How Does FortiDLP Use AI to Enhance Data Protection and Risk Management?

November 1, 2024

Fortinet has recently launched FortiDLP, a next-generation data loss prevention (DLP) and insider risk management solution. This innovative product leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to provide robust data protection across various environments, including cloud deployments, applications, and both managed and unmanaged devices. FortiDLP aims to address the growing needs of enterprises for enhanced data protection, offering a unified approach to predict and preempt data losses.

Unified Data Protection Approach

Consolidated Method for Enterprises

FortiDLP offers a consolidated method for data protection, which is particularly beneficial for enterprise organizations. This unified approach allows companies to predict and preempt both accidental and malicious data losses across diverse platforms and devices. By integrating AI, FortiDLP enhances its ability to foresee potential risks and streamline incident responses, providing a proactive defense against data breaches.

FortiDLP’s AI integration enables it to monitor large datasets continuously, ensuring that any anomaly or deviation from normal patterns is detected in real time. With its predictive analytics, the solution can anticipate breaches before they occur, giving enterprises a critical edge in data protection. The unified data protection approach means that regardless of where the data resides—whether in the cloud, on-premises, or across various devices—FortiDLP can offer consistent and comprehensive security. This end-to-end coverage is essential for organizations that operate in complex IT environments, as it simplifies the management of data protection policies and ensures a holistic defense strategy.

Addressing Traditional DLP Challenges

Traditional DLP systems often fall short when it comes to the modern complexities faced by Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and security teams. These include difficulties managing data in silos, navigating inflexible policies, and coping with the performance limitations of outdated tools. FortiDLP addresses these challenges through several key features, such as cloud-native endpoint protection and shadow AI data protection.

Cloud-native endpoint protection allows FortiDLP to safeguard data regardless of its location, making it ideal for enterprises moving towards cloud adoption. As data moves between various cloud services and on-premises environments, FortiDLP ensures that security policies are consistently applied. Shadow AI data protection, on the other hand, focuses on mitigating risks associated with the use of unsanctioned AI tools. It ensures that even if employees use external AI services, the company’s data remains protected through stringent policy enforcement and real-time monitoring. These innovative features not only overcome the limitations of traditional DLP but also offer a more flexible and scalable approach to data security.

AI-Enhanced Detection and Risk Management

Leveraging AI for Enhanced Capabilities

One of FortiDLP’s main strengths lies in its integration of AI to enhance its data protection capabilities. By leveraging AI-powered detection and risk management, FortiDLP equips security teams with the tools needed to foresee potential risks, simplify incident responses, and mitigate threats. This advanced technology helps in offering a proactive defense against data breaches, enhancing visibility and control over sensitive information from day one of deployment.

AI-powered detection allows FortiDLP to identify subtle threats that traditional systems might miss. Using machine learning algorithms, FortiDLP continuously learns from the data it processes, improving its detection capabilities over time. This adaptive learning process is crucial for keeping up with the evolving threat landscape, ensuring that the system remains effective against new and sophisticated attacks. Risk management is also significantly enhanced by AI, as it enables real-time threat assessment and automated responses. This reduces the burden on security teams and allows them to focus on strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down with manual threat analysis and mitigation.

Day-One Protection and Insider Risk Management

FortiDLP ensures visible and automated data movement monitoring and protection from the first day. It comes with out-of-the-box policies and embedded machine learning at endpoints, which is crucial for identifying and inspecting data contexts even when devices are offline. Additionally, the solution can identify insider threats through behavior analysis, policy violations, and other indicators, enforcing actions to prevent insiders from disclosing sensitive information.

From day one, FortiDLP activates immediate visibility into data flows, identifying and classifying sensitive information automatically. This proactive measure is vital for preventing unauthorized data transfers and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Insider risk management is another critical component, as internal threats can be more challenging to detect and mitigate. FortiDLP uses behavioral analytics to recognize unusual activities and potential policy breaches, enabling swift intervention before any damage occurs. By continuously monitoring user behavior and data interactions, the solution can spot and address insider threats promptly, thereby securing the organization’s critical data assets from within.

SaaS Application Data Protection

Extensive Visibility into User Interactions

FortiDLP provides extensive visibility into user interactions with cloud-based data, ensuring continued protection even when data moves out of the cloud. This includes the capability to build risk-scored inventories of SaaS applications used across an organization and insights into data ingress and egress. By monitoring these interactions, FortiDLP helps organizations maintain control over their data, regardless of where it resides.

