Data Security Posture Management

What is Data Security Posture Management?

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is a continuous process of assessing, monitoring, and improving the security posture of an organization’s data. It involves identifying and classifying sensitive data, assessing the risks associated with each type of data, implementing appropriate security controls to protect the data, and continuously monitoring the security posture and making improvements as needed.

When is DSPM Important for Organizations?

Organizations can choose to implement a DSPM solution as part of their overall strategy for the following:

Protecting Sensitive Data:

• Automatically discover and classify sensitive data across the entire IT environment. This ensures that organizations have a comprehensive inventory of all sensitive data, making it easier to protect.
• Enforce strict access control policies, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive information. This reduces the risk of internal data breaches.

Risk Management:

• Continuously monitor data access and usage patterns, identifying potential risks in real-time. This allows organizations to respond quickly to any suspicious activity.
• Leverage advanced analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies and potential threats, such as unusual data access patterns or unauthorized data exfiltration attempts.
• Provide comprehensive risk assessments, highlighting vulnerabilities and areas where data security can be improved. This proactive approach helps in mitigating risks before they can be exploited.

Data Governance:

• Ensure that data governance policies are consistently enforced across the organization. This includes policies related to data retention, access control, and data sharing.
• Maintain detailed audit trails of all data access and activity, providing a clear record for auditing purposes. This helps in identifying and addressing any policy violations.
• Managing the entire data lifecycle, from creation to deletion, ensuring that data is handled according to governance policies at every stage.

Regulatory Compliance:

• Continuously monitor compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Provide real-time alerts and reports on compliance status, helping organizations stay compliant.
• Generate automated compliance reports, which can be used to demonstrate compliance to regulatory bodies. This reduces the manual effort involved in compliance reporting.
• Manage data subject rights, such as the right to access, delete, or modify personal data. This is particularly important for compliance with regulations like GDPR.

By focusing on these key areas, DSPM provides a comprehensive approach to data security, ensuring that sensitive data is protected, risks are managed, governance policies are enforced, and regulatory compliance is maintained. This holistic approach helps organizations safeguard their data assets and maintain trust with customers and stakeholders.

Contrasting DSPM with CSPM and DLP

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) are all critical components in ensuring the security of IT environments, but they have distinct focuses and features.

	DSPM	CSPM	DLP
Focus	Ensures security of data in repositories like databases, data lakes, file shares, etc. across cloud and on-premises environments.	Enhances security of cloud environments by addressing misconfigurations and policy violations.	Prevents unauthorized access, transfer, and leakage of sensitive data from a trusted environment.
Key Features	Data discovery & classification for data at restContinuous activity monitoringRisk assessment & mitigationPolicy enforcementCompliance reporting	Continuous cloud resource monitoringDetection of misconfigurationsAutomated remediationCompliance assessment against standards	Data discovery & classification for data at rest and in transitMonitoring all data at rest, in motion and in usePolicy enforcement and alerting

Comparison of Data Catalogs and DSPM Tools

Data Catalogs and DSPM tools serve different purposes in the realm of data management and security, but they also share some common functionalities. Here is a comparison to highlight their differences and similarities.

	Data Catalogs	DSPM Tools
Primary Purpose	Organize and manage metadata to help users discover, understand, and use data effectively.	Ensure data security by continuously assessing, monitoring, and improving data protection measures across environments.
Key Features	– Metadata management- Data quality management- Data discovery- Data lineage tracking- Search and query capabilities- Collaboration features	– Automated data discovery and classification- Continuous activity monitoring- Risk assessment & mitigation- Policy enforcement- Compliance reporting
Focus Area	Enhances data governance and usability by providing an inventory of data assets used by data teams.	Enhances data security posture by protecting all sensitive data across databases, data lakes and data products.
Users	Data analysts, data scientists, business users, and data governance teams.	IT security teams, compliance officers, and data protection specialists.

Takeaway: Data Catalogs and DSPM are often both used by organizations, by data teams and security teams respectively for their own initiatives. Data teams use catalogs for data governance, while security teams use DSPM tools for data security. Collectively, they both help support data security governance initiatives inside the organization.

Challenges with DSPM for Database Security

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for database security involves ensuring that sensitive data is protected, access is controlled, and compliance is maintained. However, organizations often face significant challenges in implementing effective DSPM due to the complexity and scale of modern data environments. Here are some common challenges:

Triaging and Responding to Issues

• Volume of Data: Organizations often contain vast amounts of data, making it difficult to identify and prioritize security issues. This sheer volume can overwhelm security teams, leading to delays in addressing potential threats.
• Unclear Data Ownership: When data ownership is not clearly defined, it becomes challenging to determine who is responsible for securing specific data sets. This ambiguity can slow down the triaging process and lead to gaps in security.

Visibility is Partial and Critically Insufficient

• Prevalence of Service Accounts: In many data repositories, multiple users are mapped to a single service account, making it difficult to track individual user activity. This lack of visibility hampers the ability to detect unauthorized access and respond to security incidents effectively.
• Fragmented Access Logs: Often, access logs are spread across different systems and formats, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of data access patterns and potential security breaches.

Defining Policies is Hard

• Relying on Database Roles: Effective policy definition often relies on database roles, which require significant expertise and time to configure correctly. Security teams must have deep knowledge of database structures and access controls to define robust policies.
• Dynamic Environments: Databases are frequently updated with new schemas, tables, and users, necessitating continuous policy updates. Keeping policies up-to-date in such dynamic environments is a complex and ongoing challenge.

Policies are Not Granular Enough

• Ineffective for Rows and Stored Procedures: Many database security policies are too coarse-grained, applying broadly to entire tables or databases rather than specific rows or stored procedures. This lack of granularity can leave sensitive data within a table inadequately protected.
• Inheritance Issues: Security policies often struggle with inheritance, where permissions granted at higher levels (e.g., database level) are not appropriately inherited by lower levels (e.g., table or row level), leading to inconsistent enforcement.

Ownership of Policies is Unclear

• Distributed Specification: In many organizations, security policies are specified by different teams or individuals, leading to inconsistent and overlapping policies. This distributed approach makes it difficult to ensure a cohesive and comprehensive security posture.
• Responsibility and Authorship: The responsibility for creating and maintaining security policies is often unclear, leading to gaps in policy coverage and enforcement. Without clear authorship, it is challenging to hold individuals or teams accountable for security lapses.

Addressing these challenges requires a coordinated approach that combines standalone DSPM tools with solutions for database activity monitoring and data access control. By doing so, organizations can provide comprehensive visibility, automate policy definition and enforcement, and facilitate clear ownership and responsibility for data security.

DSPM with Cyral

Cyral provides a comprehensive data security governance platform that combines DSPM with solutions for Database Activity Monitoring (DAM), Data Access Control and Database Firewall into a single product. This helps organizations achieve their data security objectives while overcoming the limitations associated with standalone DSPM tools. To learn how Cyral can help organizations with DSPM, sign up for a demo today!