For any type of protection strategy, the natural use cases involve protecting sensitive data that shouldn't be public.
For instance, in financial organizations—or really any organization with sensitive data—there’s something to lose. This is the type of data that you don't want exposed to the public, something that should be classified as confidential or for internal use only.
Especially from the perspective of employee data, such as pay slips, this is critical. For example, if you and I work in the same organization, I should not be able to see your pay slip. Within the organization, there should be a classification level where data is categorized as internal, confidential, etc. My pay slip should only be viewable by me and the finance manager, not by any other employees or third parties.
You want to classify your data, which can be done with the electronic data classifier, or you could leverage a third-party classifier like Titus or Boldon James Classifier. Both integrate very well with McAfee ePO and Trellix Data Protection, whether on-premises or in the cloud. They also integrate with Kaspersky or even Microsoft ERP, allowing data classification. Additionally, the out-of-the-box classifier that comes with the product can be used.
By configuring policies, you can ensure that sensitive data is not shared with unauthorized individuals. For example, you can prevent sensitive data from being uploaded to the cloud, shared via email, sent to a printer, or copied to a USB stick. Protecting data, whether at rest, in motion, or in use, is essential.
For USB sticks, you could implement protection by encrypting them using McAfee Removable Media Protection. For data at rest, encryption can be achieved with McAfee Drive Encryption. On Mac OS systems, you might manage native encryption or leverage BitLocker for encryption, ensuring that your systems are encrypted and that encryption keys are properly managed.
These are basic use cases that any organization can leverage. It's not just for large organizations—any organization that is serious about securing its best interests should consider implementing data protection.
The DLP strategy is very, very key to the data protection strategy. You have your drive encryption and your File and Removable Media Protection, but without DLP, your data loss prevention strategy is far from complete.
DLP is actually massive because it covers everything from endpoints to the network and even to the cloud. It depends on how much visibility you're looking for. If your data is in the cloud, the huge question is: how much of that data do you have visibility of? If you have data on-prem, on mobile storage devices, or servers, do you have visibility into that data? Do you even know where your sensitive data is sitting? Can you do data discovery research?
Without DLP, you literally feel lost because you don't know where your data is. For example, I work with XYZ organization, and I have sensitive data on my system, but you don't know it's there. With a simple discovery scan, you can actually discover that there's a sensitive document sitting on my system. With a simple remediation, the user can request that all sensitive data be moved to a particular folder, probably on your file server. This way, you recover all sensitive data sitting on individuals' laptops or desktops and move it to central protection.
Once you've classified and done remediation on that data, you can say for sure that you don't have any sensitive data sitting on laptops or desktops within your organization, except in the file server that you control. You can also decide not to move those files but to restrict the user from sending the document to a competitor. Maybe you create a policy that ensures the document can only be sent to employees of the organization. You can also ensure that the user cannot send the document to OneDrive, Google Drive, or anywhere else.
Now, there's a limitation, and this is where cloud instances come into play. For example, if you're using Slack, you'd know that you have to consider API integration with Slack to extend that protection fully to the cloud. This is where the relationship with Trellix and Skyhigh comes in. What we're discussing today with the suite you're mentioning is just endpoint security; we're not looking at cloud security.