The most effective way to prevent data loss is to combine data discovery and classification, data monitoring and filtering and endpoint data protection, advises analyst Aberdeen Group.
Why? Because, says Derek Brink, vice president and research fellow in IT security at Aberdeen, the risk of data loss cannot be isolated to one type of data, one channel or one kind of end user behaviour.
That being the case, the integration announcement earlier this month by Websense and Voltage Security of their respective data protection systems, is, he says, good news.
Brink refers to Aberdeen’s report ‘Data Loss Prevention: Little Leaks Sink the Ship’, in which the analyst observes that about 70% of manufacturing organisations report a year-on-year increase in data volumes generated and managed, and increasingly diverse potential leakage points and methods.
“By taking an information-centric approach to protecting sensitive data, organisations with top performance use a combination of network-based and endpoint-based solutions to prevent data loss,” he says.
Hence his approval of the Websense and Voltage Security news: “Together these integrated solutions are highly complementary, combining the ability to identify and classify sensitive information with the ability to invoke more granular levels of data protection based no established policies,” he observes.