Data security posture management is the practice of safeguarding, protecting, and guarding data. It refers to the practice of ensuring that the data held by an organization is secure, prevents unauthorized access, and is carefully maintained.
More and more global organizations recognize the importance of data security and take proactive steps to ensure that their data is secure. With the increase in the number and severity of data breaches in recent years, data security posture management (DSPM) has become essential to an organization’s overall data security strategy.
This guide provides an overview of data security posture management, what it is, why it’s important, and how organizations can achieve the highest levels of protection. It includes the following topics:
What is Data Security Posture Management?
Data security posture management (DSPM) is securing, protecting and guarding data through automated processes. This enables data teams to observe and manage security policies and access controls and ultimately manage the security of their data.
DSPM is a proactive approach to data security designed to protect an organization’s data by ensuring that they’re properly secured. It requires a coordinated effort between security, data engineering and DevOps teams, system administrators, and end users to ensure that the organization’s data is safe and secure.
Why is Data Security Posture Management Important?
Data security posture management is becoming increasingly important as organizations become more reliant on data and move data quickly and easily between teams to increase time-to-value; resulting in the growing need to secure data, particularly sensitive data. Organizations are increasingly storing sensitive and confidential data in both physical and digital formats, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of where this data, including sensitive data, is located across their data stores.
Data security posture management is essential to an organization’s overall security strategy. It enables the organization to have greater visibility as to where sensitive data is located, who has access to it, for how long they have access and how it’s being used. With DSPM, organizations can identify security holes or weaknesses in their system and take steps to address them before a data breach occurs.
What Techniques Are Used for DSPM?
Data security posture management involves a variety of techniques and processes to protect an organization’s data. Here are some of the common techniques used:
Risk Assessment: Organizations assess the security risk of their data and its location to identify which databases, data warehouses and data stores are vulnerable to attack and which security measures should be implemented.
Access Control: Organizations set up access control policies to ensure that only authorized individuals can access certain data stores, applications, and systems. These access controls can be just-in-time or based on attributes (ABAC) or roles (RBAC).
Data Encryption: Organizations use encryption to secure sensitive data at rest or in transit.
Security Monitoring: Organizations set up security monitoring systems to track and log user activity and data-related events.
How Can Organizations Implement DSPM?
Organizations can achieve data security posture management results by automating and securing sensitive data using the following strategies.
- Create a data security policy: It outlines the procedures for protecting and managing the organization’s data. Security policies are implemented on all sensitive data and should be tailored to the organization’s specific needs and environment.
- Assess the security landscape: Organizations should assess the security landscape in order to identify the risks these include compliance violations and sensitive data logs.
- Implement necessary security measures: Organizations should implement appropriate security measures such as encryption and access control to protect their data from unauthorized access.
- Classification and cataloging: The data policies should include classifying and cataloging sensitive PII and PHI data.
- Monitor and review security posture: Organizations should monitor their data security posture on a regular basis, review logs, and take corrective action if necessary.
DSPM and Satori
Using Data Security Posture Management, Satori helps organizations secure their data in the modern data stack by understanding who has access to what data and how and information about the surface configuration issues and risks.
Satori provides organizations with visibility into their cloud infrastructure and allows them to better understand the data risk they face. Satori continuously seeks out and discovers sensitive data and classifies it across all data stores. Using Satori allows the automated application of security policies.
Using DSPM Satori universally applies security policies to all your databases, data warehouses and data lakes. Masking policies can be based on data types, identities, roles, or attributes and are universal across all data stores. Satori’s Data Access Manager provides increased visibility about who has access to which data, when, and for how long.
DSPM organizations can reduce the likelihood of data breaches and ensure that their data is safe and secure.
Conclusion
Data security posture management (DSPM) is essential to any organization’s security strategy. It enables organizations to have greater visibility as to where sensitive data is located, who has access to it, and how it’s being used. It also helps organizations identify security issues and take corrective action before a data breach occurs.
Organizations can implement DSPM through a variety of techniques, such as risk assessment, access control, data encryption, and security monitoring. Additionally, organizations can use DSPM platforms to achieve better security and compliance with their data stores, applications, and systems.
Overall, data security posture management is a critical component of an organization’s security strategy and is essential for ensuring that data is safe and secure. To learn about DSPM with Satori take a look at our data security guide and book a demo with one of our experts.
