What is Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)?

What is Data Security Posture Management?

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) helps organizations discover and categorize structured and unstructured data across cloud service platforms. By doing so, DSPM allows security and risk management leaders to identify security and privacy risks as data traverses through pipelines and crosses geographic boundaries. This blog aims to provide readers with a comprehensive introduction to DSPM, highlighting its significance in the ever-evolving landscape of data security.

What are the drivers of DSPM?

The explosion of data across cloud service platforms (CSPs) and global boundaries necessitates technologies for discovering and locating unknown or underutilized data repositories. Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions aim to uncover these hidden data stores and assess their risks related to data residency, privacy, and security.

DSPM solutions employ data lineage to map and identify data across structured and unstructured repositories, integrating with infrastructures, databases, and CSPs. These solutions leverage integration with identity and access management (IAM) products to generate data security alerts. The need for DSPM has been underscored by a recent SEC ruling mandating prompt reporting of material cybersecurity incidents, requiring organizations to efficiently determine materiality and report material incidents within four business days of determination. CIOs emphasize that this process has been challenging in the past due to the difficulty in identifying where sensitive information is stored and whether it is material.

DSPM Capabilities

There are four core capabilities for a DSPM. Let’s review each now.

Building a Data Map and Pipelines

DSPM technologies create comprehensive data maps by locating data repositories across cloud infrastructure and platform services, analyzing data flows and pipelines connecting these repositories. They uncover shadow data repositories and unsecured pipelines, detecting misconfigurations that can expose data to public or inappropriate access. This enables the identification of risks from improper data access and missing security controls, providing visibility into inconsistent data security postures by examining data maps and flows across various CSPs.

Analyze Data Lineage and Access

Analyzing data lineage and access involves consistently assessing data sensitivity, residency, and access across both structured and unstructured data pipelines. It is essential to identify, discover, and track data throughout its life cycle—from creation to storage and analysis—to evaluate the data security posture of each platform, ensuring data is used for appropriate business purposes.

Identify Data Risks

Identifying data risks involves pinpointing which user accounts have access to specific datasets via SaaS applications and mapping data pipelines connecting to these repositories. This capability is crucial for a top-down assessment of data security posture across connected pipelines, ensuring comprehensive oversight and protection of sensitive information.

Generate Alerts

Generating alerts through data risk assessments in DSPM products highlights data residency, privacy, and breach risks. These alerts facilitate inspection and potential integration into third-party data security controls, enhancing overall data protection and response capabilities.

What are the Benefits of DSPM?

DSPM enhances monitoring for indicators of compromise, common vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations that pose access risks, potentially leading to data breaches or privacy incidents. It accelerates the assessment of how data security policies should be enforced across diverse, siloed data security controls. DSPM identifies and maps sensitive data locations across cloud repositories, uncovers unknown data repositories, and maps access to that data. It assesses both structured and unstructured data stores, gaining visibility into data, and develops a unique bottoms-up data risk assessment for connected data stores and pipelines. Additionally, DSPM facilitates top-down analysis of who has access to specific datasets.

Deployment and Integration of DSPM into Your Organization

Deploying Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) requires organizations install several capabilities depending upon vendor: the ability to extract existing knowledge about where sensitive data is located (typically this is from a data catalog), the ability to discover new locations of sensitive data, the ability to integrate with all cloud-based data repositories and sources, the ability to connect data with reporting and analytics, the ability to analyze for insufficient data governance, the ability to understand where individuals have excessive access to data, and the ability to trigger appropriate responses.

Data Security Posture Management Best Practices

Best practices for deploying DSPM start with utilizing sensitive data discovery to extract areas of unprotected data and prioritizing for remediation repositories that have the highest volume of sensitive or proprietary data. Smart organizations deploy here a data security governance tool to quickly protect discovered unprotected data. But everything naturally starts by pinpointing the location of structured and unstructured sensitive data to ensure proactive protection and compliance measures. Sensitive data discovery also should detect inappropriate data usage, allowing for the evaluation of sensitive data, access privileges, and usage patterns across hybrid data environments. This highlights areas of overprovisioning and allows you to conduct risk assessments, and suggests policy and control adjustments.

