DSPM
What is DSPM?
A DSPM (Data Security Posture Management) is a comprehensive solution organizations can use to manage their data security posture across various cloud environments. These solutions help organizations detect, prevent, and respond to cybersecurity threats using access control, threat intelligence, data encryption, and behavioral analysis techniques to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access or data breaches.
According to Thales’s Global Cloud Security Study research, 40% of organizations have suffered a cloud-based data breach. Many of these breaches could have been prevented had organizations evaluated the data security posture of their cloud infrastructure and taken proactive steps to secure their data.
The benefits of DSPM
One of the critical benefits of DSPM security is that it provides a centralized view of an organization’s data security posture allowing security teams to identify and respond to threats; manage security policies, alerts, and incidents from a single console.
DSPMs also provide organizations with greater visibility into their data assets. This includes information about the location, ownership, and data usage across different platforms and environments. With this information, security teams can develop better data security strategies tailored to the organization’s needs.
For organizations needing to manage data security across complex and distributed environments, DSPM is a powerful and necessary tool providing the centralized visibility and control required to reduce the risk of data breaches, protect sensitive information, and comply with regulatory requirements.
Why is it important?
DSPM is crucial for helping organizations meet their data security and compliance needs. Having DSPM allows organizations to clearly understand their current security posture and identify potential security risks or vulnerabilities in their data storage and handling processes. This information enables them to proactively mitigate and eliminate these risks before cybercriminals get a chance to exploit them.
DSPM is particularly important for cloud data security as more organizations move their data to the cloud. Organizations increasingly entrust their sensitive information to third-party cloud service providers, increasing their potential attack surface. This creates security risks as the organization often lacks the ability to adequately monitor and control its data security in this environment. DSPM addresses these risks, allowing organizations to assess and monitor their cloud data security posture, ensuring their data is secure and meets compliance requirements.
Compliance is another significant driver of DSPM as DSPM helps organizations to comply with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA. These regulations require organizations to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data. DSPM provides companies with a framework for assessing and managing their data security posture, helping them meet these challenging compliance requirements.
Use Cases for DSPM
Data Security Posture Management has several use cases making it a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes, such as:
Identifying and Mitigating Security Risks - DSPM allows organizations to assess their security posture and identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities in their data storage and handling processes enabling them to take proactive measures to mitigate and eliminate these risks before cybercriminals can exploit them.
Compliance with Data Privacy Regulations - DSPM solutions help organizations to comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, which require organizations to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data. DSPM provides a framework for assessing and managing data security posture, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations.
Cloud Data Security - As more organizations move their data to the cloud, they face new security risks as they entrust their sensitive information to third-party cloud service providers. DSPM helps to address these risks by allowing organizations to assess their cloud data security posture, ensuring that their data stores are secure and meet compliance requirements. Risky security posture examples include excessive access permissions, lack of encryption, or storing shadow data.
Incident Response - DSPM combined with DDR (Data Detection and Response) can help organizations quickly detect and respond to security incidents. Organizations can detect anomalies or suspicious activity by continuously monitoring their security posture and reacting swiftly to mitigate the threat.
Risk Management - DSPM provides a holistic approach to risk management by enabling organizations to identify, assess, and manage potential security risks and vulnerabilities. Organizations using DSPM to conduct risk assessments reduce risk profiles and improve security posture by implementing a DSPM process.
How Dig is using DSPM
Dig uses DSPM to help its clients improve their data security posture using a comprehensive approach to cloud data security involving:
- Discovery and Classification - Automated discovery and classification of data assets in public clouds, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and cloud-based data warehouse solutions like Snowflake. Discovery is followed by Data classification with 100+ automated classifiers such as PCI, PII, PHI, FTC, GDPR, and CCPA and the ability to add custom-tailored classifiers. This allows you to locate where sensitive data resides and ensure continuous compliance with the latest security and privacy regulations.
- Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) - Identifies data risks that are associated with sensitive data exposure, compliance violations, and data residency issues. Incorporating both content and context of data, like people accessing the data, location, destination, and encryption, allows security teams to prioritize remediation efforts and efficiently reduce data exposure.
- Data Detection and Response (DDR) - Dig detects and responds to data breaches through continuous monitoring of all data interactions in real time, including admin events, data events, and connections. Dig evaluates data activity against an evolving threat model of cloud data stores. It includes hundreds of detections developed by our team of data researchers in order to detect data exfiltration attempts, compliance breaches, and data misuse.
Dig focuses on cloud data security because many clients are moving their data to the cloud. They use DSPM to assess their clients’ cloud data security posture, ensuring their data is secure and meets compliance requirements. This approach creates a point-in-time assessment of data security risks but does not encompass the constant fluctuations of data in real time, which is where DDR comes into the picture.
Dig is unique because its DSPM is supported by a custom threat model created from massive volumes of actual cloud data and utilized by its DDR. These threat models help to identify specific weaknesses in data services and how bad actors exploit them. Each cloud attack creates a unique footprint that the DDR uses to detect risks as they appear, allowing for immediate remediation as risks are identified.
Using a combined approach to DSPM and DDR, Dig helps organizations understand the whole landscape of their cloud data security, understanding its current posture and monitoring continuously to ensure that data remains secure.
Learn more about data security posture management (DSPM).