Organizations struggle with too many data loss prevention alerts

A new report finds 78 percent of organizations report being challenged by administering and maintaining existing data loss prevention technology solutions and policies, and 94 percent report using at least two tools and, on average, more than three tools with DLP capabilities, resulting in significant man-hours to administer and maintain multiple solutions.

The study from DLP specialist MIND and Enterprise Strategy Group also shows 91 percent of organizations say it's important to reduce alert noise produced by their current DLP controls due to simple, poor and outdated classification schemes.

"Data loss prevention tools are critical for protecting sensitive information in today's digital landscape and AI era," says Eran Barak, co-founder and CEO at MIND. "Unfortunately, too many enterprise security teams are burdened with outdated DLP solutions that generate excessive false positives, lack contextual insights and demand significant manual effort. Commonly used DLP tools can't keep pace with today's ways of working, exposing organizations to increasing risks. Organizations need to transform their data security programs into a strategic advantage with both data security posture and data loss prevention by implementing a solution that combines simplicity, AI, automation and scalability at machine speed."

Despite using multiple DLP tools, 53 percent of respondents report two or more unstructured data loss events that they know of and, on average, more than four in the last 12 months. It's likely that there are many more data loss events that are unknown.

Respondents also report that more than 73 percent of their unstructured sensitive data has not been discovered and classified, leading to potential data risk landmines and unknowns.

Organizations are increasingly overwhelmed by DLP alerts, with 92 percent either deferred or left for inspection after 24 hours, or false positives/not remediated. 47 percent of DLP alerts that are inspected within 24 hours are false positives.

The full report is available from the MIND site.

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