With 90% of the world's data created in the past two years, and a projected total of 181 zettabytes by 2025, securing valuable data is the number one priority among organizations today. Yet many security teams lack the required visibility and security controls over their business-critical data. That’s why organizations are moving towards data security posture management (DSPM) to secure data, achieve compliance, and drive business with confidence.
In fact, DSPM is becoming one of the fastest-growing security categories, with Gartner estimating around 20% of organizations worldwide will adopt DSPM by 20262. This rapid adoption reflects the recognition that DSPM is crucial for managing data security risks in modern, multi-environment infrastructures, especially given the vital role that data plays within the business.
However, although DSPM tools boast a swift deployment process, it is imperative for organizations to take into account the human, procedural, and technological aspects when implementing DSPM. It is crucial to strategically plan an approach that not only addresses present needs, but also lays the foundation for future scalability and innovation, such as incorporating generative AI (GenAI) capabilities.
How to prepare for a successful DSPM deployment Implementing a successful DSPM solution requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the data security needs of the organization, aligning with the regulations and types of data it gathers, stores, and processes. The following steps illustrate the best practices that can be part of an organization's DSPM deployment approach:
Team alignment: The first step is key stakeholder engagement, including governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) personnel, data teams, cloud architects, and security teams so that everyone understands the goals, objectives, KPIs, their roles, and responsibilities, and benefits in the DSPM deployment process. This will avoid confusion, ensure accountability and top-down support for resource allocation and prioritization.
Data landscape and taxonomies analysis: DSPM inventories all data (including structured and unstructured data) across all environments, such as cloud, on-premises, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid systems. It can also categorize data based on sensitivity, regulatory requirements, and business value that might require special treatment or controls. Security teams can get a 360-degree view of their data landscape. Once DSPM is implemented and configured, it needs to be monitored. As it learns about the organizational environment and data flows, DSPM will automatically start assisting you in adapting your security policies.
Unlock insights, enforce controls, and secure data flows: Once security teams have a thorough understanding of their data landscape, including both structured and unstructured data, as well as the location of the data and how it flows, they can implement security policies. The comprehensive view and consistent policy enforcement helps security teams to recognize all data sources and understand how data moves across infrastructure, ensuring no data is overlooked.
Continuous compliance checks implementation: Organization can implement continuous automated compliance by benchmarking security and compliance posture against industry regulations (e.g., PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA) and internal policies.
Risk assessment: DSPM deployment can be tailored to organizations data risk assessment needs, ensuring DSPM continuously monitors, manages, and reports on data security posture based on the data value and risk severity. Organizations can automate data classification, access control, and real-time threat detection, enabling proactive management of data security risks.
Integration with existing tools: The best time to integrate the DSPM with existing security tools is during the initial deployment phase. Organizations have an array of technologies across their security and IT teams, and they can integrate DSPM solutions with the tools they’re already using, such as SOAR, ITSM, and SIEM, to streamline their security workflows and remediation process.
Incident response: Security teams can develop and implement an incident response plan that specifies actions to take in the event of a security incident. They can also configure alerts to trigger real-time alerts for any suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access attempts or data exfiltration. Ideally, a DSPM solution offers real-time guidance when a data security policy violation occurs along with the recommended next steps and remediation guidance so the individual/professional can act and respond to the risk.
Education, training, and collaboration: Regular training sessions can help key stakeholders stay updated on DSPM best practices, and encourage collaboration between cross-functional team members to ensure consistent data protection practices.
Benefits of a successful DSPM deployment
Data security for public cloud environments: DSPM provides real-time visibility into data assets, automates data classification, and highlights potential risk, vulnerabilities, and attack paths. It helps to identify data exposure that results from misconfigurations, overly permissive access controls, and other security gaps that can lead to data exfiltration or data breach attempts. Data lineage, data detection, and response (DDR), and risk remediation capabilities, offer continuous monitoring and analyzing data flow that enables proactive risk mitigation and rapid response to potential threats.
Compliance: Regulatory requirements such as GDPR and CCPA, as well as industry-specific standards, often necessitate regulated data discovery (e.g., for PII), effective classification, and specific regulation mapping. Manual processes can be slow and error-prone. DSPM can reduce the risk of non-compliance that leads to hefty fines while cutting the time and resources required for audit preparation and reporting.
Savings: DSPM can help organizations save millions of dollars every year through improved data management practices and cloud storage/resource optimization. It can eliminate multiple security tool costs, resource costs by automating time-consuming manual processes, including data discovery, classification, risk assessment, and remediation.
Deploying a modern DSPM solutionZscaler offers an agentless, fully integrated DSPM solution that helps organizations with:
Comprehensive AI-driven data discovery, classification, and inventory
Risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation
Automated policy enforcement, and integration with security tools and cloud platforms
Book a custom DSPM demo and see how easy it is to get started and successfully deploy DSPM in your environment that can help reduce data breach risk, improve security posture, and orchestrate security controls.
References
1: ESG Report: streamlining Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Implementations
2: Gartner, Innovation Insight: Data Security Posture Management, Brian Lowans, Joerg Fritsch, Andrew Bales, 28 March 2023.
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