By Josh Breaker-Rolfe

Data security posture management (DSPM) is the rising star of the data protection world. As cloud adoption continues and IT environments grow increasingly complex, these solutions are becoming instrumental in finding and securing sensitive data and data depositories, easing workloads for overstretched security teams, and enhancing security postures.

Keep reading for a more detailed explanation of DSPM and the five key benefits of implementing it in your organization.

Understanding DSPM

DSPM provides insights into sensitive data locations, access permissions, usage, and the overall security status of stored data or applications. It achieves this by evaluating data security, identifying and categorizing risks, applying protective measures, and routinely monitoring the security environment to maintain effectiveness. This approach helps businesses uphold data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Primary users of DSPM include IT, security, compliance teams, and executive leadership.

Benefit 1: Enhanced Data Protection

Modern organizations use various CSPs, necessitating the use of an increasing number of data repositories and pipelines. Data can become lost in areas not directly linked to business operations. For example, an administrator may generate backups without informing security teams. Lost or unknown data and data repositories – also known as shadow data – are typically left unprotected.

DSPM solutions help overcome this problem by providing enhanced visibility into an organization’s assets. To enhance data protection, they identify, classify, and secure all sensitive information in an organization’s environment, wherever it resides.

Moreover, DSPM solutions leverage advanced technologies like AI and machine learning for real-time monitoring and threat detection in cloud data environments, protecting against unauthorized access and data exposure and safeguarding sensitive information.

Benefit 2: Reduced Attack Surface

The increasing use of CSPs and the proliferation of shadow data and Shadow AI have vastly expanded attack surfaces, leaving already overstretched security teams scrambling to protect all their data, data depositories, and endpoints.

DSPM solutions help address this issue by proactively discovering and managing unauthorized data access practices, alerting security teams to vulnerabilities, and bolstering the organization’s security posture by unifying security measures and alerting security teams to vulnerabilities.

Similarly, these solutions help enforce consistent security policies across the IT environment, ensuring all data depositories are visible and protected against potential breaches, facilitating faster threat response times.

Benefit 3: Risk Mitigation

Again, increasingly complex cloud environments result in increased risk. DSPM solutions help organizations identify, assess, manage, and prioritize vulnerabilities to improve remediation efforts and reduce the associated risk. These solutions have automation capabilities to relieve the burden on security teams, leverage machine learning to enable predictive analytics for threat response, and ultimately protect sensitive data.

Benefit 4: Regulatory Compliance

Ensuring compliance with data protection standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and, more recently, the CCPA can be a laborious, costly, and complicated process for many organizations, especially those with complex cloud environments. Failing to comply with these regulations can have disastrous consequences, including hefty fines and, in some cases, financial insolvency.

DSPM solutions streamline compliance by ensuring data protection practices align with legal requirements. They provide detailed audit trails and reporting capabilities, ensuring organizational data protection practices are transparent and security teams are held accountable.

Benefit 5: Operational Efficiency

More broadly, DSPM tools offer improved operational efficiency by automating many manual processes and reducing the burden on overstretched security and IT teams. They automate the identification and management of misconfigurations, outdated access controls, excessive permissions, the identification and classification of data, and reporting processes to bolster security postures without the need for extensive manual intervention.

The Future of DSPM

While DSPM is a relatively new solution, it is gaining significant traction and quickly becoming a crucial part of many organizations’ data protection strategies. When Gartner first introduced DSPM in 2022, it stated that DSPM’s market penetration was less than 1%. A year later, in their Innovation Insight Report, they projected it would grow to 20%. 

As cloud adoption increases, solutions like DSPM will only grow more important. While now these tools are primarily used by large organizations with sprawling cloud environments, it’s feasible that within the next five to ten years, even smaller businesses will have cloud environments that necessitate the use of advanced security solutions like DSPM.

The key takeaway here is that while DSPM might not be suitable for your organization now, it’s worth monitoring the market so you’re well-informed should you need it in the future. Gartner’s recent Voice of the Customer report is an excellent place to start.

Josh is a Content writer at Bora. He graduated with a degree in Journalism in 2021 and has a background in cybersecurity PR. He’s written on a wide range of topics, from AI to Zero Trust, and is particularly interested in the impacts of cybersecurity on the wider economy.