As enterprises continue to experience a sharp uptick in data blind spots and a widening of their attack surfaces, the need for automated data discovery, classification, and control is only growing more urgent. Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)—a term coined by Gartner in 2022—is often described as a solution that can address these critical needs, and the market for such solutions is said to have a compound annual growth rate of 34% over the next decade.
With that in mind, legacy tools like data loss prevention (DLP) and dedicated data classification solutions, among others, can also address these data protection needs. With DSPM being as new as it still is, and given its overlap with adjacent solutions, organizations are often left wondering what DSPM is, what role(s) it can play in their greater data protection strategies, and whether or not DSPM is worth the investment. Using analogies to describe ten use cases, we'll show how a comprehensive DSPM solution can work with your organization's current data protection architecture, how it extends the capabilities your tools already deliver, and how it can directly improve your overall security posture.
1. Secure AI Tool Adoption
The Risk Assessor
When an organization implements a new piece of technology to its employees’ workflows, risk assessors are often tasked with determining the level of risk that tech solution presents to the organization’s security posture before deployment. This is particularly relevant to AI solutions, which can be significantly beneficial for employee productivity but also present risks to your sensitive data. DSPM not only identifies these risks, but actively enforces policies that prevent users from inadvertently over-sharing or otherwise exposing sensitive data to generative AI tools or their training sets.
2. Managing Data Sprawl in Mergers & Acquisitions
The Herdsman
During mergers and acquisitions—especially for those who have compliance standards to meet—it can be easy for the sheer sprawl of data to become overwhelming and to lose visibility of some of that data, putting your security posture and compliance readiness at risk. DSPM can be thought of as a herdsman in this scenario whose job is to get a lay of the land (map all data repositories across both organizations) and rein in any cattle (sensitive data) that wandered off or were otherwise hidden. In this way, DSPM accelerates the integration process by identifying compliance risks, data access conflicts, and overlapping data sets.
3. Identify Shadow IT
The Private Investigator
In the work-from-home, bring-your-own-device era, shadow IT has been on the rise. Whether that means an employee is using a personal device, downloads a piece of unapproved software to their work machine, or uses unsanctioned web-based apps, these can all put an organization’s sensitive data at risk. The problem is that many data protection solutions don’t have the reach to prevent users from sharing sensitive data with these apps and devices. In this way, DSPM acts as a private investigator who monitors the data users are creating, editing, moving, and sharing—and where they’re sharing it. When DSPM finds a user attempting to share data with unapproved cloud applications or use a device your IT team hasn’t been made aware of, it can block sensitive data from being shared.
4. Compliance & Audit Readiness
The Compliance Officer
Compliance can often present more granular challenges for employees, but at an organizational level, it’s the costly and manual processes like gathering evidence for audits that emerge as the most pressing concerns, as they can have a direct impact on productivity and your bottom line. DSPM acts as a virtual compliance officer on your team that automates reporting, showing the locations of all the sensitive data governed by the compliance regulations you abide by.
5. Identifying Erroneous Data Access & Insider Threats
The Receptionist
A receptionist at a hotel is typically responsible for checking guests in for their stay, ensuring they have access to specific amenities, resolving guest issues and concerns, and ensuring a smooth check-out process. DSPM can also be thought of as a receptionist—where the hotel rooms and amenities represent an organization’s data stores and network resources, and the guests represent employees and third-party collaborators. DSPM manages data access controls for employees and any third-party data handlers, prevents erroneous access to specific network resources and data by those lacking proper privileges, and terminates access when an employee leaves an organization or a third-party contractor’s engagement has ended.
6. Data Discovery & Classification
The Researcher & Taxonomist
Researchers in their respective fields make discoveries every day, whether that means a biologist discovering a new organism, an astronomer discovering a new planet, a chemist discovering a new compound, etc. Taxonomists then name those discoveries for the sake of organization and consistency across languages. In the context of data protection, DSPM serves as both the researcher and taxonomist, discovering an organization’s (potentially unknown) sensitive data across its cloud or hybrid environment and then applying the proper classification(s) according to compliance and business needs.
7. Minimize False Positives
The Operations Manager
The job of an operations manager in any department is to eliminate roadblocks for your employees so they can focus on the most important and valuable work relevant to their roles. One of the many roadblocks common to IT teams is false positives, often caused by a complex data environment, one or several misconfigurations in your systems, normal behaviors that are detected as suspicious, and more. But by making use of AI classifiers, optical character recognition (OCR), predefined policies based on organizational needs, and more, Fortra DSPM acts as an IT operations manager that significantly reduces false positives and promotes uninterrupted, yet safer operations.
8. Automating Data Residency Assurance
The Travel Agent
When planning a vacation—particularly a vacation spanning several international locations—many opt to hire a travel agent to assist in planning. These agents often assist with important components of the trip like acquiring visas and arranging bookings, but they can also tell travelers where to avoid on their trips and help resolve any issues during the trip. In the realm of regulatory compliance, DSPM can continuously ensure data remains within approved geographic or regulatory boundaries, acting as a sort of travel agent for your sensitive data. It automatically flags when files drift into unauthorized locations, simplifying compliance and assuring data residency for multi-cloud operations.
9. Securing Ephemeral Cloud Workflows
The Hired Guard
Many event venues already have their own security team in place responsible for the safety of event attendees, but these venues will sometimes need to hire extra security for occasional large-scale events or for events with important guests. Similarly, organizations will sometimes need to secure temporary testing environments and other ephemeral cloud workflows, but many security tools can’t scan these environments for sensitive data. Think of DSPM as an extra hired guard, making it possible to monitor both your permanent environment along with these contained or ephemeral environments. It visualizes where sensitive data lands and then ensures it’s destroyed once the temporary environments are terminated.
10. Preventing Data Poisoning in AI Pipelines
The Engineer
For organizations that are building or fine tuning their own AI models, the threat of data poisoning is an ongoing challenge. While engineers work tirelessly to safeguard the integrity of their models, some of which already use somewhat vulnerable public and/or open-source datasets for training, they must also stay vigilant for unauthorized modifications or injected data that could alter model behavior. DSPM serves as an extra team member whose sole responsibility is to monitor training sets for these kinds of alterations and block malicious access in real time.
Why Fortra DSPM?
While the ideal DSPM tool can address multiple data protection pain points, not all solutions are built to protect your entire data ecosystem. Fortra DSPM learns your organization's unique DNA, including the types of structured or unstructured you handle, the compliance standards you're held to, and which data is most vulnerable to a breach. Our tool quickly maps your data landscape from your endpoints to the cloud via automated data discovery and classification, delivers comprehensive visibility of your sensitive data, proactively prioritizes and mitigates risks, and eliminates the need for manual, error-prone compliance processes.
Ready to see Fortra DSPM in action? Schedule a free 30-day risk assessment powered by our comprehensive data protection solution—no commitment required.