Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions enable organizations to take a data-centric approach to data security. It provides a comprehensive look into an organization’s entire data estate, including the elusive shadow data and the risks associated with security, governance, and compliance.
However, picking a top-tier DSPM tool is not all about evaluating its features but also about the business values it can deliver. A robust solution should contribute to an organization's overall cybersecurity strategy.
This blog will discuss the important factors to consider when buying a DSPM solution and the leading vendors.
Key Factors to Evaluate Before Choosing a DSPM Solution
Define Objectives
DSPM draws powerful capabilities from many disciplines, such as Data Security, Data Governance, Data Access Governance, and compliance. These capabilities enable organizations to holistically approach data security, governance, and compliance obligations. Therefore, it is critical for organizations to first determine the key objectives or strategic goals that define their success criteria.
Ensure a Uniform Data Classification Framework
Data classification is critical for establishing security controls and reporting on risks or compliance. However, it is challenging since data exists in varying formats across the multi-cloud environment and SaaS applications. A robust DSPM solution must give deeper visibility into data across different environments, including cloud-native or shadow data assets. It must be able to classify and label data consistently.
Integrate Enhanced Classification for Data+AI Insights
The introduction of GenAI has skyrocketed the value of data to new heights. Data is now used to fuel large language models (LLMs) for tuning or training purposes. To ensure AI's safe and secure adoption, organizations must integrate data and AI insights from several disciplines, such as security, governance, privacy, and compliance. A unified view of contextual data and AI insights can break silos and accelerate the operationalization of incident response and other data obligations.
Automate Security & Compliance Controls
Most DSPM solutions don’t go beyond risk identification and enable manual or automated remediation measures. A robust DSPM tool should automate the enforcement of security and compliance controls. This requires centralizing policy management and controls, reinforcing security configurations, establishing access policies, redacting or masking sensitive data, and blocking public access.
Orchestrate Security Playbooks
Data security requires support from various other departments in addition to the security teams. Hence, orchestrating processes through unified automation is critical. Look for DSPM solutions that help orchestrate security playbooks to automate processes, remove manual efforts, and reduce risks.
Ensure a Unified Data Controls Solution
A siloed approach to data security can be costly and risky. Some DSPM solutions offer limited capabilities that protect only specific environments that lack data sharing context, sensitive data access insights, or governance capabilities. Siloed solutions lack visibility into non-native environments or shadow data assets, preventing important insights from sharing and consuming across different departments. To overcome these limitations, look for a DSPM solution, an integrated module of a centralized AI and data security platform.
8 Leading DSPM Solutions 2024
Securiti DSPM
An integration of the Data+AI Command Center, Securiti DSPM helps organizations protect their data and AI everywhere- across on-premise, SaaS applications, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. The solution leverages contextual data intelligence and automated controls to help organizations discover and classify data, identify risks, reduce ROT data, remediate misconfigurations, establish least privilege access controls, track data flows, and implement security controls across the data lifecycle. The platform further enables organizations to gain complete visibility of their AI estate and enforce security controls around data and AI flows, model entitlements, data sanitization, and prompt firewalls. Notably, the solution offers comprehensive integration with a number of security tools and services, such as CASB, CNAPP, CIEM, etc. The solution is rated as a leader in the GigaOm Radar report and a Customer Choice in Gartner’s Peer Insights Customer Choice report.
Managed DSPM by Concentric
Concentric Semantic DSPM solution is another entry in our list of top DSPM solutions in 2024. The solution leverages ML technology to automate data discovery and classification. With its advanced risk analysis capabilities, the solution gives comprehensive insights into data that may be at risk due to a number of factors, such as inaccurate classification, excessive entitlements, etc. The solution offers broad coverage, enabling organizations to discover both structured and unstructured data.
Cyera DSPM
Cyera Data Security Platform offers DSPM solution that provides autonomous data discovery and classificationa cross a broad range of environments, including on-premise, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Leveraging agentless discovery engine, the solution helps organizations identify and classify data across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured datastores. Cyera further allows integration with a range of catalogs, including but not limited to Secoda, Collibra, etc.
OneTrust DSPM
OneTrust is a renowned named in the data security and privacy management industry. OneTrust’s DSPM offerings include a dynamic data discovery and classification engine that leverages over hundreds of connectors, allowing for comprehensive shadow data and sensitive data discovery across on-premise and cloud environments. Using shadow and sensitive insights and the associated risks, users can automate remediation via integrated workflows.
Normalyze DSPM
The Normalyze DSPM solution provides both agentless and Machine Learning-powered data discovery and classification capabilities. It allows scanning across a range of environments, giving deep insights into sensitive data. Organizations can further automate remediation measures and other security controls for access entitlements and compliance reporting.
IDM Guardium DSPM
IDM Guardium offers a DSPM solution in the making. Unlike other DSPM offerings in the list, IBM Guardium offers a limited set of DSPM capabilities. For instance, the solution offers data discovery across only cloud data sources. Moreover, the discovery of sensitive data is also limited to preset definitions. The tool also lacks any data detection and remediation capabilities.
Eureka DSPM
Eureka DSPM allows businesses to protect their sensitive data, including structured and unstructured data, in cloud repositories. The solution unified data discovery, threat detection, and remediation, offering a powerful data security platform. Users can have comprehensive insights into data risks and identify threats before it’s too late.
Palo Alto Prisma Cloud DSPM
The Prisma Cloud DSPM solution supports a range of cloud environments, including but not limited to AWS, Snowflake, GCP, etc. The solution can scan and discover sensitive data at rest and in transit, and categorizes the data using 100+ pre-built classifiers. Users can further have deep visibility into their data risk using various custom and pre-built policies.
Final Thoughts
These tools help you understand where your sensitive data lives, who has access to it, and any misconfigurations around it. When selecting a solution, consider one that is designed to scale and adapt as AI continues to revolutionize industries worldwide.
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