At the same time, it is smart to deploy the principle of least privilege. This involves measuring the alignment between access permissions and job requirements. This minimizes the risk of unauthorized access by ensuring users have the necessary access for their roles. DSPM delves into user access patterns, identifying anomalies and flagging potential security risks through abnormal event metrics. By rectifying inappropriate data usage through active posture management processes, business and data leaders are equipped with actionable insights to prioritize and address vulnerabilities swiftly. This enables fine-tuning of their individual posture and effectively mitigating risk exposure, ensuring robust data security measures are in place.

Who Owns DSPM in the Enterprise?

While ISO 2700x and NIST 802.11 have long suggested that CISOs play a role in data and data protection, many CISOs had other pressing priorities. The recent SEC ruling, however, makes data protection a core responsibility for CISOs, placing data squarely within their charter. CISOs now have a pivotal role in deciding whether a security incident is material, a critical task given that 32% of cybersecurity incidents in 2024 involved data theft or leaks. Consequently, CISOs should embrace this function and aim to become the control point for access management, supported by a corporate data governance function.

What’s the difference between Active vs Passive DSPM?

Passive DSPM helps organizations visualize sensitive data posture by discovering and mapping the presence of sensitive data, provisioned privileges, and access patterns across their hybrid data estate. It creates a detailed map showing the location of both structured and unstructured sensitive data, identifying who has access, who is accessing it, and the associated business risks. This allows organizations to assess the impact of their current data security posture, revealing over-provisioning and necessary policy and control fixes.

Meanwhile, active posture management empowers organizations to mitigate, secure, monitor, and audit risks identified through passive data posture management. By applying policies and sensitivity tags, and creating controls across data lakes and datasets, organizations can maintain seamless control as their data estates expand. This transition from system-specific controls to a unified governance model simplifies management, ensuring transparency, consistency, and auditability, which streamlines administrative tasks and enhances compliance.

Additionally, active posture management includes continuous monitoring and auditing, maintaining a detailed log of every data access event. This log records who accessed data, when, and under what protections, whether transparent, masked, or encrypted. This detailed information, integrated with data security analytics tools, enables real-time alerts and monitoring, significantly enhancing data analysis capabilities and ensuring robust data security and governance. 

DSPM vs CSPM

CISOs need both Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) to maintain a robust security framework for their cloud infrastructure. CSPM tools are essential for automating the identification and resolution of security issues, monitoring systems for risks and misconfigurations, and automating remediation workflows. They centralize threat detection, quarantine, and remediation processes, providing a unified view of cloud security across multi-cloud environments. Continuous discovery visualizes cloud-native assets, enabling fast decision-making.

DSPM ensures that the data from the above cloud assets is securely managed, protected, and accessed. DSPM solutions help uncover hidden cloud data repositories, assess risks related to data residency, privacy, and security, and provide a comprehensive view of data security across multiple cloud service platforms. Together, CSPM and DSPM enable CISOs to effectively manage and protect their cloud infrastructure and data.

Read our blog “DSPM vs CSPM: Why CISOs Need Both to Protect A Growing Cloud Estate” to learn more about how CSPM and DSPM can effectively manage and protect the cloud infrastructure and data for your organization.

Don’t Wait for a Breach To Occur

DSPM is essential to timely knowing the impact of a hack and responding in a timely form to governmental regulation. To learn more about how DSPM solutions help discover unknown data repositories, assess data security risks, and ensure compliance with regulations like recent SEC mandates, please read, Activating Data Security Posture Management. The goal of DSPM should be to create comprehensive data maps and pipelines, analyze data lineage and access, identify data risks, and generate alerts to enhance data security.

DSPM are critical to timely visualizing sensitive data posture, showing data location, access patterns, and associated risks. It reveals over-provisioning and policy gaps, enabling risk assessment and necessary fixes. This is essential to determining the materiality of a security incident. However, Active posture management goes further, applying policies and controls, ensuring transparency and consistency, and streamlining governance. Continuous monitoring and auditing provide detailed logs of data access, integrated with analytics tools for real-time. alerts, enhancing data security and compliance. DSPM creates a robust framework for managing and securing data in complex, expanding digital environments. Finally, to get a test run of DSPM for your environment, please request a demo here.