary Adaptive DLP Solutions

Covering data in use, in motion and at rest, the Clearswift solutions have in-built DLP capabilities to help secure and protect structured and unstructured data. This integrated DLP functionality allows us to offer protection against unwanted data loss and acquisition through our Secure Email, Exchange, and Web gateway appliances.  

Email DLP Knowledge Panel

  • Network DLP: This type of DLP helps support compliance and reduce risks of data loss by monitoring and controlling the flow of sensitive data via all network traffic, email, or web, and then enforcing policies to ensure protection.
  • Cloud DLP: This type of DLP allows your organization to adopt cloud applications and storage while maintaining needed visibility and control. It can integrate with leading cloud storage providers to enable the encryption of, removal of, or automated remediation of sensitive data before the file would be shared in the cloud, or can scan and audit anytime afterwards.
  1. For compliance: Email and web DLP solutions can be used to classify an organization’s sensitive information that is subject to regulatory standards, such as PII data, HIPAA privacy, or GDPR regulations. In this case, DLP monitors activities involving this data and provides reports to document compliance.
  2. For Intellectual Property (IP) protection: Email and web DLP solutions use context-based data classification to identify important IP that needs enhanced protection from unauthorized users.
  3. For enhanced data visibility: Email and web DLPs solution can monitor data in the cloud and on networks–providing increased visibility into how data is used and to make it run more efficiently and effectively.
  1. Identify the types of data that need protecting. This might be data based on regulation (GDPRHIPAA), personal data (PII or PCI), or other valuable, business-critical data. 
  2.  Consider whether data needs to be labeled according to its classification, where it is stored (on-premise or in the cloud), how it is shared (via email, web, or managed file transfer) and who needs access to it. 
  3. Even with risks minimized, ensure that everyone knows what to do through cybersecurity awareness training and simulations of data breaches.

Clearswift's Deep Content Inspection Engine deconstructs files down to their constituent parts to identify sensitive or valuable information, or active cyber threats. Then rules are set and are applied based on content and context, such as automatic detection, data redaction, encryption, structural sanitization, and so on. And these policies can be extended to scanned documents and images.

Enhancing Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is fast becoming the collaboration tool of choice for many corporations. Leveraging the cloud, it allows professionals to create and communicate with ease. Microsoft 365 offers multiple tiers of capability, including provisions for data loss prevention – but are these features comprehensive enough to secure data to satisfy the strictest regulatory requirements?

Adaptive DLP from Clearswift working alongside Microsoft 365 deployments, makes the most of the cloud-centric infrastructure, but with zero compromise on security. Benefit from greater DLP controls, protection from incoming cyber threats, and more flexibility when implementing policies. as well as a reduced total cost of ownership.

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Enhancing Data Loss Prevention in Office 365

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Find out how Clearswift Email Data Loss Prevention integrates with Microsoft 365 to enable advanced email threat protection in the cloud. 

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Additional Fortra Solutions for Data Loss Prevention

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If you need to better see and protect critical data and IP, Fortra offers additional market-leading endpoint data loss prevention to complement our email security solutions. 

  1. Endpoint DLP provides the most robust coverage and control for Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints in order to ensure there are no gaps in your data protection strategy. It does so by capturing and recording events at the system, user, and data levels, and allows you to fine tune responses based on these various factors. With SaaS deployment options and managed services, Digital Guardian deploys rapidly and delivers fast results.
  2. Other enterprise DLP solutions can be deployed alongside data classification tools and software for managed file transfers (MFT), such as the Secure ICAP Gateway.. During the process, adaptive DLP recognizes the different data classification labels and automatically enforces the appropriate policy. It also ensures labeling remains in place as the data moves throughout the network or leaves the organization. Finally, files being sent or received securely through MFT benefit from an additional layer of DLP and protection from cybersecurity threats

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Incorporating email DLP into your cybersecurity portfolio is crucial. Talk to one of our experts to discover the DLP solution that's right for your organization.

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