Data has rightfully become one of the most sensitive and most important assets in an organization’s infrastructure. In the days of on-prem environments only, ensuring that the organization’s sensitive data was kept secure was a relatively simple endeavor, as it was confined to one location.
The cloud revolution has upended this by introducing limitless, borderless, dynamic and distributed cloud environments, replete with cloud services. Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) products strive to secure these new environments. Finding the right DSPM product inevitably involves industry-specific requirements and other individual attributes. Still, there are several fundamental requirements that a DSPM product must have to deliver value across industries, infrastructures and organizations. Below are the top four considerations for choosing the right DSPM product:
- Continuous monitoring and detection.
Comprehensive visibility has become a must for any security tool. Any DSPM tool must go beyond this basic necessity and offer continuous monitoring and updates on the data assets used, on data drifts in unmanaged environments and identify the data stored within them and whether it’s sensitive. This must occur across all environments, including lower-tier and unmanaged environments, such as development or testing environments. Beyond monitoring alone, DSPM platforms must alert security teams to any indication that sensitive data was found in these environments.
- Access control.
Managing who and what can access sensitive data in the cloud is an essential element in securing it. Holistic DSPM products must reduce the risk of overexposure while offering security teams a comprehensive assessment of which local users, IAM roles, SSO permissions and row/table access exist in the organization’s cloud environments. With such cross-environment access control, security teams can gain the profound visibility required to understand what’s being done with the data, and by whom. A good DSPM platform should also alert on shadow data stores that are not being used and excessive or untrusted users or apps – and assist the security team’s efforts in implementing and enforcing least-privilege access policies.
- Risk and threat detection.
With comprehensive visibility, DSPM tools should automatically monitor and analyze cloud environments for any data security risks, misconfigurations or compliance violations. Once detected, DSPM platforms should offer contextualized alerts on any risk or suspicious activity, overt or hidden within the vast lakes of audit logs. DSPM tools bring added value by offering teams with steps and processes for fixing these threats, mitigating these risks, and preventing non-compliance. Continuous tracking should let security teams detect anomalous behavior and predict any new data security threats before they actually compromise company assets. Completing the risk mitigation cycle, a good DSPM tool should then assist security teams with implementing and enforcing relevant guardrails to ensure consistent data governance across all cloud environments.
- Usability and connectivity.
Ease of use and seamless integration are basic tenets of a strong security tool. For DSPM solutions, they must be cloud-based, agentless, and capable of seamlessly integrating with existing cloud infrastructure across the organization. It’s essential to cover all environments where sensitive data resides, as is connecting to the organizational workflow – without which the tool will be practically useless.
With budgetary constraints and economic volatility, CISOs are especially hesitant to onboard a new, shiny security tool that purports to secure their data. Carefully assessing the company’s organizational needs, requirements, industry standards, and customer expectations must be the first step in choosing the right DSPM tool for an organization’s data needs. Sensitive data has become a currency for attackers, and safeguarding it while still being able to leverage this data for business needs has become a growing concern for security leaders. Start from these four fundamentals and teams can more successfully secure their cloud environments.
Shahar Avraham, product management, Eureka Security