This level of visibility is essential for maintaining data integrity and security in an increasingly cloud-centric business environment. Organizations often struggle to keep track of data as it moves across various SaaS applications, which can lead to security gaps and potential breaches. FortiDLP’s ability to build detailed inventories and monitor data movement in real time addresses this challenge by offering comprehensive oversight. The system assigns risk scores to different SaaS applications, helping security teams prioritize their efforts and focus on the most critical threats. This targeted approach ensures that resources are used efficiently and that the organization’s most valuable data remains protected.

Origin-Based Data Protection

The solution enhances traditional content and sensitivity classification approaches with origin-based data identification, manipulation detection, and egress controls. This allows security teams to track and prevent unauthorized data transfers from various endpoints to external devices like USB drives and printers. By focusing on the origin of data, FortiDLP provides a more comprehensive approach to data protection.

Origin-based data protection ensures that data is monitored from the moment it is created until it is either securely archived or properly disposed of. This comprehensive tracking is crucial for identifying potential breaches early and enforcing security policies more effectively. Manipulation detection helps in recognizing unauthorized changes to data, which is particularly important for maintaining data integrity and trust. Egress controls prevent sensitive data from being transferred to unauthorized external devices, mitigating the risk of data loss or theft. By combining these advanced features, FortiDLP offers a robust and adaptive solution that addresses the dynamic challenges of data security in modern enterprises.

User Education and AI-Powered Incident Analysis

Educating Users on Data Protection

Administrators can craft policies and actions within FortiDLP to educate users about the importance of safeguarding sensitive information. It also enforces accountability, prompting employees to adhere to data protection practices. By educating users, FortiDLP helps create a culture of security awareness within the organization.

User education is often an overlooked aspect of data protection, but it is critical for ensuring that employees understand their role in maintaining security. FortiDLP provides tools for administrators to develop and implement educational programs tailored to the organization’s needs. These programs can include training sessions, regular updates on best practices, and reminders of the importance of data security. By making employees more aware of potential risks and their responsibilities, FortiDLP fosters a proactive approach to data protection that complements its technical capabilities. This holistic strategy ensures that both technology and people work together to safeguard the organization’s sensitive information.

AI-Powered Incident Analysis

FortiDLP’s AI capabilities extend to incident analysis, where the AI-powered assistant processes high-risk activity data. This data is contextualized and summarized to align with the MITRE Engenuity Insider Threat Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) Knowledge Base, making it easier for analysts to comprehend and act upon. This advanced analysis helps security teams respond more effectively to potential threats.

AI-powered incident analysis reduces the time and effort required to investigate security incidents. By automating the initial stages of data collection and analysis, FortiDLP enables security teams to focus on developing and implementing effective responses. The system contextualizes high-risk activities within a broader framework, providing insights that are aligned with industry-standard threat intelligence. This alignment ensures that analysts have access to relevant and actionable information, allowing them to make informed decisions quickly. The result is a more efficient and effective incident response process that enhances the overall security posture of the organization.

Trends and Future Directions

Shifting Towards AI-Powered Solutions

The overarching trend in data protection is shifting towards AI-powered, unified solutions that can address multiple facets of data security within a single platform. This is driven by the need to manage increasingly complex data environments and the limitations of traditional DLP systems. The integration of AI to enhance detection, manage insider risks, and provide day-one visibility and protection positions FortiDLP as a forward-thinking solution.

This trend reflects a broader movement within the cybersecurity industry towards leveraging AI to overcome the limitations of traditional tools and methodologies. As data environments become more complex, the ability to process and analyze large volumes of data quickly and accurately becomes increasingly important. AI provides the necessary capabilities to meet these demands, offering enhanced detection, risk management, and automated responses. FortiDLP exemplifies this shift by integrating AI across its various functions, ensuring comprehensive and adaptive data protection that keeps pace with evolving threats and regulatory requirements.

Adapting to Modern Digital Work Environments

Fortinet has recently rolled out FortiDLP, a cutting-edge data loss prevention (DLP) and insider risk management solution that caters to the sophisticated needs of modern enterprises. This advanced tool utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver comprehensive data security across a myriad of environments, encompassing cloud platforms, diverse applications, and a range of devices, both managed and unmanaged. FortiDLP is designed to meet the escalating demands for superior data protection by delivering a cohesive strategy to anticipate and avert data breaches. This solution targets the pressing issues organizations face in securing their data, offering an integrated method to foresee and thwart potential data loss incidents. By leveraging AI, FortiDLP enhances an organization’s ability to safeguard sensitive information and mitigate risks associated with insider threats. The launch of FortiDLP underscores Fortinet’s commitment to innovation in the field of data security, providing businesses with the tools needed to protect their most valuable digital assets efficiently.

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