LAVENDERS, BEES, HONEY AND DATA LOSS PREVENTION - Choosing The Right Strategy

Mid-day, during the farm visit, appreciating a good view of the flowering lavenders as the bees sway on top. I witness them sucking nectar and collecting pollen. I understand it's the primary source of protein and food for the bees.

What fascinated me is the bees legs, well-equipped with various tools that help to counter the loss of precious nectar and pollen.

Each of the three pairs, the Fore, Middle, and Hide legs, have the same structure, the hide ones including a viscosity suspension. It inspired me to think of Sir Lewis Hamilton, F1 discussion concerning "13s and 18s" wheels sizes, anyway a story for another day.

For the bees, the size of each pair of legs is identical and has an equal number of segments amidst pollen "baskets" solidly built to prevent any expected loss.

The six legs segments include;

1. The Coxa?- near the throat which facilitates forward and backwards movement
2. Trochanter?- helps in upward and downward movement
3. Femur?- the longest part which aids in forwarding and reversing movement
4. Tibia?- Bee's pollen baskets
5. The basitarsus
6. Tarsus claw?or Three Tarsomeres/ Pretarsus or foot

Tiny hairs on the bee's body collect pollen, stored and ferried safely on its muscular back legs.

Unloading/Offloading

At the final destination (beehive), the elastic nectar tank within the bee's abdomen is pressured to eject the juice out through the proventriculus valve to the mouth. Awaiting bees suck it, and as they pass it on to each other, enzymes processing occurs at this stage. Later the maturing honey is placed into cells within the honeycomb. The honey cells are then tightly sealed with wax.

On the other hand, pollen is offloaded from the hide legs and stored separately, awaiting mixing with honey to serve the bees as food.

In the?DATA LOSS PREVENTION (DLP)?world, the story is considerably similar. Mission-critical data is our Crown Jewels, the "nectar", and the "pollen" that we collect from our dear customers.

As we develop and establish our technical controls, we need to contemplate on customer data classification schemes, business needs, technology, customer rights and prevalences, and the evolving regulatory and statutory requirements.

Crucial or toxic data need to be collected, processed and stored in the most secure form, where the DLP tools could watch over it. It may be a good idea to reexamine this periodically to rival the emerging data breaches, cybercriminals, sponsored Nations-States actors, malicious intruders, and insider threats.

Similar to the bees three pairs of legs, the DLP solutions/tools tripartite strategy could potentially emphasize on;?

1. Personal Identifiable Information?(PII), Personal Information?(PI)?or Personal Health Information?(PHI).
2. Protected data that may require consent, for example the Intellectual Property?(IP).
3. Data mapping, metadata and data inventory management.

Once the DLP program objectives are established, approved, and adopted through your organization's information security/cybersecurity program, it's time to focus on the?minimum. These are six fundamental areas applicable to the network DLP or endpoint DLP solutions where you could start.

1. Define your DLP rules, policies or data classification rules;?it's crucial to work with the data owners and business units to lead or own this initiative.
2. Identify the data leaks/data loss channels;?that may exist within your environment, for example, data egress from Outlook to personal Webmails. External email channels, Apps that connect to the external cloud platforms. Monitor communications applications used for virtual meetings or collaboration. Learn the mechanism utilized to egress or ingress data and define the appropriate DLP rules or policies.
3. Data fingerprinting;?specify the data matching techniques once you determine the data, data use and storage locations.
4. Define the DLP rules/policies violation alerts mechanisms;?an example could be?either trigger a prompt, prompt and block or block when a user action matches the rule and provide a user notifications triggering the next activity. Notify a designated personnel to review the action or record the event without user's notification.
5. DLP solution testing; At this point, if feasible, engage change management board and the testing groups. DLP tools tend to be nosy and require a lot of finetuning. It needs to be assimilated into your computing environment to limit interference with other applications, existing endpoint security agents or just the user experience. Make sure your DLP rules and policies are triggering respectively, and the tool is watertight. It may also be an excellent opportunity to wholly reevaluate your technology DLP risks and organization cybersecurity risks appetite.
6. Identify and engage DLP champions; this group act as the catalyst for change; it would be great to include individuals who possess a 360-degree point of view, with an in-depth knowledge of the business, data flows, familiarity with the organization's,?TECHNOLOGY,?PEOPLE, PROCESSES AND DATA.

Please, enjoy the?LAVENDERS, BEES, HONEY AND YOUR DATA LOSS PREVENTION?journey!

Ref: Understanding Bee Anatomy: https://www.understandingbeeanatomy.com/ (Access 1/7/2021)