Cyber Awareness Month: Tips on leveraging DSPM to improve your security posture
In recognition of Cyber Awareness Month, Concentric AI is proud to share expert insights on how to effectively protect your organization's sensitive data. In today's digital and cloud-first business environments, understanding the who, what, and where of your information has never been more critical and never more relevant for Cyber Awareness Month. In this article, I will outline the top strategies for safeguarding your data – particularly challenging as it's scattered across on-premises and cloud environments and is increasingly integrated with generative AI systems – using a proven and comprehensive approach called Data Security Posture Management (DSPM).
What is DSPM?
With evolving threats and the security landscape making securing sensitive data a massive challenge, it's no wonder that DSPM has come a long way since Gartner introduced the term a few years ago. In short, DSPM is a comprehensive approach to providing visibility into your data, understanding its context, identifying risks, and automating remediation of those risks.
Gartner and the broader marketplace may define it as an approach to managing your data's security posture, but it is evolving into something much greater – a centralized platform that categorizes and catalogs data while also enforcing governance, compliance, and privacy protections. DSPM is becoming an important tool for managing data lifecycles and ensuring identity and access management — all in a unified system.
How has data protection changed over the years?
Because there was no technology or enough resources to fully grasp how much data an organization had, many of today's security programs have proven unsuccessful at stopping data exfiltration on a large scale. Organizations don't fully understand what data they own, where it resides, or who has access to it. Traditional tools that are supposed to discover and classify data rely on outdated manual methods like regular expressions and keyword searches, which have proven ineffective and unable to scale.
But now, with the rise of AI, we no longer must depend on end users to classify data manually — a process prone to human error and possible intentional misuse. This shift in technology allows companies to prevent insider threats and better protect their sensitive information on a more automated scale.
Why is DSPM so important today?
The security landscape has clearly shifted, and data no longer resides neatly within corporate perimeters that can be easily controlled. With data volumes growing exponentially, along with the skyrocketing use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, accidental data loss has become a significant risk. Employees can unintentionally input sensitive company data into public AI systems, which could lead to data exposure or leakage.
At the same time, data privacy and protection regulations are evolving and proliferating everywhere. To stay compliant, organizations must adopt DSPM as an essential part of their data security strategy. As noted, DSPM helps companies understand what private, sensitive, and IP data they have, where it's located, who has access to it, and how it's being used. This makes DSPM an indispensable component in an organization's security toolset.
How does DSPM work?
Before discussing some important takeaways, it's important to understand how DSPM works.
Whether in the cloud, on-premises or in SaaS applications, every file or data record can be easily shared with anyone worldwide. This data can also be easily copied, duplicated, modified and shared. Imagine 100 variations of a redlined sensitive contract that needs to be protected, with each version containing different access privileges. This presents some serious security challenges, which DSPM can effortlessly address with the right tools.
Here, briefly, are three steps DSPM uses to improve an organization's data security posture:
It identifies all sensitive cloud and on-premises data, from intellectual property to financial to PII/PCI/PHI.
DSPM gathers all information about what data is being shared with whom and tracks data lineage as it moves across the environment. It identifies where data may be at risk, which is a crucial step since it provides visibility into which data is being shared in accordance with corporate security guidelines and where violations are happening. Typically, the DSPM will alert SOC analysts to provide actionable insights.
It remediates security issues as they are happening. For example, it can fix access control issues or permissions, or it can disable sharing a sensitive file that should not be shared.
Benefits of DSPM for organizations
DSPM systems deliver incredible efficiency for organizations. Traditionally, organizations spent hours interviewing business leaders, trying to map what data their departments were creating and how it was being shared. Now, thanks to DSPM, organizations can have a full inventory of data categories and know where data is located and how it's being used.
This shift has also changed how organizations can approach data governance. The focus for IT teams is no longer on discovering data but remediating discovered risks. And it can be done without causing operational disruptions, allowing organizations to continue functioning smoothly while improving their security posture.
Companies that adopt DSPM are reaping critical benefits. They see faster times to value, less operational overhead, and significant risk reduction. Savings on cyber insurance costs are also possible because organizations can now demonstrate to insurance companies that they've done due diligence to reduce risk.
How to improve data security posture
Here are three steps for organizations to improve data security posture:
- Establish a data security steering committee – Form a cross-functional team that includes representatives from legal, HR, compliance, and cybersecurity. This team should have executive buy-in to make strategic decisions on reducing data risk and define key performance indicators (KPIs) for the program.
- Know your data – Understand what data the organization owns, where it's stored, who has access to it, and how it's being used. This crucial step allows organizations to apply effective policies and controls to protect their most sensitive information at a granular level.
- Leverage advanced AI-based DSPM technology – Use DSPM's advanced data categorization as the foundation of the data security strategy. From classification to governance and lifecycle management, advanced DSPM helps enforce access controls, remediate risks, and ensure compliance across all corporate data.
In today's fast-paced, data-driven environment, adopting DSPM is no longer optional.
When companies leverage AI-driven approaches, they can gain complete visibility into their data, mitigate risks, and implement proactive security measures without disrupting business operations. And ultimately, with more sensitive data to manage than ever before, the ability to understand and protect it is becoming a critical competitive advantage – not just during Cyber Awareness Month, but all throughout the year.
