Choosing the Right DSPM

How to Choose the Right DSPM Platform

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Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) platforms are becoming a must-have for organizations seeking to reduce data risk. At their core, DSPM platforms connect to your different systems (IaaS/PaaS, SaaS, and on-prem) to discover and classify data, helping identify sensitive data that might be at risk. This unified view provides a holistic perspective of your data estate and your associated data security posture. 

What to Prioritize in a DSPM Platform

Data proliferation, stringent regulations, and complex business models are a few of the many reasons that DSPM is rapidly becoming a well-known acronym. But what should you look for in a DSPM platform? There are five critical factors you should focus on. Speed, scale, precision, intelligence, and context. These characteristics will play a pivotal role in determining the success of your DSPM platform. 

Speed. The world’s leading DSPM platforms offer accelerated visibility. This means they are easy to implement across environments and results come quickly. They are often agentless and can connect to your environments without requiring highly manual database connections. This is especially important as showing rapid return on investment (ROI) from your DSPM investment is critical. A slow, costly configuration delays these results. Additionally, the longer your data is in the dark, the more risk you carry. 

Consider asking: 

• How fast can your DSPM solution be implemented across our environments?
• How long before we start to see results?
• In what ways will we be able to demonstrate ROI in the first month? 
• How does the solution minimize manual configuration time?
• Does the solution integrate without agents? 
• Does the solution require manual database connections?

Scale. The best DSPM platforms can scale effortlessly across vast, complex environments. In the age of AI, and as your business grows, data volumes will only accelerate, meaning you need a solution built to last. A DSPM solution that can’t scale creates blind spots, leaving critical data exposed. As your data grows, your DSPM platform must match its pace, ensuring that no sensitive data falls through the cracks.

Consider asking:

• How does your DSPM platform scale across large, complex environments?
• How does your solution handle growing data volumes?
• What is the most amount of data your solution has discovered and classified?

Precision. The ultimate value of a DSPM platform is in its ability to accurately identify and classify sensitive data. Inaccurate classification burns resources and, even worse, leaves sensitive data unprotected. High classification precision leads to fewer  false positives and helps eliminate blind spots. This high precision minimizes noise, focuses efforts on real risks, and allows your team to act on insights without second-guessing the platform's findings. This can only be achieved through the use of sophisticated AI-based classification, which does not require any manual tuning.

Consider asking:

• How precise is your platform in identifying and classifying sensitive data?
• What mechanisms does your platform use outside of regular expressions (regex) to identify and classify sensitive data?
• What measures are in place to ensure high classification precision?
• How much time is needed to manually tune classifiers for better results?

Intelligence. A modern DSPM platform needs to go beyond out-of-the-box classifiers. Every business has unique data that generic classifiers won’t uncover (e.g. proprietary formulas, internal design docs, or custom ID numbers). This is often some of the most crucial data to an organization’s operations. It’s critical that your DSPM platform can leverage advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to create custom classifiers tailored specifically to your business. Without this level of intelligence, important data will go undiscovered.

Consider asking:

• Does your platform automatically create custom classifiers with AI?
• How does your platform adapt and learn from data over time? 
• What AI and machine learning capabilities does your platform use? 

Context. Seeing data in isolation is not enough. The best DSPM platforms provide context, meaning they offer deep insights into the data itself. For example, knowing that a datastore contains personal information is helpful. Knowing that the personal information relates to your EU customers, is unencrypted, and is stored in the US is even more helpful. That's context. This context empowers security teams to make more informed decisions and prioritize the risks that matter most.

Consider asking:

• What context does your platform provide in addition to the data classification?
• How does your platform help us understand the full risk profile of data?
• Does your platform offer risk prioritization capabilities? 

Making the Right Choice for Your DSPM Needs

Your DSPM platform will be the cornerstone of your data security strategy. It’s a critical decision to get right. Search for solutions that offer:

• Speed of deployment and ongoing discovery for accelerated visibility
• Scalability across data types and environments
• Precision when classifying data without manual tuning
• Deep data context to better understand your data estate
• Intelligence to automatically learn and classify unique data types

With the right questions in hand, you can ensure the DSPM platform you choose is right for both short- and long-term success. To learn more about Cyera’s DSPM solution, request a demo today.