How Effective is an ECM at Sensitive Data Loss Prevention?

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are incredibly efficient tools for storing, organizing, and managing your company’s data. They’re also immensely helpful when it comes to sensitive data loss prevention. 

Most enterprise organizations store a massive amount of data in the cloud via ECMs and other content management systems. And more than 30% of that data contains sensitive information like social security and credit card numbers. Protecting this data should be a top priority, and requires a complex set of controls to monitor and limit access both within your system and outside of it. 

Fortunately, many ECMs have these controls built into their systems, offering organizations set-it-and-forget-it data loss prevention solutions that can be scaled up or down depending on their needs. Keep reading to learn how data loss prevention works in today’s cloud-based world – and how an ECM helps make it easier than ever to achieve. 

The basics of enterprise data loss prevention

Enterprise data loss prevention (DLP) refers to a set of strategies and tools that enterprise organizations use to mitigate the unauthorized access, use, and misuse of sensitive information. 

These types of sensitive data loss prevention practices can be found in pretty much any field, but they are particularly prevalent in regulation-heavy industries such as healthcare, finance, and government, which must maintain compliance with laws like HIPAA, CCPA, and Europe’s GDPR. 

Done well, data loss prevention systems, including those managed within ECMs, help safeguard the personal data of organizations, their employees, and their customers. They also help companies avoid a whole lot of the risks associated with data loss, including data breaches, compliance violations, and costly reputational damage. 

How data loss prevention works in an ECM system

Sensitive data loss prevention is a multi-step process. An advanced ECM will cover all of these steps for you, making it one of the easiest and most cost-effective types of data loss prevention systems on the market. 

So how does it work? Key DLP strategies and technologies that ECM systems can leverage include:

• Robust access controls
• Automatic classification and tagging of sensitive information
• Streamlined encryptions
• User activity monitoring
• Detection and prevention of potential data breaches

All of these strategies play an essential role in sensitive data loss prevention. By outsourcing and automating them via an ECM, you greatly reduce the types of manual errors that put data loss prevention systems at risk. Even better, you do so in a way that doesn’t require the added software (or added costs) of a separate DLP platform.

Maintaining the effectiveness of data loss prevention solutions

An ECM system can do a ton of the work of enterprise data loss prevention for you. For best results, though, you’ll want to make sure your workforce is well-informed on your DLP policy and that they understand their own role in preventing the loss and/or unauthorized access to your organization’s sensitive data. 

Here are three ways to maintain your policy and make sure your employees are as invested as you are. 

Regular audits

Routine audits of your DLP systems are a must for identifying weak spots in your strategy and ensuring everything is working as intended. These audits should include a comprehensive assessment of current data loss prevention strategies and tools, and should be used in conjunction with real-time tracking of data access, transfers, and integrity. 

Employee training

The more your employees are educated on sensitive data loss prevention, the less likely they’ll be to make the sorts of easily avoidable errors that lead to information breaches. Provide team members with training sessions and resources dedicated to understanding your DLP systems and policies, and you’ll cultivate a company culture that recognizes the necessity, value, and overarching importance of data loss prevention systems. 

Policy updates

The tactics used to breach enterprise data are constantly evolving, and your DLP policy needs to be evolving too. Using information gleaned from your audits, as well as information about the what, where, why, and how of recent industry breaches, continually update your DLP policy and technologies, continuously keeping employees informed on what’s new. 

Sensitive data loss prevention with Systemware ECM

The Systemware cloud-based ECM system is designed with innovative data security solutions that keep your data secure across its entire lifecycle, from storage to access to sharing among internal and external parties. And in doing so, it closes the gaps that can interfere with the integrity and compliance of your organization’s most sensitive information. 

Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo to explore Systemware ECM and see firsthand how it can support your data loss prevention efforts.