Why You Should and How You Can Move Away from Existing DLP Programs

Data breaches continue to expose personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property (IP), and other sensitive data at an alarming scale. Human error and credential theft are often involved; 82% of data breaches involve the human element and 61% involve credentials,¹ meaning that intentional and unintentional data loss by both malicious and well-meaning employees is a predominant cause of a breach in addition to the malicious data exfiltration conducted by external cybercriminals. All of these trends must be tactically addressed as part of an overall data protection strategy.

Data breaches are costly events that carry lingering consequences. The average cost of a data breach increased 2.6% from USD 4.24 million in 2021 to USD 4.35 million in 2022.² The consequences of a breach affecting PII and IP can be very serious, and include direct loss of revenue, diminished reputation and effect on customer trust, noncompliance fines, class action lawsuits, loss of competitive advantage, operational downtime, and employee turnover, especially at the executive level. Many companies underestimate the effect a breach can have on reputation, but their customers’ perception can be severely impacted by a business’ data breach, with 69% of respondents in a 2019 survey claiming they would avoid a company that had suffered a data breach, and 29% of them claiming would never visit that business again.

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