Five Must-Haves for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

With ‌widespread adoption of multicloud infrastructures, organizations are migrating vast volumes of data to the cloud. As per the statistics, more than 175 zettabytes of data is expected to move to the cloud by 2025, reaffirming the unstoppable growth of data and its migration to cloud environments leading to the emergence of “shadow data”—unmanaged data residing outside a security team’s control. With the advent of laws and industry regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA, etc. and strict penalties, holding sensitive data is becoming risky and expensive for organizations. 

Organizations operating in multicloud ‌environments encounter the challenge of managing consistent data security across platforms while continuously complying with industry regulations. Many organizations depend on traditional data protection tools and techniques to secure data in multicloud environments. But‌ traditional perimeter-focused data security solutions can’t address the security challenges present in the agile, complex, and diverse cloud environments

DSPM is a category coined by Gartner and stands for ‘Data Security Posture Management' quickly gained momentum as one of the most critical practices in the data security space. According to Gartner, “Data security posture management (DSPM) provides visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used, and what the security posture of the data stored or application is.” 

Through DSPM, organizations gain critical intel with the ability to see:

• Where sensitive data resides
• Who has access to it
• How data has been used
• What is the security posture of the data store or application is

As per Gartner, by 2026, more than 20% of organizations will deploy DSPM technology, due to the urgent requirements to identify and locate previously unknown data repositories and to mitigate associated security and privacy risks

The fragmented nature of cloud infrastructure, keeping data secure, avoiding breaches, and maintaining regulatory compliance poses challenges. Hence, DSPM is a critical practice for organizations of all sizes. Organizations need a Data security posture management (DSPM) solution to effectively manage and enhance their data security posture. 

DSPM solves many challenges that security teams are facing with current security approaches, including:

• Data discovery and classification: DSPM scans data stores, discovers sensitive data, and accurately classifies it. It also creates an accurate map and inventory of data assets, helping security teams locate sensitive data and understand who has access to it and how it is being used.
• Map and track exposure: DSPM helps security teams secure their crown jewels in complex environments by mapping and tracking exposures as well as correlating misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to prioritize risk. This helps reduce alerts, prevent resource fatigue, and ensure the safety of your cloud data.
• Risk remediation: DSPM streamlines risk management with context-based guided remediation, enabling security teams to easily fix issues and violations at the source and prevent future disruptions.
• Posture management: With the ability to effectively contextualize cloud data, correlate advanced threats, and integrate with security, ITSM, and other developer and operational tools, DSPM can dramatically improve your data security posture while providing operational efficiencies. 
• Compliance management: DSPM automatically maps data security posture to compliance benchmarks and best practices to assess gaps, understand the impact, and remediate compliance violations while reducing manual effort and errors. 

Overall, DSPM offers a robust, integrated approach to data security that enhances protection, reduces costs, improves compliance, and provides better visibility and control over data security posture.

Since DSPM is an emerging trend, many organizations and cross-functional teams may still need some help familiarizing themselves with the concept and platform. It is essential to understand, evaluate the features and capabilities of the DSPM platform ‌that meets unique security requirements. With that in mind, we have created a list of top five key considerations to take into account when selecting a DSPM solution for your organization. This will help to make an informed decision and select the option that best aligns with the organization's needs and objectives. The top five requirements to consider are: 

Complete Posture Management 

You can’t protect what you can’t see or don’t know. Considering the complex nature of cloud environments, the first step to securing cloud data is getting comprehensive visibility and control over (and inventory of) the environment. A DSPM solution must scan cloud data repositories to discover structured and unstructured data stores to give a clear view of the data landscape, inventory, and security posture. 

Multicloud Support 

DSPM should seamlessly cover a variety of cloud environments and read from various databases, data pipelines, object storage, disk storage, managed file storage, data warehouses, lakes, and analytics pipelines‌—both managed and self-hosted to provide a single, consistent view of data across clouds, geographies, and organizational boundaries. This single view helps security teams to evaluate the risk of sensitive data across multicloud environments rather than individually.

Single DLP Engine

Encompassing a single DLP engine for your entire data protection solution can help organizations create a policy once and apply it everywhere in their enterprise. This ensures your most sensitive data is properly tracked and consistently protected, no matter where or how it is accessed, while reducing the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining complicated policies. 

Advanced AI/ML for Threat Correlation 

DSPM must leverage AI, ML, and advanced threat correlation capabilities to aggregate and effortlessly transform security data into meaningful insights to uncover hidden risks or attack vectors that could lead to a compromise or breach. This can be backed by near-real-time alerts and notification and remediation guidance that enable your security team to focus on what matters most.

Compliance Management 

DSPM solutions must streamline compliance processes around data protection, such as automatically mapping data posture with internal solutions as well as external regulatory benchmarks related to GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and many more. 

By focusing on these five requirements, you can select a DSPM solution that provides robust data protection and effective risk management.

To learn more, you can download ebook: Top Five Requirements for Your Next Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Solution to understand the why, what, and how of data security posture management. This guide provides key requirements and questions to consider while selecting a DSPM solution that’s right for your organization.