How DSPM Can Help Avoid Costly Data Breaches
Data breaches can be extraordinarily costly. In fact, most of them are: 2024’s IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report revealed that the average data breach costs an organization $4.88 million. So, how can your business avoid suffering one?
Of course, there are the usual best practices – mandating MFA across the organization, training staff, and enforcing the principle of least privilege, to name a few – but for many companies, these measures don’t go far enough. They need a tool to help them manage and protect their data across sprawling, complex cloud environments. Enter, stage right, data security posture management (DSPM).
DSPM: An Overview
At root, DSPM tools offer organizations enhanced visibility over where their sensitive data is, who has access to it, how it has been used, and how secure the data store is. Unlike other tools that focus on securing perimeters or specific environments, DSPM zeroes in on the data itself, identifying, securing, and monitoring it across diverse hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Key Features of DSPM
The key features of DSPM tools include:
- Data Discovery: Automatically identifying and inventorying all data assets across an organization’s entire infrastructure.
- Data Classification: Classifying data based on its sensitivity, criticality, and compliance with relevant data protection regulations.
- Risk Assessment and Prioritization: Assessing the organization’s data security posture to identify data assets most in need of attention and remediation.
- Configuration and Policy Management: Ensuring configurations and security policies are consistent, enforced, and aligned with established best practices and regulatory standards.
- Reporting and Alerting: Producing detailed reports that provide insights into an organization’s security posture and classify risks based on potential impacts.
- Remediation and Prevention: Offering actionable instructions and intelligence for addressing uncovered security issues, conducting incident response, and remediating incidents in real time.
These features ultimately help security teams understand and protect all their data assets, offering a birds-eye view of their data environment to inform and enforce data protection efforts.
How Does DSPM Help Prevent Data Breaches?
Now we better understand how DSPM works, we can explore how it helps prevent data breaches. Key benefits of DSPM include:
Enhancing Data Protection
Because DSPM tools offer organizations greater visibility over their data than traditional security tools, security teams can use them to ensure all sensitive information is identified, classified, and protected. The best DSPM tools use evolving technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to monitor data and detect threats in real time. These capabilities ensure unauthorized actors can’t access sensitive data and that data is protected from inadvertent exposure.
Reducing Attack Surfaces
Modern IT infrastructures are remarkably complex. For example, hybrid working and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies have exploded traditional security perimeters, the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud environments has made tracking sensitive data increasingly difficult, and the increased use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications means more data flows through third-party systems than ever before.
DSPM tools help reduce attack surfaces by finding and addressing unauthorized data access practices, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses in an organization’s overall security posture. They centralize security measures to ensure security policies are enforced uniformly across all data stores and flows.
Mitigating Insider Threat Risk
Although we may think of threats to data as originating from outside organizations, this often isn’t the case. Insider threats pose just as much threat to organizations as malicious, external actors.
These threats are often even more costly than external attacks. 2023 research from Verizon recently revealed that while the average external threat compromises about 200 million records, incidents involving an inside threat actor expose 1 billion records or more on average.
DSPM tools help protect against insider threats by monitoring user access patterns to detect anomalies and unauthorized access or data exfiltration attempts. Basically, if someone in your organization attempts to expose your sensitive information—accidentally or otherwise—a DSPM tool will detect and prevent them from doing so.
Automating Regulatory Compliance
It’s easy to view data protection regulations as a nuisance, something that creates more work for security teams and costs organizations significant portions of their budgets. However, these regulations are a guideline for avoiding a data breach. With DSPM, you can automatically ensure these frameworks are enforced across your infrastructure, mapping sensitive data to regulatory requirements, generating audit-ready reports, and ensuring data handling adheres to legal mandates.
What Are the Challenges of Implementing DSPM?
That said, implementing a DSPM tool is not without its challenges. For example, integrating DSPM with existing tools can be laborious, initial costs can be high, and you may need to train staff to use these tools for them to be effective.
Is DSPM Right for You?
Although DSPM is a valuable tool, it’s not suitable for every organization. Unless you have a large, complex IT environment, DSPM tools are probably overkill. If you do have this environment, however, you can find out more about the DSPM market and determine what tool is right for your organization on the Gartner Peer Insights page for DSPM.
