Protecting Cloud Data Using DSPM

As organizations keep using cloud-based services for data storage, data security is still a top concern. With thousands of cyber criminals and data breaches occurring yearly, cloud data security has become a significant issue for enterprises of all sizes.

In a report about a data breach in 2022, it was reported that a data breach in the US costs more than half of the global data breach. Data breaches cost organizations over $9 million. This is why data security posture management (DSPM) was introduced and is crucial.

In 2022, Gartner introduced DSPM as the Hype Cycle of Data Security. According to Gartner, ” DSPM provides visibility to where sensitive data is, who has the data, and how the data is utilized. Also, it gives the security posture of the organization’s data”. This summary provides a general understanding of DSPM. Let us learn about DSPM, why It is essential, and ways to protect cloud data with Flow Security DSPM.

What is DSPM?

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is a data security strategy that solves complex data issues in the cloud environment. The complex data issues involve knowing where your data is on the cloud and how to secure it. DSPM has become one of the most critical approaches in the field of cybersecurity.

DSPM addresses data security challenges by providing data visibility, classifying the data based on the sensitivity level, managing risks, automating data discovery, and responding to incidents and vulnerabilities. Also, It enables organizations to determine their data security posture by analyzing the data map.

DSPM helps organizations to discover, understand their data and take measures to protect and continually assess the data risk.

Why is DSPM important?

Data is growing tremendously, and cloud infrastructure continues to expand since organizations are moving their data to the cloud. As data and cloud infrastructure grow, organizations become increasingly aware of the risks of sensitive data. These risks involve cyber crimes and data breaches, as well as risks of data-related regulatory violations that are likely to cause them to lose a lot of money and data.

DSPM is designed to address issues that existing solutions are struggling to solve due to the massive data growth and complex development environments. DSPM can handle huge volumes of data and has made it possible to:

• Discover where sensitive data is
• Classify the data types
• Know who has the data access
• Provide visibility into how the data has been used
• Determine the organization’s security posture.

DSPM is a critical data security solution. DSPM enables organizations to reduce business security risks associated with data and maintain a data security posture. Here are some of DSPM’s benefits:

1. Data discovery: DSPM helps the security teams discover data stores, who has access to the data, and how the data is being used. Organizations must know where their sensitive data is located and regularly monitor, analyze, and track data flows. This ensures the security posture remains effective and the necessary security controls are in place.
2. Data protection: With increasing amounts of data generated daily and stored in various data stores, it has become a challenge for organizations to keep track of all their sensitive data and prevent data exposure. DSPM solutions help identify sensitive data and continuously monitor the security posture of the data. Organizations can protect and prevent unauthorized access by classifying data, managing data-related risks, and responding to data incidents.
3. Security compliance: DSPM detects and creates alerts whenever a data incident is detected or when sensitive data violates regulatory bodies’ requirements. These bodies include GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and more.
4. Cost savings: By maintaining a good security posture, businesses and organizations save costs in various ways. First, DSPM provides insurance against incidents such as cyber security attacks, thus reducing costs associated with cybercrime. Also, it automates processes such as data discovery and classification, data analysis, and monitoring to drive costs further.

Ways to protect cloud data with Flow Security DSPM

Organizations are increasingly moving data to the cloud, thus giving security teams tasks to protect this data. Here are ways to protect cloud data.

Discovery of organization’s data in the cloud

The first step is about discovering and classifying data in the cloud. The data is widely stored across clouds and data technologies, not all managed, and some are flowing to external services, so discovering all that data is fundamental to true data security. Once data is identified, it is classified based on the data and type.

When security teams know and understand where their sensitive data is, they can identify potential risks and mitigate them by implementing security controls.

Data flow

Data movement is all-over in the cloud environments due to the increase of the organization’s data. Data security teams should effectively monitor data movements to know where the sensitive data is moving and who moved it, track un-usual activities, and prioritize to remediate incidents related to sensitive data.

Monitoring is one step to reducing the data flow risk. It gives you a clear picture of your cloud data flows. Using DSPM, you can create a data security strategy that protects data in motion. Securing data in motion is a challenge for any organization. The data security team should be able to identify when an incident has occurred during data movement using automated tools.

Monitoring data flows should alert you when an incident is detected, such as sensitive data being moved to the wrong locations, unusual massive organization data being downloaded, and more. It is crucial to have an automated process that will notify data owners when a high-risk incident is detected.

Enforcing compliance controls is another measure to put in place when protecting cloud data flows. This helps identify data movements that don’t comply with regulatory bodies such as GDPR, PCI, etc.

Understand and manage the data risks

DSPM provides a catalog of all data and visualizes its flows. In doing so, the risk associated with data is automatically identified from unintended exposure, cyber threats, unauthorized access, wrong positioning, risky sharing, data loss, and more.

Unauthorized access and data sharing to the wrong locations across the cloud and data technologies can put sensitive data at risk, leading to a data breach. This can lead the organization to a huge loss. Understanding and managing risk is critical when protecting cloud data using DSPM.

DSPM solution continually investigates and remediates risk. The investigation stage analyzes the data flow to find any data risks. When the risk is detected, the DSPM tool, such as Flow Security, remediates the issues by providing mitigation recommendations, such as changing permissions, deleting data, moving data to the right location, or disabling access.

The DSPM’s ability to autonomously discover and monitor data and provide risk remediation makes it an effective tool for maintaining an organization’s security posture.

Detect and Respond to Data Violations

This involves monitoring and analyzing an organization’s data security to detect and respond to data incidents and violations. Malicious activities that put an organization’s data at risk are detected in real-time. This includes data loss, data leakage, data theft, and more.

Protecting cloud data at risk entails responding to data violations and vulnerabilities discovered during detection.

Conclusion

DSPM is an essential tool that helps organizations manage and protect their cloud data. I hope you got a good overview of DSPM, why it is important, how it benefits organizations, and how it protects cloud data. DSPM was introduced to improve an organization’s data security. Happy learning.