Balaji Ganesan is the CEO and co-founder of Privacera, a leading AI governance and data security company.
Cloud data security currently faces a significant threat, with more than 35% of cloud security incidents occurring due to attackers using valid and compromised credentials. This data underscores the urgent need for organizations to quickly implement robust security measures and prepare for potential incidents. Data security posture management (DSPM) is emerging as a critical category, focused on protecting sensitive data and ensuring business data security and compliance.
DSPM provides organizations with a comprehensive framework to effectively manage sensitive data and effectively assess and identify risks. It provides a centralized control plane that empowers data-driven enterprise initiatives by enhancing data security across diverse platforms. This enablement is essential to reduce damage, comply with regulatory requirements, maintain customer trust, and instill a sense of control and trust in your data security efforts.
What is DSPM vs Active DSPM?
DSPM involves discovering, visualizing and identifying risks or vulnerabilities related to an organization's security posture. Active DSPM, on the other hand, is about effectively managing and improving your security posture. This proactive approach identifies risks and takes steps to mitigate them, reassuring organizations and taking control of their data security efforts.
Data spread across cloud warehouses
As businesses increasingly adopt cloud services, data spread across different environments creates significant challenges in observability, manageability, and security. Organizations often need help monitoring all of their data silos, which results in unidentified and obsolete data that can pose security risks. Unknown data silos complicate compliance efforts and increase the risk of security breaches. This proliferation of data can make compliance with data protection regulations more complex, underscoring the need for greater visibility into and access to sensitive data locations.
Need for visibility into sensitive data and access management
Protecting sensitive information requires comprehensive visibility into data locations, the presence of sensitive data, and access and usage patterns. DSPM is pivotal in ensuring that all sensitive data is discovered and categorized appropriately, mapping sensitive data across environments, and determining where it is stored.
Identify and monitor who has access to sensitive data
Understanding who has access to sensitive data is an important aspect of security. DSPM tools provide insights into current access permissions and actual access patterns, which helps enforce appropriate controls. Continuous monitoring is useful in detecting unusual or unauthorized activities in real-time, allowing quick action to mitigate potential threats.
Over-provisioning—providing more access to data than necessary—is an important aspect of DSPM. Organizations reduce the risk of unauthorized access and breaches by ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive data.
Assess risks and prioritize high-risk areas
DSPM involves assessing the risks associated with different data repositories and prioritizing efforts to protect high-risk areas, such as databases containing sensitive customer information, financial records, or intellectual property. An active DSPM is not just about identifying risks, but about mitigating them by implementing access controls, data masking or encryption. In this way, organizations not only react to violations, but actively work to prevent them.
Responding to regulatory questions after a breach
DSPM provides detailed logs and insights to prepare for and respond to regulatory inquiries after a breach. This capability is critical given current regulations, such as the SEC's four-day reporting window for material breaches, that put pressure on organizations to respond quickly and accurately.
Active DSPM accelerates the process of data democratization
In many organizations, there is friction between the security teams that define authorizations, the data and infrastructure teams that implement controls, and the business groups that want to use the data. This often delays data access or compliance reporting. Active DSPM balances these goals by enabling security teams to define and delegate policy guidelines that are systematically implemented across a centralized control plane. This speeds up data access requests while real-time auditing and monitoring allows all teams to assess and evaluate security posture and remediation steps.
Active DSPM implementation
To begin the data security and privacy management (DSPM) journey, leaders must align on their mandates, technical capabilities, and data requirements. Start with manual processes to collect information and define sensitive data and access permissions. This manual consolidation of access permissions provides a high-level view of sensitive data and user access, allowing adjustments to be made for redundant access.
Managing new data access requests involves complex negotiations between security, data, and business teams to streamline the process. Once the core process and situation are defined, leaders can leverage automation to help with tasks like scanning databases to identify sensitive data and implementing centralized visibility of access controls.
However, challenges can arise when security teams focus solely on identifying sensitive data without considering who has access to it or who has accessed the data in the past. To address these challenges, using a single security system that includes mapping, assessment, and remediation can help. In short, align your leaders, collect relevant information manually, and gradually work your way toward automation while emphasizing the need for a unified system to address security, data, and business requirements.
The importance of the DSPM framework
A comprehensive DSPM framework can ensure that all data within an organization is appropriately identified and protected. This framework allows security incidents to be detected and responded to faster, minimizing potential damage and reducing the risk of breaches and data leaks. It also reduces complexity and improves efficiency by standardizing and simplifying data security processes.
As organizations navigate the complexities of protecting sensitive data, DSPM provides a comprehensive framework to address and mitigate risks across diverse platforms. By adopting an active DSPM system, businesses can go beyond understanding their security posture to effectively managing and improving it, ensuring a proactive stance against potential threats.
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