Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Data security posture management (DSPM) offers integrated, intelligent monitoring and management of potential threats to an organization’s data. DSPM identifies and tracks corporate data in the cloud and intelligently identifies configuration errors, vulnerabilities, and other potential threats to data security.

Learn More Download the Solution Brief

How It Works

DSPM solutions implement a multi-stage approach to identifying and managing potential security risks to an organization’s data. These include:

Data Discovery and Mapping: To protect an organization’s data, a DSPM solution needs to know what it is protecting. DSPM solutions will automatically perform data discovery and classification to identify sensitive data within the organization using a tool such as AWS Macie. They also can perform data flow mapping to understand how data moves and is used throughout an organization’s infrastructure.
Risk Assessment and Management: DSPM solutions can use various means to identify potential risks to an organization’s sensitive data. For example, they can perform vulnerability scans and audits of configuration settings to identify potential threats and security gaps. Based on these assessments, the organization can implement security controls to monitor and manage these potential data security risks.
Ongoing Monitoring: DSPM solutions automatically perform ongoing monitoring and auditing of an organization’s sensitive data. This enables them to quickly identify potential risks and gaps in the organization’s data security controls.
Incident Response and Remediation: DSPM supports incident response via incident detection and remediation via automated incident response workflows. For example, automated remediation can determine and apply the correct set of permissions for a zero trust access control policy.

Why Do Enterprises Need Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)?

Data is many organizations’ most valuable asset. Some of the reasons why modern companies can benefit from DSPM include:

Data Breach Prevention: DSPM enables organizations to proactively address data security threats and respond quickly to ongoing incidents. This reduces the risk of a data breach and the potential cost of one if it occurs.
Regulatory Compliance: Numerous regulations mandate that organizations control access to sensitive data and protect it against breach. DSPM offers ongoing monitoring and protection to minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
Preserving Brand Reputation: Data breaches can damage an organization’s reputation with customers, vendors, and suppliers. By reducing data security risk, DSPM decreases the chance of an embarrassing data breach.

Key Capabilities of DSPM

DSPM solutions are designed to manage and protect an organization’s data. To achieve this goal, they need the following capabilities:

Data Discovery and Classification: DSPM solutions should be able to identify and classify sensitive data within an organization’s infrastructure. This includes detecting data flows and repositories that the organization doesn’t officially know exist.
Access Management: DSPM solutions provide insight into and feedback about an organization’s access controls. It can help to identify excessive permissions that violate the principle of least privilege and expose the organization to additional data security risks.
Vulnerability Detection and Remediation: DSPM solutions offer various risk detection and remediation capabilities. Vulnerability scanning, configuration monitoring, and behavioral analytics all help with identifying potential security risks and insider threats within an organization.
Compliance Support: DSPM solutions help organizations maintain regulatory compliance by controlling and monitoring access to sensitive customer data. It’s also helpful if they embed specific regulatory knowledge to support compliance reporting.

DSPM Use Cases

DSPM can be used to address various use cases within a business. These include:

Data Management and Compliance: DSPM solutions are able to identify, classify, and manage access to an organization’s data. This enables the company to more effectively manage and protect its sensitive data and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.
Attack Surface Management: Data is commonly the target of cyberattacks, and cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions to access it. DSPM in a combination with Effective Risk Management helps to manage organization’s data attack surface by identifying and helping to remediate potential attack vectors.
Least Privilege Enforcement: The principle of least privilege is core to the zero trust security model. DSPM helps to enforce least privilege in concert with cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) by identifying instances where a user or application is granted more access than is needed for its role.
Simplified Data Protection: DSPM solutions work across and cloud-based environments. This enables an organization to more effectively detect and manage data security across its entire environment.

DSPM vs. CSPM

DSPM and cloud security posture management (CSPM) both manage aspects of an organization’s security posture. However, they have different areas of focus.

DSPM solutions focus on data and manage its security across an organization’s entire IT environment, both on-prem and off-prem. CSPM, on the other hand, is solely focused on the security of an organization’s cloud environments and attempts to ensure that cloud environments are properly configured and secured.