5 Must-haves for your next DSPM solution

Rumor has it: By 2025, over 175 zettabytes will be pushed to the cloud. With scattered sensitive data across multiple cloud platforms and hundreds of services, the increase of shadow data – unmanaged data residing outside the security team’s control – has imploded, leading to a new era of security challenges in the cloud.

Major challenges in securing sensitive data in the cloud:

• Cloud complexity: With a data sprawl in multiple cloud platforms, accounts, and services – organizations struggle with understanding and having visibility to what data is in the cloud and where it is.
• Excessive permissions: On top of discovering and classifying data, security teams also lack the ability to understand data access along with being compliant with data sovereignty requirements. This results in massive security gaps and extensive resources needed.
• Lack of data context: With use of multiple cloud service providers and security tools, lack of contextual intelligence around risks and alert overload are common issues that lead to greater resource fatigue and security breaches.

And that’s why we’ve seen the rise of data security posture management (DSPM). DSPM is designed to continuously monitor data in the cloud to protect against vulnerabilities and potential risks. Per Gartner’s definition, “[DSPM] provides visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used, and what the security posture of the data stored, or application is.” DSPM provides actionable insights to improve data security posture, enabling security teams to protect sensitive data with intelligence and context.

With these challenges in mind, here are the top 5 requirements you should look for in your next DSPM solution:

1.  Data discovery, classification, exposure, and posture management

You cannot protect what you can’t see or what you don’t know. Considering the complex nature of cloud environments, the first step to secure cloud data is to get comprehensive visibility and inventory of your environment. Your DSPM solution must scan cloud data repositories and discover cloud native structured and unstructured data stores, providing a clear view of the data landscape, inventory, and security posture.

Not all data are created equal. Therefore, your DSPM solution must also accurately classify data. This is done using a combination of content analysis techniques, AI, machine learning, metadata, or tagging. After the classification of data, your DSPM solution must provide deep context and understanding of sensitive data across the ecosystem. It should be able to access data security posture and identify data exposures, misconfiguration, and overly permissive access that could result in a data leak. It should also notify security teams of the discovery of new data stores or objects that could be at risk by creating an accurate map and inventory of the organization’s data assets. This helps security teams to understand where sensitive data is stored, who is accessing the data, where it is going, and how secure it is.

2. Single DLP engine across your entire enterprise

Organizations use different cloud and data services. Security teams need a comprehensive understanding of the location, movement, and exposure of sensitive data to prevent data leaks and exfiltration attempts. It is also important to have and enforce consistent data security policies that detect and remediate on-premises and cloud-based violations.

Encompassing a single DLP engine for your entire data protection solution can help organizations create a policy once and apply it everywhere in their enterprise. This ensures your most sensitive data is properly tracked and consistently protected, no matter where or how it is accessed while reducing the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining complicated policies.

3. Advanced AI/ML for threat correlation

Managing data security risk in a complex environment can be a struggle—especially if an organization relies on an ecosystem of multiple or more individual cloud and security point products with disconnected metrics and high-frequency alerts. Risk-based prioritization is critical to help teams manage data risk in complex environments with high volumes of security alerts while focusing on and fixing the most severe risks.

Your DSPM must leverage AI, ML, and advanced threat correlation capabilities to aggregate and effortlessly transform security data into meaningful insights to uncover hidden risks or attack vectors that could lead to a compromise or breach. This can be backed by near-real-time alerts and notification and remediation guidance that enable your security team to focus on what matters most.

4. Multicloud support

Most organizations are now pursuing a multicloud strategy — choosing to use more than one cloud service provider (CSP) — which brings several benefits. However, the ability to track data becomes exponentially more complex with a multi-cloud strategy. On premises data protection solutions, like DLP, don’t scale in the cloud. Cloud native provider solutions are limited and cannot support a multi-cloud environment.

Your DSPM should seamlessly cover a variety of cloud environments and read from various databases, data pipelines, object storage, disk storage, managed file storage, data warehouses, lakes, and analytics pipelines — both managed and self-hosted. DSPM must provide a single, consistent view of data across clouds, geographies, and organizational boundaries. This single view also helps security teams to evaluate the risk of sensitive data across multicloud environments, rather than individually.

5. Compliance management

Data protection regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI compliance, etc. mandate the protection of sensitive data. Achieving compliance with external compliance laws and regulations, as well as with internal guidelines and standards, involves knowing what type of sensitive data you have, where your data consumers are accessing that data and the specific requirements that apply to your data, such as data residency or the right to be forgotten.

Your DSPM solution must streamline compliance processes around data protection, such as automatically mapping data posture with internal as well as external regulatory benchmarks related to GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and many more. It should trigger alerts to security teams or appropriate stakeholders about the nature of the configuration error or issue causing compliance violation, the asset it affects, the regulations at risk, and the severity of the compliance risk. This allows the appropriate stakeholders to assess the compliance rate and where it falls short. DSPM must also provide remediation guidance to mitigate the risk of access controls, configuration errors, etc. This ensures organization easily checks multiple boxes with respect to data protection frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, and more. DSPM solution also simplifies manual, tedious, and time-consuming compliance reporting part. DSPM solution provides centralized automated simple, audit-ready compliance reporting. It helps compliance and security teams to track compliance with relevant regulations.

Zscaler DSPM

Zscaler AI Data Protection Platform is the world’s most comprehensive fully integrated data protection platform that secures both structured and unstructured data across the web, SaaS-based services, public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), private applications, email, and endpoints.

Zscaler Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) provides granular visibility into cloud data, classifies, and identifies data and access, and contextualizes the data’s exposure and security posture, empowering organizations, and security teams to prevent and remediate cloud data breaches at scale.

Zscaler DSPM is part of Zscaler Data Protection that provides a comprehensive, cloud-delivered platform built to safeguard sensitive data within your entire enterprise – web, SaaS, on-prem applications, endpoints, BYOD devices, and public cloud. It uses a single and unified DLP engine to deliver consistent, best-in-class data protection across all channels. By following all users across all locations, and governing data in use and at rest, it ensures sensitive data is seamlessly protected and compliance is achieved.

For more info visit check out our recent DSPM launch webinar!