It’s a double-edged sword, and it’s been that way for… well, maybe not forever… but for a very long time. Data is both an organization’s precious asset and its greatest liability. Protecting critical data from unauthorized access, inappropriate sharing, or exfiltration is paramount for business continuity, regulatory compliance, and customer trust. In this context, the importance of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capability for data protection cannot be overstated. An organization’s security infrastructure depends on DLP to identify, monitor, and protect sensitive data across various environments—from endpoints and networks to cloud applications.
By implementing robust DLP strategies, organizations can safeguard Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), financial records, or any other intellectual property or sensitive data. This supports compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Effective DLP significantly reduces the risk of insider threats and enhances overall visibility and control over data flow, allowing businesses to proactively secure their digital ecosystem and mitigate potential reputational and financial damage.
Cisco Secure Access: Unified, AI-Powered Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for the Modern Enterprise
Cisco Secure Access delivers the next generation of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) as a core component of our Security Service Edge (SSE). Purpose-built for today’s hybrid and cloud-first organizations, Secure Access DLP protects sensitive data everywhere—across the web, private applications, SaaS platforms, endpoints, and email—while harnessing the power of AI in every aspect of the platform. AI is at the heart of Secure Access DLP, helping to drive innovation in data classification, enhance detection accuracy, simplify policy management, and manage the risks of generative AI tools and AI development.
Secure Access DLP also plays a vital role in enabling the safe use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and model repositories. It mitigates risks by controlling the ingress/egress of source code, establishes guardrails to detect prompt injection attacks (inferring intent), and protects unstructured data such as patent applications, non-disclosure agreements, or mergers and acquisition materials with large language models (AI-Powered Intellectual Property Detection in Cisco Secure Access). This is a topic for a future blog post but now, let’s unpack DLP protection for endpoints and email.
Extending Data Protection to Local Endpoints
A significant vector for data loss originates at the endpoint itself. To address this potential source of data misuse or exfiltration, Secure Access introduced Endpoint DLP in September 2025. This enhancement brings robust DLP protection directly to user devices, allowing organizations to scan content as it’s moved or copied locally.
A Glimpse into How it Works: Protecting Local File Operations
With Secure Access endpoint DLP, administrators can define and enforce policies for local file operations. Whether a user attempts to copy sensitive data to a USB drive, to an internal network share, over Bluetooth, or tries to print it, the content is scanned against DLP policies and blocked if a violation is detected.
Organizations may choose to monitor or block, providing flexibility between visibility and enforcement that facilitates stepwise adoption if desired. To maintain the organization’s chosen balance between business continuity and security, administrators may decide whether the endpoint should “fail-open” (allow and log the operation) or “fail-close” (block and log the operation) when the endpoint is not connected to the cloud.
The Endpoint DLP Advantage: Safeguarding Data Movement at the Source
Incorporating endpoint DLP into an organization’s data protection strategy brings immense value. It extends data loss prevention beyond protecting web traffic and data-at-rest in cloud applications to guarding unauthorized lateral data movement at the endpoint, a domain traditionally challenging to secure. This helps prevent local data exfiltration, a common method for insider threats or accidental data exposure. By safeguarding data at its source of creation and manipulation, endpoint DLP helps organizations comply with data privacy regulations, reduce risk, and preserve trust across the entire digital ecosystem.
Extending Data Protection to Email Traffic
Despite the ubiquitous use of instant messaging, team rooms, and video conferences, email remains one of the most pervasive communication channels in business, and consequently, a frequent conduit for potential data exfiltration. Recognizing this, Cisco Secure Access launched email data loss prevention (Email DLP) in September of this year. This enhancement integrates Secure Access’s powerful DLP engine with Cisco Email Threat Defense to provide comprehensive protection for your email communications.
A Glimpse into How it Works: New Defenses for Email
Email DLP enables organizations to scan the content of outgoing emails against their established DLP policies. When email is routed through Cisco Email Threat Defense, it then communicates with the DLP engine within Secure Access. This integration allows for real-time evaluation of the email content against sensitive data identifiers and policies. If a violation is detected, the email can be monitored or blocked, preventing sensitive information from leaving the organization via this channel.
Crucially, administrators manage the configuration and reporting for email DLP directly from the familiar Cisco Secure Access dashboard. We’re expanding our truly multimode DLP capability—unified DLP policy and reporting that centralizes data loss prevention operations for data in web traffic (data-in-motion), in cloud repositories (data-at-rest), across endpoint operations, and within email. It is sophisticated protection against data loss or leakage, with elegant, streamlined, and simplified operations.
The Email DLP Impact: Preventing Exfiltration and Preserving Trust
By extending DLP protection to emails, a business gains crucial visibility and control over potential data exfiltration via a communication vehicle—that has been around for ages and perhaps seems old school—and nevertheless stubbornly remains entrenched in all organizations. With this DLP enhancement, you can detect and prevent both malicious and accidental data loss through email, an often-overlooked vector for compromise. Combined with existing web, cloud, and now endpoint DLP, email DLP rounds out data protection to reinforce compliance initiatives, drive down risk associated with data breaches, and preserve trust among stakeholders.
A Unified Approach to Data Security
The introduction of endpoint DLP and email DLP within Cisco Secure Access marks a significant leap forward in providing a truly comprehensive and unified data loss prevention strategy. These enhancements bolster the already robust multimode DLP capabilities, extending protection to additional areas where data is vulnerable—at the endpoint and within email communications. Guard sensitive data as it is moved, stored, copied, shared, and communicated.
By converging these new data security features into Cisco Secure Access, you gain a unified, multi-mode, AI-powered DLP solution that seamlessly provides data protection, simplifies compliance, and empowers safe innovation—no matter where, how, or with what technology your teams work.
Learn more about Cisco Secure Access and its many capabilities.
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