Balaji Ganesan is CEO and co-founder of Privacera, a leading AI and data security governance company.
Cloud data security is currently facing a significant threat, with more than 35% of cloud security incidents occurring from the use of valid, compromised credentials by attackers. This data underscores the urgent need for organizations to swiftly implement robust security measures and prepare for potential incidents. Data security posture management (DSPM) emerges as a crucial category, focusing on safeguarding sensitive data and ensuring the security and compliance of business data.
DSPM provides enterprises with a comprehensive framework to manage sensitive data and assess and identify risks effectively. It offers a centralized control plane that empowers organizations’ data-driven initiatives by enhancing data security across diverse platforms. This empowerment is crucial for minimizing damage, complying with regulatory requirements, maintaining customer trust, and instilling a sense of control and confidence in your data security efforts.
What is DSPM vs. active DSPM?
DSPM involves discovering, visualizing, and determining risks or gaps related to an organization’s security posture. Active DSPM, on the other hand, is about actively managing and improving your security posture. This proactive approach identifies risks and takes steps to mitigate them, reassuring organizations and controlling their data security efforts.
Data Proliferation Across Cloud Repositories
As companies increasingly adopt cloud services, data dispersed across various environments creates significant challenges in observability, management and security. Organizations often need help to monitor all their data repositories, leading to unidentified and overlooked data that can pose security risks. Unknown data repositories complicate compliance efforts and increase the risk of security breaches. This proliferation of data can make adhering to data protection regulations more complex, underscoring the need for greater visibility into sensitive data locations and access.
Need For Visibility Into Sensitive Data And Access Management
Protecting sensitive information necessitates 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 adequately classified, mapping out sensitive data across environments, and identifying where it is stored.
Identifying And Monitoring Who Has Access To Sensitive Data
Understanding who has access to sensitive data is a critical aspect of security. DSPM tools provide insights into existing access permissions and actual access patterns, thereby helping enforce appropriate controls. Continuous monitoring is instrumental in detecting unusual or unauthorized activities in real time, enabling swift action to mitigate potential threats.
Overprovisioning—providing more access to data than necessary—is a critical aspect of DSPM. Organizations minimize the risk of unauthorized access and breaches by ensuring that only authorized individuals can access sensitive data.
Assessing Risks And Prioritizing High-Risk Areas
DSPM involves evaluating risks associated with different data repositories and prioritizing efforts to protect high-risk areas, such as databases with sensitive customer information, financial records or intellectual property. Active DSPM is not just about identifying risks but mitigating them by implementing access controls, data masking or encryption. This way, organizations are not merely reacting to breaches but actively working to prevent them.
Responding To Regulatory Questions After A Breach
DSPM provides detailed records and insights to prepare for and respond to regulatory inquiries post-breach. This capability is critical given current regulations, such as the SEC’s four-day reporting window for material breaches, which pressures organizations to respond quickly and accurately.
Active DSPM Accelerates Data Democratization
In many organizations, friction exists between security teams defining mandates, data and infrastructure teams implementing controls, and business groups wanting to use the data. This often leads to delays in accessing data or providing compliance reports. Active DSPM balances these objectives by enabling security teams to define and mandate policy guidelines implemented systematically via a centralized control plane. This accelerates data access requests while real-time auditing and monitoring allow all teams to assess and evaluate their security posture and remediation steps.
Implementing An Active DSPM
To start your data security and privacy management (DSPM) journey, leaders must align on their mandates, technology capabilities and data requirements. Begin with manual processes to collect information and identify sensitive data and access permissions. This manual consolidation of access permissions provides a high-level view of sensitive data and user access, allowing for adjustments to over-provisioned access.
Managing new data access requests involves complex negotiations between security, data and business teams to streamline the process. Once the primary process and posture are defined, leaders can leverage automation to assist in tasks such as scanning databases to identify sensitive data and implementing a centralized view of access controls.
However, challenges may arise when security teams focus solely on identifying sensitive data without considering who has access to it or who accessed the data in the past. To address these challenges, using a single security system to encompass mapping, assessment and remediation can help. In summary, align your leaders, manually collect relevant information and incrementally make your way up to automation while emphasizing the need for a unified system to address security, data and business requirements.
The Importance Of A DSPM Framework
A comprehensive DSPM framework can ensure that all data within an organization is adequately defined and protected. This framework enables faster detection and response to security incidents, minimizing potential damage and reducing the risk of breaches and data leaks. It also reduces complexity and improves efficiency by standardizing and streamlining data security processes.
As organizations navigate the complexities of safeguarding sensitive data, DSPM offers a comprehensive framework to address and mitigate risks across diverse platforms. By adopting active DSPM, companies can move beyond understanding their security posture to actively managing and improving it, ensuring a proactive stance against potential threats.
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