Like so many legacy technologies, legacy data loss prevention (DLP) tools fail to deliver the protection today’s organizations need. Implementation challenges, visibility gaps and inconsistent policies negatively impact customers and make data breaches far too easy for adversaries.

With U.S. data breach costs averaging a staggering $4.45 million last year, organizations need a way to better secure their data as cloud adoption accelerates and IT environments evolve. But with the continued security talent shortage and a market of ineffective data protection solutions — which struggle even when it comes to compliance — organizations are desperate for a modern alternative. 

This blog post explores where gaps exist in legacy DLP and how CrowdStrike Falcon® Data Protection is redefining the data protection market to stop data breaches.

Where Legacy DLP Solutions Fail to Deliver

If you rely on a legacy DLP product, some of these challenges may sound familiar. 

1. Unstructured data on endpoints is at great risk of misuse or breach.

The vast majority of sensitive data no longer resides in databases. USB devices are increasingly used to move large files and file batches. Likewise, organizations are hosting more of their data in a variety of public cloud services, web apps and online storage repositories. Unstructured data on these and other egress channels have become the nexus for sensitive data loss, yet many legacy DLP solutions fail to detect it.

2. More than a third of DLP deployments fail.

Legacy DLP tools often require large-scale, on-premises software and server installations. These deployments don’t scale without great effort, rarely integrate with other security tools and rely on heavy agents that slow down and crash machines. Due to these inept tools, complex deployments and poor strategies, more than 35% of DLP implementations fail. 

3. Most active DLP tools are in monitor-only mode.

Due to complexity, most organizations turn off prevention features and are simply notified after data walks out the door. Even this monitoring capability is problematic, since visibility gaps grow as your business becomes more distributed. Monitor mode doesn’t prevent a breach, and visibility gaps leave security teams without critical insights needed to swiftly respond to threats.

4. Your data is too complex for legacy DLP tools.

Legacy DLP products overly depend on well-formed data patterns and keywords to detect sensitive data. But organizations now have data with no recognizable content pattern, such as clinical research data, data about business processes and proprietary designs. While security teams can add sensitivity labels to data, that entails a lot of manual work, and any user can change or remove a sensitivity label. It can take security teams a lot of effort to analyze content, which becomes even more frustrating when accuracy is suspect.

5. DLP tools lack context to stop breaches.

Security teams relying on legacy DLP tools lack visibility into real-world data flows, and they don’t have time to play whack-a-mole with protection rules. As a result, many businesses are overwhelmed by alerts, while being exposed to risks they’re not even aware of. Teams need the ability to find, follow and protect sensitive data. They should know where it originated, where it’s been on its journey, how it’s being copied and used, and who interacted with it. Most legacy DLP solutions simply can’t provide this context.

Introducing the Future of Data Protection

Falcon Data Protection offers a modern approach to securing enterprise data. Powered by the unified CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, Falcon Data Protection provides deep, real-time visibility into what’s happening with your sensitive data, including data artifacts, as they move across web sources, endpoints, USBs, web browsers, cloud and SaaS applications.

With data protection, context is everything. Falcon Data Protection inspects file data as it arrives on the endpoint to identify not only the originating source but unique features within data, allowing it to be tracked as it moves between files. When data egresses from an endpoint, it can be identified as sensitive based on its originating source and content, even if it’s a derivative of the content that was first identified. 

Notably, this similarity detection capability includes preventing data leakage through generative AI tools like ChatGPT. With Falcon Data Protection, security teams can enforce policies for all web-based generative AI tools and trace back derivative content as it’s shared across files and SaaS applications, allowing you to stop malicious and accidental exposures in real time.

Say, for example, an account manager copies a piece of information from Salesforce into Google docs. Maybe he does this across multiple hosts and it goes downstream, creating derivative content across multiple users. With Falcon Data Protection, you can track the source of that content through all derivatives and downstream sharing, allowing you to enforce the original policy. While legacy DLP tracks the file, Falcon Data Protection tracks the content tied to context, making it far more effective with high-fidelity detections and stopping data loss.

Delivered from the Unified Falcon Platform

Falcon Data Protection offers ease of administration and immediate time-to-value because it’s deployed on the industry’s only unified, AI-native security platform, providing exceptional data protection from a single agent and command console. 

If you’re a Falcon platform customer, there’s no extra sensor or installation required to use Falcon Data Protection. One CrowdStrike sensor delivers all of your data protection needs, in addition to industry-leading endpoint, cloud and identity threat protection — providing the visibility and context across all attack surfaces to stop modern attacks.

An organization’s data is among its most valuable assets, and safeguarding it should be a high priority. With Falcon Data Protection, CrowdStrike is reinventing yet another broken legacy market to deliver context-driven data protection from the unified Falcon platform. 

To learn more about CrowdStrike’s modern approach to data protection, register for our upcoming virtual event, “Stop Big Game Hunting Adversaries with Modern Data Protection.”

Additional Resources

• Visit the Falcon Data Protection webpage to learn how CrowdStrike is redefining the data protection market.
• Sign up today to experience firsthand the benefits of Falcon Data Protection.
• Read the data sheet for specific features and technical content.
• Learn more about data loss prevention.