Modern IT environments are a marvel of human ingenuity. They are the foundation of the business world, allowing organizations of all shapes and sizes to produce quality work at an unprecedented pace.
But they’re also a major headache for compliance and privacy teams. Data Security posture management (DSPM) solutions can help relieve the pain.
The Challenges
Recent advances in cloud computing and the subsequent adoption of cloud technology have introduced new compliance and privacy challenges that, if not overcome, could see organizations face massive legal and regulatory fines.
Compliance
Most modern organizations must comply with data protection regulations. For example, healthcare organizations must meet HIPAA requirements, financial institutions must conform to PCI DSS standards, and GDPR applies to any company that handles European citizens’ data. However, modern IT environments are making compliance increasingly difficult. Key challenges include:
- Fragmented data environments ─ Most modern organizations have hybrid setups, including cloud, on-premises, and SaaS platforms. Ensuring compliance across all these platforms can be laborious.
- Dynamic regulatory landscape ─ Changing data privacy laws requires businesses to continuously adapt their processes to avoid non-compliance penalties.
- Audit complexity ─ Proving compliance during audits requires accurate tracking of sensitive data across sprawling IT environments and the data lifecycle, which can be resource-intensive and error-prone.
Data Privacy
Ensuring data privacy is also more difficult than ever. Modern businesses handle an unprecedented amount of data. Keeping track of this data is extraordinarily difficult in modern IT environments, as data becomes lost and overlooked in cloud environments. What’s more, the cybersecurity threat landscape is more treacherous than at any point in history.
What is DSPM? How Does it Ensure Data Privacy and Compliance?
DSPM solutions play a crucial role in mitigating these compliance and data security challenges. They identify, monitor, and safeguard sensitive data, ensuring that organizations comply with relevant data protection regulations and protect data privacy.
DSPM automatically scans data repositories to locate sensitive information, including shadow IT – data created without the knowledge or authorization of security departments – and classifies it based on risk and regulatory requirements. This process helps organizations maintain data integrity and better allocate resources for data protection.
DSPM solutions also continuously track the movement of data across an organization’s environment to detect and offer remediation advice for vulnerabilities, ensuring that no unauthorized person can access sensitive data.
Moreover, by mapping data against relevant regulations, DSPM ensures that a business’s data protection and management practices comply with necessary standards and frameworks, eliminating the need for lengthy compliance audits.
The primary advantages of using a DSPM solution include:
- Reducing the likelihood of breaches through proactive risk management.
- Enhancing data governance by providing a comprehensive view of data lifecycles.
- Supporting automation for faster threat detection and remediation
DSPM’s Evolving Role in Compliance and Data Privacy
It’s worth noting that DSPM’s role in compliance and data privacy is still relatively minor. Gartner predicts that over 20% of organizations will use DSPM by 2026. While this is a significant rise from the less than 1% market penetration of a few years ago, that’s not a massive proportion of companies.
However, DSPM is only likely to increase in popularity in the coming years as data privacy and compliance challenges become more acute and evolving technologies make DSPM tools more effective.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are facilitating the more advanced data discovery, classification, and monitoring techniques. These technologies enable DSPM tools to provide deeper insights into data patterns and predict potential security incidents before they occur.
For example, AI-driven DSPM platforms are capable of context-based classification, which examines how data is used, accessed, and moved within an organization. This contextual understanding enhances the accuracy of risk assessments, ensuring that security measures are tailored to the organization’s unique needs.
Barriers to DSPM Evolution
Despite the huge benefits of DSPM, several barriers stand in the way of widespread adoption. Awareness and understanding of these solutions are still relatively poor, and many IT decision-makers view DSPM tools as overly complex and expensive.
As with any solution, however, these barriers are likely to be eroded over time. As the DSPM market matures and more vendors offer these tools, costs will naturally come down. As for awareness and understanding, there is already a wealth of educational material out there that attempts to demystify DSPM.
Conclusion
All in all, DSPM tools are fast becoming an essential tool for strengthening and streamlining compliance and data privacy. As IT environments become increasingly complex, more organizations will turn to DSPM solutions to ease the burden on overstretched security, compliance, and privacy teams.
Although many organizations may not have the budget for DSPM solutions today, costs are likely to fall, and adoption will increase. In short, DSPM’s future is bright.