Enterprise security teams must focus on cyber resilience to protect against ransomware and other threats. A key part of cyber resilience is data resilience. Data resilience refers to the ability of the data infrastructure to anticipate, survive, and recover from disruptions, ensuring continued data availability and integrity. If something slips through the protection and detection layers, the data infrastructure must hold out.
CISOs and security teams can only undertake a limited number of projects during a fiscal year. And while the list of possible projects is long, in reality they can only accommodate three to five projects per year due to budget and bandwidth constraints.
Recent research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that data resilience is a top priority for nearly nine out of 10 survey respondents, with 36% of respondents saying it is their top priority.
Data resilience lies at the intersection of Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), data security, privacy, and data governance. DSPM enables organizations to locate and categorize their sensitive data stores so they can protect, secure, and manage the data.
Let’s discuss why organizations need to prioritize DSPM to make a measurable impact on their security programs. I’ll also describe where to start and what use cases can best contribute to success.
The need for DSPM
With ransomware incidents making headlines and bringing affected organizations to a standstill, security leaders are realizing that while protection and detection are essential, threats can slip through. The resilience and recoverability of data infrastructure—also known as data resilience—is critical, and they are prioritizing these projects.
A key element of data resiliency is understanding where sensitive data stores are located and what is in them. You can’t protect what you don’t know about, and DSPM helps identify and categorize data stores. It includes technologies and processes that continuously monitor and assess an organization’s data security controls across all environments. DSPM discovers and categorizes data stores to identify vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and ensure data remains protected from evolving threats.
Two DSPM use cases
Data discovery is a means to an end. Organizations want to achieve something that is enabled by the discovery of their sensitive data. This means they have a DSPM use case.
While there are six key DSPM use cases, two emerged at the top of companies’ lists when we asked them what they wanted to achieve with DSPM:
- Preventing data leaks. The most common use case is preventing data breaches. Security teams need to know where their sensitive data is, what it contains, and the state of that data so they can proactively prevent potential breaches. Actions can range from securing data stores to encryption and masking to removing outdated access to the data store.
- Facilitating the deployment of generative AI technology. Generative AI (GenAI) relies on data to inform the model, but organizations must categorize the data to minimize the risk of data leakage. GenAI projects require finding and categorizing data so that the model is properly informed and sensitive data is not accidentally and inappropriately leaked in response to an unprivileged employee’s prompt for a large language model.
Figuring out what your company wants to achieve (use cases) and how to improve your tools and internal processes is the path to tangible success. The DSPM market continues to grow with innovative startups such as Bedrock Security, Concentric AI, Cyera, Normalyze and Sentra, ongoing acquisition activities (including Rubrik buying Laminar, CrowdStrike buying Flow Security and Tenable buying Eureka Security, to name a few) and organic expansion (e.g. Forcepoint and Varonis).
DSPM can solve a number of problems. Understanding where your company wants to start is the first step towards success.
Todd Thiemann is a senior analyst for identity access management and data security in TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group. He has more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity marketing and strategy.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. The group’s analysts maintain relationships with technology vendors.
