What you'll learn in this article
- Email DLP (data loss prevention) helps prevent accidental, malicious, and cyberattack-driven data exposure through email.
- The three primary email data loss risks are accidental sharing, insider-driven malicious leaks, and external data exfiltration attacks.
- Sensitive business data such as financial records, customer information, intellectual property, and strategic plans are frequent targets.
- Effective email DLP solutions must balance strong security controls with user productivity and minimal IT overhead.
- Mimecast email DLP provides adaptive policy enforcement, encryption, insider risk management, and centralized control across modern email environments.
What is Email DLP (Data Loss Prevention)?
DLP, or data loss prevention, is an umbrella term for activities and technologies that prevent the loss, accidental disclosure, or unauthorized access of sensitive information. Email DLP is a subset technique of data loss prevention, which describes techniques aimed at stopping data loss caused through email.
Types of Email Data Loss to look out for
The three main types of data loss are:
- Accidental Data Loss
- Malicious Data Loss
- Data Exfiltration
Accidental Data Loss, as the name implies, involves data being lost accidentally. When it comes to accidental data loss through email, common and frequent examples include employees unknowingly sharing information with the wrong people within the organization or using “Reply All” instead of “Reply” and distributing data with a larger group than intended.
While accidental data loss happens unintentionally, malicious data loss is a targeted act, in which individuals with access to confidential or sensitive information purposefully aim to harm an organization. Examples for malicious data loss include individuals sharing confidential information outside the organization, forwarding sensitive data to a personal or external address, or making copies of confidential information to an external device.
Examples of attacks with the goal of data exfiltration include common cyberattacks such as Business Email Compromise (BEC) , Ransomware Attacks, and Spear Phishing amongst others.
Superior email DLP tools help protect your organization
Data leakage prevention for email (email DLP) has become a critical technology for organizations. Sensitive information related to customers, financials, future business plans, and new products is routinely kept in digital form and shared by employees through email. When these assets are leaked inadvertently or intentionally, the cost can be quite high – from fines and legal actions to damage to reputation and loss of business.
The right email DLP solution can help prevent leaks and protect your organization, but choosing the right data leak prevention tools is essential. Your email DLP technology must be comprehensive enough to stop leaks anywhere in the organization and flexible enough to not stifle productivity. On top of that, your email DLP solution must not add additional administrative burden to IT teams already facing constrained budgets and staff resources.
Mimecast offers comprehensive DLP with adaptive controls for all modern work channels. With a focus on Insider Risk Management (IRM), Mimecast’s DLP solution combines easy-to-use tools with powerful technology to protect your organization by stopping email leaks
Email DLP technology from Mimecast
Email data loss prevention is a critical part of your organization's security. Accidental or malicious email data leaks can cause great damage to your business. Consequently, risk and compliance officers want to apply mail security controls to protect against email data loss prevention, but these solutions cannot stifle productivity or be too expensive. As a leading provider of email information archiving , data loss prevention, and continuity solutions, Mimecast offers an email DLP tool that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange to guard against both accidental data loss linked to insider risks and malicious leaks while educating users about organizational policies and best practices.
With Mimecast's comprehensive data loss prevention solution, you retain the control and flexibility needed to reduce business risk without impeding user productivity or adding
How Mimecast's email data loss prevention solution works
Mimecast's email data loss prevention service synchronizes with Secure Active Directory and provides flexible content policy management features that make it easy to apply appropriate controls to specific users and groups. Mimecast scans all email – including body text, headers, subject lines, HTML, and attachments – and compares content against policies that identify specific words, text patterns, and images as potential data leaks.
When a policy is triggered, administrators may choose from a variety of possible actions including hold pending review, block, CC a group, deliver securely, or add content. Mimecast also enables hidden metadata from Microsoft Word documents to be removed to help reduce the risk of unintentional leaks. Administrators can manage policies from a single web-based console, applying changes consistently to all sites and every mail server in real time. Policy-based TLS encryption protects against eavesdropping when emails are in-transit, helping to meet compliance and corporate governance requirements. Encryption may be applied on a mandatory or case-by-case basis. And the Mimecast Secure Messaging service enables users to share sensitive information with people outside the organization without content ever leaving the security of the Mimecast network.
How Mimecast's email data loss prevention solution works
Email data loss prevention from Mimecast synchronizes with Secure Active Directory and provides flexible content policy management features that make it easy to apply appropriate controls to specific users and groups. Mimecast scans all email – including body text, headers, subject lines, HTML and attachments – and compares content against policies that identify specific words, text patterns and images as potential data leaks. When a policy is triggered, administrators may choose from a variety of possible actions including hold pending review, block, CC a group, deliver securely or add content. Mimecast also enables hidden metadata from Microsoft Word documents to be removed to help reduce the risk of unintentional leaks.
Administrators can manage policies from a single web-based console, applying changes consistently to all sites and every mail server in real time. Policy-based TLS encryption protects against eavesdropping when emails are in-transit, helping to meet compliance and corporate governance requirements. Encryption may be applied on a mandatory or case-by-case basis. And Mimecast Secure Messaging service enables users to share sensitive information with people outside the organization without content ever leaving security of the Mimecast network.
Advantages of Mimecast's email data loss prevention service
With its focus on insider risk management, Mimecast's email data loss prevention technology easily enables you to:
- Safeguard your organization's reputation by preventing unwanted leaks.
- Provide support to meet legal and regulatory compliance needs.
- Simplify policy enforcement with a single solution that works across multiple sites.
- Educate users by providing automatic notifications when their actions conflict with your email data loss prevention policy.
- Enforce policies during email server outages.
- Implement an email data loss prevention solution immediately with zero capital outlay.
Learn more about Mimecast's email data loss prevention technology, and about Mimecast solutions for Microsoft Office 365 archiving and Office 365 disaster recovery, and how Mimecast can serve as a Postini replacement.
