Data security is an essential part of the day-to-day mission for any diligent business, but it is also a challenge because of the complexity of how we store, access, and use data while continuing to grow. Therefore, finding effective ways to secure it has been a priority, which has led to the development of data security posture management (DSPM) solutions.

What Value Does a DSPM Solution Provide?

DSPM solutions help organizations build a detailed view of their data environment and associated security risks across three key areas:

• Discovery and classification: This is the fundamental first step, as you can’t secure what you don’t know exists. Solutions look across cloud repositories—platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and software as a service (SaaS)—as well as on-premises sources to discover and classify data, looking for sensitive information that could be misused.
• Access reviews: Monitoring who is using critical data, what they’re doing with it, and where they’re doing it from is the next step. It’s also important to track the ways in which sensitive data moves through and out of an organization. DSPM solutions review this information looking for misconfigurations, patterns, poorly configured repositories, and over-provisioned rights.
• Risk analysis: Once the above analysis is complete, DSPM solutions present a clear proposed security posture. They highlight risks, report on compliance against security frameworks, and offer guidance on how to lower these risks. Without insight into these areas, it’s impossible to apply robust data security.

This type of analysis can be done with native tools and skilled operations teams, but DSPM solutions bring all of these actions and insights into one tool, automating the effort and providing additional intelligence along the way—often more quickly and more accurately than a human.

How Will AI Impact the DSPM Market?

The original purchase drivers of data security tools were the introduction of GDPR, the European Union regulation, and a flurry of other data privacy legislation. Organizations needed to understand their data and where it presented regulatory risk, driving an increased adoption of discovery, classification, and security tools.

It’s likely that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive a new wave of DSPM adoption. AI learning models present a range of opportunities for businesses to mine their data for new insights, creativity, and efficiency, but they also present risks. Given the wrong access to data or even access to the wrong data, AI tools can introduce a range of security and commercial business risks. For example, if tools surface information to users that they would not normally be able to access or present inaccurate information to customers and partners, this could result in negative commercial and legal impacts.

Therefore, it’s essential for organizations to take steps to ensure that the data models that AI is using are both accurate and appropriate. How do they do that? They need insight into their data and to understand when and what information AI learning models are accessing and whether that data is still valid. AI usage should have us thinking about how to ensure the quality and security of our data. DSPM may just be the answer.

Are DSPM Solutions Worth the Investment?

The reality is “it depends.” It’s useful to realize that while DSPM solutions can definitely deliver value, they are complex and come with a cost that’s more than financial. Fully adopting the technology, as well as an effective DSPM process, requires operational and cultural change. These types of changes do not come easily, so it’s important that a strong use case exists before you begin looking at DSPM.

The most important thing you should consider before adoption is the business case. Data security is fundamentally a business problem, so adopting DSPM cannot be an IT project alone; it must be part of a business process.

The strongest business case for deployment comes from organizations in heavily regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, critical infrastructure, and pharma. These usually demand compliance with strict regulations, and businesses must demonstrate their compliance to boards, regulators, and customers.

The next most common business case is companies for which data is the business, such as those involved in data exchange and brokering. They demand the most stringent controls because any failures in security could lead to business failure.

If you’re not in one of those types of organizations, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t adopt a DSPM solution, but you do need to consider your business case carefully and ensure there’s buy-in from senior management before you begin a DSPM project.

Stand Up Straight, and Get your Data Security Posture Right

A good data security posture is essential to all businesses. A DSPM tool will give you the insight, guidance, and controls you need and do it more quickly and effectively than pulling together information from several different tools and resources, improving your organization’s posture more quickly and saving on costs at the same time.

So, don’t slouch, sit up straight, and improve your data security posture.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s DSPM Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

• GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating DSPM Solutions
• GigaOm Radar for DSPM

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Data is core to all organizations and has become an essential asset. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, data is increasingly dispersed across a range of locations. No longer limited to on-premises shares and databases, today data is stored in multiple cloud repositories and data platforms. This complexity presents a significant risk to the security and privacy of data, one that cannot go unchecked, as the impact of a data loss incident is becoming increasingly severe.

