Law firms are increasingly becoming a prime target for cybercriminals and malicious insiders. The reason is the type of data they collect daily, from PIIs related to their clients, employees, and partners to confidential corporate information, trade secrets, and data about intellectual property, among others.
Law firms are increasingly becoming a prime target for cybercriminals and malicious insiders. The reason is the type of data they collect daily, from PIIs related to their clients, employees, and partners to confidential corporate information, trade secrets, and data about intellectual property, among others. The result is that protecting the collected data becomes one of the prime responsibilities of a law firm. While the larger law firms have data backup plans in place, it is usually the small and medium-sized firms that suffer considerable losses. With no proper cloud backup solutions, small and medium-sized firms are always at risk of data leakages and data loss. Understanding how law firms can mitigate the risk of data loss requires comprehending data loss prevention from scratch.
Data Loss Prevention, as the name suggests, is a method by which organizations, in this case, law firms, can prevent their data from getting lost or leaked into the hands of cybercriminals or other threat actors.
In a nutshell, DLP is a practice that helps in data security by implementing a set of procedures, tools, and processes to prevent the loss, misuse, or unauthorized access of sensitive data. Data loss prevention ensures that confidential data doesn’t cross corporate boundaries by restricting workforce access.
DLP, also known as data leak prevention, extrusion prevention, and information loss prevention, has three steps to prevent data loss.
- Identifying the critical data from the huge data that your law firm collects. Once the critically sensitive data is identified, we move on to the next step.
- Classifying critically sensitive data is the second step toward data loss prevention. With this step, law firms classify the critical data and move on to the third step, which is to discover.
- Discovering the data elements
Data loss can be worrisome for any business; with law firms that collect lots of sensitive data from their clients, DLP is critical. The larger law firms have dedicated IT teams in place; usually, the small and medium-sized law firms suffer the most.
So, what can small and medium-sized law firms do to prevent data loss; what solutions can they go for that will help them with their data backup problems?
Here are three things small and medium-sized law firms can do to prevent data loss.
- The first step for small and medium-sized law firm owners is to understand the need to outsource their Security Operations Centers, aka SOC, to protect their data better.
- In the second step, they can opt for products that allow small and medium-sized businesses to tag and control their data. The programs in these products help small law firms classify their information assets, thus offering layered security.
- Small-sized law firms must implement and enforce a good solution for privileged account management. A robust privileged account management system will make it difficult for outside attackers to gain access to enhanced privileges – necessary to exfiltrate critical data.
Some essential DLP tips for law firms are the usual tips for any other industry. So, essentially, the vital tips remain the same, and they are –
- Educating your employees on Data protection policies and procedures.
- Implementing a robust data protection policy like continuous data backup plans or cloud backup solutions. These solutions will help you in keeping a backup of your files while preventing your data loss.
- Encrypting your confidential and sensitive data is another way to prevent data loss.
- Backing up your sensitive data is one of the ways to DLP. Cloud backup plans help law firms to prevent critical data loss.
- While hiring a reliable IT support company will be a good investment, it is crucial to educate your employees about data leakage.
- Antivirus and anti-malware software are necessary, and the first level of protection for your data, a strong password policy, is the second level of data protection.
- Patching is essential, and being up-to-date with patches is crucial. Simultaneously, it is imperative to protect your hardware.
- Like security, Data Loss Prevention is everyone’s responsibility. Every team/employee/individual in your organization must understand their responsibility to protect data.
- Strong encryption is your friend; embrace it with all your heart and open arms. Understand this – hackers, criminals, and even foreign governments will not shy to exploit weak encryptions.
- Insider threats are real and exist; you need to be mindful of them. Insider threats can be anyone from an innocent employee/client to an ex-client or an ex-employee. It can also be an employee bought by a rival firm to reveal your trade secrets or any critical data.
Scary?
Yes, it can be.
That’s the reason why DLP has become critical for law firms. And that’s where AceData, with its cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, comes to play.
AceData offers robust cloud backup solutions and disaster recovery solutions.
Per AceData experts, cloud backup is a strategy that entails data backup, data storage, and application from a business’ primary server to a secondary or remote server.
With cloud backup solutions, law firms can recover and restore their critical data quickly in case of a system outage or any other disaster. It ensures minimal disruption in operations and optimum continuity – something crucial for law firms that collect lots of sensitive data.
Data loss prevention is a strategy to help law firms prevent their sensitive data loss. When your firm opts for cloud backup, you store that critical data in the cloud, thus preventing it from getting leaked or lost.
To know more about this, you can book a call with our product specialist and understand the nuances of data backup and cloud backup solutions.