DSPM for Regulatory Compliance: Strengthening Your Data Security Strategy

With regulations like the GDPR and CCPA in place, and new ones like the EU AI Act on the way, data compliance can feel like an endless pursuit. And as evolving requirements add complexity, ongoing business changes further deepen the compliance quagmire—whether through new acquisitions, market expansions, or the launch of an AI project. 

Initiatives like these inevitably impact your data—how much there is, where it goes, and its importance to your organization. Meanwhile, compliance remains a constant. 

And while laws regulating data differ, they all revolve around the same core principles:

• Protecting sensitive data
• Maintaining transparency
• Ensuring only authorized individuals can access critical information

These are all areas where Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) can help. DSPM simplifies compliance by automating data discovery and classification to enable proper protection of sensitive data. With this foundation, organizations can implement privacy by design and zero trust principles—all while demonstrating compliance through simplified recordkeeping.

But what specific ways can DSPM help with regulatory compliance?

Finding Regulated Data with Data Discovery‍

A fundamental requirement of regulations like the GDPR is knowing what personal data you have, where it’s stored, and who has access to it. This is easier said than done, especially for large enterprises with thousands of employees, millions of customers, and operations across the globe.

With DSPM, you can automatically discover datastores across cloud and on-prem environments. This discovery simultaneously uncovers critical compliance details, such as if the datastore contains personal data, what country the datastore is in, what security controls (e.g. encryption) are in place, or if the datastore is publicly accessible on the internet. 

Categorizing Regulated Data with Data Classification

Once you've discovered your data, the next step is to understand what you're dealing with. Data classification helps distinguish sensitive data from non-sensitive data. This enables you to put resources toward ensuring that your most critical assets are protected. For organizations subject to regulations like the GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others, accurately classifying personal data is essential. If personal data slips through the cracks, or is transferred somewhere it shouldn’t go, compliance could be at risk. Classification can also help you distinguish highly sensitive personal data—such as race, gender, or health data—from other types of personal data. 

DSPM solutions like Cyera automate data classification at scale, with speed and high precision to give you accelerated visibility into your data. This helps you distinguish between the data that matters and the data that clutters.

Understanding Your Data Compliance Posture‍

Knowing what data you have and classifying it is just the beginning. Posture is about understanding your overall data security and compliance standing. Posture takes a look at all the risks you have and helps you prioritize them. It’s the ultimate view of the data security and compliance risks to your business. However, without data discovery and precise classification, your data security and compliance posture will remain unknown. 

DSPM gives you a picture of your posture and provides guidance on how to strengthen it. With out-of-the-box policies that automatically flag compliance risks, DSPM uncovers critical issues that relate to regulations like the GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and many more. 

Practicing Data Minimization‍

Regulatory frameworks often emphasize the principle of data minimization. This means organizations should only collect and retain data that’s necessary. Collecting and storing data for the sake of collecting and storing data is at odds with data-related regulations. 

DSPM helps businesses identify redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. By doing so, organizations can remove unnecessary data to minimize storage costs and meet data minimization requirements. In turn, this reduces their attack surface and the potential impact of a data breach. Organizations using Cyera have saved millions of dollars a year by reducing storage costs. 

Adhering to Data Retention Requirements‍

Many regulations, such as HIPAA for healthcare, dictate how long certain types of data—like patient records—must be retained. In the financial sector, FINRA mandates retention periods for electronic communications. Organizations handling EU citizen data are subject to the GDPR, which imposes specific requirements for data retention and deletion. Non-compliance with these regulations can result in hefty fines, reputational damage, and increased legal exposure.

DSPM solutions provide granular metadata about your data, such as creation, modification, and access dates. By identifying data that’s outlived its retention period, businesses can take action, either by deleting or archiving the data according to regulatory requirements. This mitigates compliance risk and reduces unnecessary data exposure, improving your overall security and compliance posture.

Uncovering Identities That Access Sensitive Data‍

Managing who—or what—has access to data is essential for regulatory compliance. Many regulations mandate strict access control for sensitive information. That’s why having full visibility into which identities—internal, external, human, and non-human—have access to regulated data is so critical.

DSPM solutions with identity capabilities, such as Cyera’s Identity Module, can surface data access insights, including whether or not an identity can be trusted or if multi-factor authentication (MFA) is in place. By correlating identity access with data discovery and classification, DSPM provides visibility that enables organizations to enforce least privilege principles, ensuring that people, third parties, and even AI tools only access the data they need to do their jobs. This reduces the likelihood of unauthorized data access—a common compliance pitfall.

Maintaining Records to Demonstrate Compliance

‍Compliance requires recordkeeping. Organizations need to be able to demonstrate that they are meeting regulatory requirements, which is why it’s so critical to validate and document your data privacy and security controls. With data spanning multiple environments, across multiple countries, in many different applications, this recordkeeping is not an easy task. 

DSPM solutions simplify recordkeeping by providing a unified view of data across environments, allowing companies to find regulated data and validate if proper protections are in place, such as encryption, SSL, hashing, masking, truncating, MFA, or backups.

Limiting Potential Data Breach Exposure and Streamlining Investigations‍

In the event of a data breach, organizations are often required by law to report the incident within a specified time frame. But how can you do that if you don’t know what data was impacted? 

DSPM with Incident Response solutions like Cyera’s allows businesses to swiftly understand the data involved in an incident—and whether or not it was sensitive in nature. This helps organizations determine if a breach is subject to notification requirements, and if so, meet the timelines imposed by regulations such as the GDPR, HIPAA, NY SHIELD, and the SEC’s new Cybersecurity Disclosure Rule, among others. Many regulations require not only notification to regulators, but also to affected individuals. With DSPM, organizations can investigate breaches to determine exactly which individuals were affected, limiting notifications to only the right individuals. 

Navigating the Future of Regulatory Compliance

Compliance is a business imperative. While no solution offers an “easy button” for total compliance, DSPM vastly simplifies your ability to demonstrate data compliance with global requirements. Cyera’s DSPM solution discovers and classifies data, enabling its protection while streamlining compliance across global regulations. Interested in seeing how? Request a demo today. 

‍