DLP is trending. What’s that got to do with microsharding?

Cloud migration has been going on for years, but old technologies are still evolving to keep up. With massive amounts of data shifting to the cloud from on-premises environments, many companies are sticking with the traditional tools they’ve been using for years.

Data loss prevention — DLP — is a great example. An older approach that was originally used for on-premises storage, DLP is currently trending as an option for the cloud. A new report from Allied Market Research estimates that the global cloud data loss prevention (DLP) market will surge from $2.4 billion in 2021 to an estimated $27.5 billion by 2031. 

DLP still has its place and is definitely not going away. But it’s no longer the only solution. When it comes to protecting your data, there are now modern alternatives that offer strong data protection and resilience for the cloud. 

DLP in a nutshell 

Data loss prevention software typically works by monitoring, detecting, and preventing data breaches. Depending on the product, DLP solutions can protect data in use (endpoint actions), in motion (network traffic), or at rest (storage). They may include data monitoring, access control, encryption, or retention policies. 

Some automated DLP measures can be implemented at the network perimeter, while others require new programs to be installed on devices. Others may be able to disable user access based on suspicious user behavior. 

These features made sense in the past, and they’re still a good fit for some situations. But DLP solutions also run up against some common challenges in the modern workplace. 

 First, a company’s internal practices can make it difficult to protect against data loss. For instance, Allied Market Research found a 123% increase in data downloaded to USB devices by employees, and 74% of that data was deemed “classified” by the organization. The safety of that data depends largely on the actions of individual employees and the specific security systems around them.  

A bigger problem is that safeguarding your data against specific threats is getting more and more complex. Data loss can occur for any number of reasons, including ransomware, outages, data breaches, misconfigurations, and user errors. DLP solutions rarely protect against everything.

So, is there a better way to tackle data security and resilience in the cloud? 

Microsharding for data protection in the cloud  

DLP is often organizations’ first instinct when they consider keeping their data safe. And sometimes this approach is necessary and warranted. 

 But now, instead of chasing threats to your sensitive material, you can make that sensitive data worthless to threat actors. 

That’s where microsharding comes in. Microsharding works without the complexities of key management or rule-based technologies to make data unintelligible and of no value to unauthorized users. It can supplement or even replace DLP technologies by protecting data at rest in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. It keeps data in the hands of its owners, and it ensures data privacy and resilience in the face of data loss. 

Our microsharding solution works in the background, so no asset tracking is required. If data is altered by an outage, ransomware, or some other kind of malicious attack, our self-healing data reconstructs affected storage containers automatically, transparently, and in real-time. And if data discovery is needed for M&A or other reasons, ShardSecure can be used in conjunction with industry-leading tools that can move data from one storage location to another. 

Contact us today 

Nearly every CISO I speak with is looking for ways to do more with less. We can help. 

Instead of relying on old, familiar technologies shoehorned into a modern digital environment, consider using ShardSecure to mitigate the impact of data breaches, ransomware, outages, and more. Get in touch with us today to make intrusions a complete waste of time for attackers.