The risks associated with the proliferation of data are well known, but the move to the cloud presents specific issues. The ease of use and perceived low cost of cloud repositories means they are often created outside of normal controls. Often, they are used for specific tasks and then discarded and forgotten by original project owners. This leads to shadow data repositories that exist outside of established data storage and security controls. Even those with good data security tools often find that they struggle to identify such shadow repositories, leaving them unprotected and unsecured.

Moreover, the proliferation of data in different repositories has led to the adoption of an array of separate, often platform-specific solutions, which increases complexity and adds cost and risk. Couple this with the ongoing security threats and stringent compliance requirements users must adhere to, and it becomes clear organizations need a better way to stay on top of data security and risk.

DSPM solutions have emerged to give organizations the comprehensive view they need by providing visibility across multiple data platform types, both in the cloud and on-premises. Often cloud-based, DSPM solutions can easily integrate with a wide range of data repositories. They are often able to automatically find data repositories and build a data map. They analyze data movement and lineage to understand how data flows through an organization and where it may introduce risk. DSPM solutions can also discover shadow data stores and analyze the data held within them. They can use this data to help give an organization a clear picture of its data estate, its compliance position, and its security posture. Once deployed, DSPM solutions should continuously monitor security posture, provide guidance on access controls, understand user behavior to quickly identify threats, and enable those threats to be rapidly mitigated.

While some DSPM vendors are well-established providers of data management solutions that have evolved to provide DSPM, this is a new and evolving market in which there are many new and innovative providers with solutions built specifically to tackle this problem.

As organizations’ data demands grow, including in areas such as analytics and AI, diligent IT leaders can’t allow potential threats to remain undetected and unchecked. DSPM is becoming one of the best ways to address this challenge, and that’s something modern data security leaders must consider.

This is our first year evaluating the DSPM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This GigaOm Radar report examines 12 of the top DSPM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading DSPM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) appeared first on Gigaom.

Identity and associated credentials, whether human or machine, are the tickets to access and privileges, so gaining control of them is a priority for cyberattackers. Not surprisingly, attempts to steal them are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and trying to detect and stop sophisticated attacks is ever more difficult. This challenge has intensified in the cloud era; with more potential platforms to attack and gain access to, the attacker’s job has become easier, while the defender’s is more complex.

The complexity and frequency of attacks mean that a more proactive approach is required; one that can detect and mitigate potential threats autonomously, accurately, and more quickly than human security teams could. This need has led to the development of identity threat detection and response solutions (ITDR). These systems use broad telemetry, large-scale analytics, and intelligence to identify threats and automate the response to them to quickly and accurately reduce risk.

ITDR solutions use a combination of security tools, processes, and best practices to effectively detect and respond to identity-related threats, such as credential theft, privilege misuse, data breaches, and fraudulent activity. This capability can be a major component in significantly reducing the threat posed by identity security attacks. Any tool that improves identity security should be evaluated as a priority because identity breaches present attackers with the opportunity to engineer attempts to cause disruption and steal data, cash, or both, with obviously negative impacts on any business.

Business Imperative
Identity is a high-value target for the modern cyberattacker, and a breached identity has the potential to significantly impact a business, so finding ways to be effective in identifying threats and quickly reducing the risk they pose must be a priority in any diligent IT security leader’s cybersecurity strategy.

Dealing with the challenge has become more difficult as the sophistication and accuracy of identity threats have increased. As attackers begin to use tools such as generative AI and large learning models (LLMs) to develop even more sophisticated attack approaches, the risk grows.

A solution will require financial investment, and deployment and adoption will take time and may require an organization to rethink the way it manages identity, but the benefit of more secure identities is significant. Those who fail to address the challenge run a high risk of identity compromise, a significant breach, and business disruption.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an ITDR solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of an ITDR solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 3.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that an ITDR solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for ITDR are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.