What is Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention?

Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a fully managed service that enables organizations to discover, classify and protect sensitive data in cloud and on-premises environments. Google Cloud DLP uses machine learning and pattern matching techniques to gain visibility into sensitive data risk throughout an organization. It analyzes data and identifies potentially sensitive information like credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data.

Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention also provides tools for classifying data based on its sensitivity, and it reduces risk through techniques that anonymize or de-identify and redact sensitive data. Security teams can use Google Cloud DLP to create and enforce DLP policies. This Google product integrates easily with other Google Cloud services, including BigQuery, Cloud Storage and DataFlow. Google Cloud DLP also provides APIs that enable developers to integrate DLP capabilities and applications and automate data protection processes.

DLP solutions have become a critical part of the security stack. Quickly evolving data privacy laws require organizations to adopt strong protections for customer data, imposing significant fines for compliance violations. At the same time, transformational changes in IT environments have created challenges for security teams charged with protecting data assets. Hybrid cloud infrastructure, BYOD and work-from-anywhere workforces have made it easier for data loss incidents to occur – and more difficult for IT teams to prevent them.

Data Loss Prevention technology like Google Cloud DLP can help organizations prevent data loss and leaks to avoid the damage to reputation, customer relationships and the bottom line. A Data Loss Prevention system enables organizations to:

• Identify and protect sensitive and business-critical information from loss, leaks, theft and other threats.
• Achieve and prove compliance with global, national and local regulations concerning data privacy, governance and sovereignty.
• Gain visibility into the presence of sensitive data in rapidly growing data stores.
• Simplify the task

Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention provides comprehensive tools for identifying and protecting sensitive data.

• Automated discovery simplifies discovery and identification of sensitive data throughout the organization.
• Flexible classification with 150 built-in infoTypes enables teams to scan, discover, classify and report on data from virtually anywhere. Data Loss Prevention for Google Cloud features built-in support for DLP in Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery and Datastore, while a streaming content API enables support for additional data sources, applications and custom workloads.
• Simple and powerful redaction includes tools to redact, mask, tokenize and transform sensitive data. With support for structured and unstructured data, Cloud DLP preserves the utility of data for analytics and AI while hiding the raw sensitive identifiers.
• The ability to measure statistical properties such as k-anonymity and l-diversity enhance understanding and protection of data privacy.
• Serverless architecture enables security teams to manage DLP without needing to manage hardware or VMs.
• Secure data handling is confirmed by several independent third-party audits that test data safety, security and privacy.
• Pay-as-you-go pricing enables organizations to pay only for the services consumed.
• Easy workload integration features include reusable templates and periodic scans for monitoring data.
• Custom rules enable teams to add custom types, adjust detection thresholds and create detection rules to reduce noise and tailor DLP to the organization’s needs.

While Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention offers comprehensive tools and significant benefits, it also has certain limitations and shortcomings. Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention may not be granular enough to achieve 100% compliance with data privacy regulations. Accuracy can also be an issue – Google’s DLP tool may generate false positives or overlook sensitive data altogether. To ensure the highest levels of protection, organizations can augment DLP capabilities by adding a solution from a third-party Data Loss Prevention company.

As a leading user and data security cybersecurity company, Forcepoint offers a DLP solution built for today’s most challenging data security risks. Forcepoint DLP provides the tools to effectively discover, classify, monitor and protect data intuitively across web, cloud, email, network and endpoints – with zero friction for the user experience. Risk-Adaptive Protection enables teams to audit behavior in real time to stop data loss before it occurs.

With Forcepoint DLP, organizations can:

• Control data with a single policy. Replace broad, sweeping rules with individualized, adaptive data security that blocks action only when necessary, ensuring that employees can stay productive.
• Configure policies once and apply them everywhere. With Forcepoint, teams can create data security policies once and apply them to the web, cloud and private applications through integration with the Forcepoint ONE Security Service Edge (SSE).
• Simplify compliance. Forcepoint provides the industry’s largest pre-defined policy library, ensuring regulatory compliance across 80+ countries for GDPR, CCPA and others.
• Protect critical intellectual property. Protect PHI and PHI, trade secrets, company financials, credit card data and other types of sensitive customer data, even in images. Follow intellectual property (IP) in both structured and unstructured forms. Stop low and slow data theft even when users are off the network.

In addition to enhancing Data Loss Prevention in G Suite and Google Cloud, Forcepoint can augment Data Loss Prevention in Office 365 and other popular cloud platforms.