Partner POV | The Definitive Guide to Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

This was written by Sarah Hospelhorn at BigID.

DSPM: The Definitive Buyer's Guide 

Every now and then, a new term catches the attention of the market: but it's difficult to cut through the noise of DSPM, DSP, DLP, DAG, DDR… you get the idea. Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is here to stay: it's a prelude to the Data Security Platform (DSP), a way to answer "what now?" when you're assessing risk, and the strategy to take a data-centric approach to manage your risk. 

And in an era where data breaches and cyber threats are a constant concern, privacy and protection regulations are constantly evolving, and security is in the spotlight, it's more important than ever to find the right solution to manage and protect your sensitive data. 

Enter DSPM: it's an emerging market - but not a new concept: it's taking the idea of managing risk and adding a programmatic spin to it. 

What is DSPM?

At its core, DSPM is "Discovery Plus": data discovery with security management capabilities that span from automated alerting to remediation. Coined by Gartner in April of 2022, Data Security Posture Management is an emerging market that centers around risk management: organizations of all sizes need to be able to assess, understand, and remediate data security risks across their environment.

Security and risk management leaders need to be able to understand where their risks are, prioritize what to address when, take action to reduce that risk, and track & report on improvements throughout. 

DSPM is part of a comprehensive data security governance strategy: starting with the ability to understand, assess, and identify data risk; transitioning to being able to address those risks, and ultimately mitigating data risks to reduce business risk.

Critical Capabilities of DSPM

While it's still an evolving market, there are common critical capabilities any DSPM initiative has to be able to address. When evaluating DSPM solutions, security and risk leaders need to validate that their DSPM solution can address the following critical needs:

Find, classify, and map sensitive data across your environment:

DSPM solutions should be able to automatically discover, tag, and inventory both unstructured and structured data across on-prem environments and cloud environments, all in a single pane of glass. 

Discover dark data, shadow data, and unknown data: 

It's critical to be able to uncover data that you know about - as well as data that you don't. This means being able to automatically surface cloud data that you didn't know was there; duplicate and simlar data; redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data; and any data that's sensitive or critical: including regulated data, secrets & keys, intellectual property, and business data.

Identify potential access & exposure risks:

Understand who has access to what data, what data is overexposed, and monitor data sharing alongside both internal and external access. By layering in access intelligence, you can reduce insider risk, accelerate zero trust, achieve least privilege, and improve the security posture of your data from the access side as well. 

Alert on high-risk vulnerabilities and critical issues: 

Visibility isn't enough: DSPM solutions need to be able to automatically trigger alerts based on risk level, policy violations, & insider risk - all while accelerating investigations so that security teams can easily investigate, resolve, and track security alerts and risk reduction.

Easily report and assess risk: 

DSPM is all about understanding risk - and that means being able to report on your risk posture, monitor for improvements (and issues), and track progress. Data risk assessments are step one to understanding where you stand, alongside both granular and high-level reporting on your crown jewel data on a consistent basis.

Take Action: 

Once you've got an understanding of your risk posture - what then? Passive assessments are no longer enough for today's security challenges: you need to be able to take action - and your DSPM solution should provide guidance on what to do next in order to remediate risk. It needs to be able to automate, guide, and orchestrate remediation for high-risk data – triggering alerts based on activity (without being noisy), remediate data security issues, reduce over-privileged data access and enforce controls over your sensitive data. 

Be Enterprise Ready: 

Any DSPM (or security solution at large) that you adopt needs to be enterprise ready for your organization's needs: this means enterprise grade security & scan management that works without interrupting business. DSPM solutions need to be able to include granular RBAC, scope down roles, iterative scanning, and integrations with your existing tech stack - so that you can do more with less.

What's the BigIDea?

BigID has emerged as the undisputed leader in the realm of Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): with a slew of accolades and a groundbreaking approach to data security, BigID has been named the leader in DSPM by CB Insights, and the most disruptive cybersecurity software in the space. 

Since BigID first entered the market, we reimagined data security, compliance, and privacy. BigID pioneered cloud-native security for the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, building out the most comprehensive data-first solution for data visibility and control. With years of R&D, testing, and collaborating with customers, BigID's platform seamlessly takes organizations from DSPM to DSP and beyond – enabling organizations to drive security from a data-risk standpoint.

BigID consistently stands apart from the market by demonstrating differentiated capabilities for our customers. A few ways that BigID's DSPM is different include:

Coverage for the data that you care about most – wherever it is. 

We've got you covered in cloud, on-prem, for structured and unstructured data. The cloud is just the start; you need to be able to uncover, classify, and analyze the data that you know about and the data you don't, whether it's dark data, shadow data, ghost data, and hidden data – across the cloud and on-prem. 

Risk management that's accurate: 

our classification & out of the box policies are less noisy and more accurate. We've got patented ML & customizable tuning that gives you the right results based on your data – not somebody else's. That means you can prioritize the critical issues first – and enable your team to work smarter, not harder.

Remediation that works for you, the way you want. 

We'll help you answer the question "what now?" – whether that's automatically triggering a Jira ticket, or a full-on remediation workflow to quarantine or delete your data. 

Scalable data security:

With BigID, you can remediate at scale, involving the actual business orders, making sure the right people are making the right decision on the right data. Security alerts, remediation workflows, and risk posture management can all be delegated to the right people across the business. 

The broadest partner ecosystem 

Enrich and extend your existing tech stack: natively integrate with leading SOAR platforms, IAM, PAM, CSPM, and more - so that you can do more, with less and fill gaps in your tech stack with a single platform.

About BigID

BigID is a leader in data security, privacy, compliance, and governance: enabling organizations to proactively discover, manage, protect, and get more value from their data in a single platform for data visibility and control. Customers use BigID to reduce their data risk, automate security and privacy controls, achieve compliance, and understand their data across their entire data landscape: including multicloud, hybrid cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and on-prem data sources. BigID has been recognized for its innovation and DSPM market leadership, as a 2019 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, named to the 2021 Forbes Cloud 100, the 2021 & 2022 Inc 5000 as the #19th fastest growing company and #1 in Security, and an RSA Innovation Sandbox winner. Find out more at https://bigid.com. DSPM is driving the security market to innovate, approach data security differently, and take a proactive approach to protect their data: click here to take a test drive, or hop on a 1:1 demo with our security experts to learn more.

Know Your Data, Control Your Data.

Data Security * Compliance * Privacy * Governance

Reduce risk, accelerate time to insight, and get data visibility and control across all your data - everywhere.

"Tools like BigID are the future. Organizations should be leveraging these tools to remove the manual processes from data discovery, provide better visibility, and help with prioritization of controls." 

Ryan O'Leary

Future of Trust: Battling Data Discovery Confusion