The accelerating pace of change in today’s hybrid workplace presents corporate IT teams with two key challenges: Finding a smarter way to manage multi-cloud connectivity and finding a smarter way to protect their organizations from even smarter cyber attackers. Keeping sensitive data safe is getting harder as security teams struggle to connect employees securely to cloud applications, shield their organizations from evolving threat vectors, and deliver high-quality user experiences on managed and unmanaged devices.
Ultimately, chief information security officers (CISO) and chief compliance and risk officers (CCO/CRO) want to ensure that their organizations comply with corporate and federal regulations, while security analysts and administrators want to protect sensitive company data in the cloud from bad actors.
There’s good news: The newly enhanced multimode cloud data loss prevention (DLP) functionality in Cisco Umbrella’s cloud access security broker (CASB) helps all of them check both boxes.
What is cloud data loss prevention (DLP)?
Put simply, cloud DLP scans outbound web traffic and blocks sensitive data in it from leaving your organization or being exposed to malicious attackers in the cloud. Umbrella now delivers two modes of cloud DLP: Inline and out-of-band, or what Cisco calls Real Time DLP and SaaS API DLP, respectively.
Real Time DLP scans data inline through Umbrella’s secure web gateway proxy and supports all cloud applications. SaaS API DLP scans data while it’s at rest in the cloud, via restful API instead of the secure web gateway proxy, but with near real-time enforcement, and with support for Cisco Webex, Microsoft 365 (SharePoint and OneDrive), and Google Drive.
We will continue to develop enhancements for both modes of Umbrella cloud DLP on an ongoing basis to ensure we deliver comprehensive functionality that meets our customers’ expectations.
What makes Umbrella cloud DLP different?
While other vendors in the market provide both modes of DLP, a key differentiator in Umbrella is the unified policies and reporting between them, giving customers a single management interface experience. Those other vendors have separate policy and reporting experiences for the two modes, so there’s cumbersome back-and-forth between screens, applications, or platforms. Admins and analysts typically don’t like such back-and-forth instead of what should be unified processes. Cisco recognizes this preference, and its commitment to integration and management simplicity sets Umbrella apart.
Exact data matching in Umbrella provides even more DLP efficiency. It’s an advanced and flexible classification and detection technique that allows for protecting sensitive data records that are maintained in a tabular format by matching multiple values in a data record rather than a single value.
In other words, let’s say you have a data record like a person’s full name, along with maybe their social security number, a phone number, or maybe a birthdate or a credit card number. If you identify a match of just one of those components, you may trigger a false alert. But matching two or more values of a sensitive record – like a combination of name and social security number – more strongly indicates the presence of a sensitive record that should be protected. That’s what exact data matching does; you get better efficacy, accuracy, and a higher level of trust in your DLP policy.
Why choose Cisco Umbrella?
With so many vendors to choose from when it comes to making the right investments in cybersecurity solutions, reliability and simplicity are often top of mind. Helping our customers protect the integrity of every aspect of their business so they can deal with unpredictable threats or changes – and then emerge stronger and more resilient – is one of the ways Cisco has become a trusted secure networking and cloud solutions provider.
With threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, Umbrella integrates multiple components that were once standalone security services and appliances in a single, cloud-native solution. The constant innovation and delivery of new and differentiated capabilities, such as the unified policies and reporting for multimode DLP, mean that our customers get a uniquely positive and simple experience, along with unparalleled reliability.
Want to learn more about Cisco Umbrella’s cloud DLP functionality?
Sign up for a personalized demo with one of our security experts today! Or, if you’re ready to try Umbrella yourself, request a free trial.
