DSPM vs. CSPM: The differences, Importance and When to Use?

Cloud technology has revolutionized businesses by enhancing scalability, accelerating time-to-market, and decreasing operational expenses, thus facilitating a swift trajectory towards innovation and growth. Nevertheless, the road to modernizing cloud security doesn't advance at the same speed.

The task of securing the cloud is uniquely challenging due to the intricate, dispersed structure of the infrastructure. Moreover, safeguarding the colossal volume of data spread throughout the cloud environment becomes an even more critical concern. This is because petabytes of data are dispersed across thousands of data repositories in numerous geographical locations and cloud services.

Over the time, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM ) has proven effective in defending the cloud infrastructure. However, it hasn't been sufficient to halt data breaches, which are now a more pronounced security concern in the cloud than ever before. Herein, Data Security Posture Management (DSPM ) significantly contributes by supplementing CSPM practices and providing robust data protection and compliance.

Let's delve deeper into the contrasts between DSPM and CSPM and understand how these technologies supplement each other to bolster data security.

What is CSPM & How Does It Work?

As per Gartner, CSPM is a suite of services that consistently manage the security posture of IaaS and PaaS through prevention, detection, and response to risks associated with cloud infrastructure.

Analogously, if a fortress were under threat from an invasion, the attackers could potentially infiltrate it through any unchecked and susceptible entry points, like hidden underground passages or unguarded walls. Similarly, CSPM solutions scrutinize a cloud infrastructure for vulnerabilities, enabling information security teams to spot potential infrastructure risks and fix misconfigurations.

CSPM solutions comprise automated configuration checks that correspond to various security controls specified by security and compliance standards, such as CIS, NIST, or PCIDSS. These solutions scan the cloud environment (IaaS and PaaS) and its configurations for issues, like open ports, exposed storage buckets, or weak authentication methods. By continuously monitoring the infrastructure, CSPM rectifies issues or misconfigurations, thereby preventing potential security, reputational, and compliance hazards.

5 Key Features of CSPM

CSPM is equipped with a broad spectrum of features that allow organizations to identify and mitigate security threats and vulnerabilities in their cloud infrastructure. Some commonly available features in various CSPM offerings include:

1. Discovery of cloud resources: CSPM solutions utilize APIs to connect with different cloud providers to identify cloud resources and their configuration settings throughout the environment.
2. Configuration best practices: An essential component of CSPM solutions is configuration best practices and controls that align with security standards and compliance requirements.
3. Risk assessment: This feature involves recognizing cloud resources that are not configured according to best practices. Examples include cloud resources with excessive access permissions, publicly exposed assets, or unencrypted storage volumes.
4. Remediation mechanisms: These controls aid in rectifying configuration settings to reduce risk. This could be achieved by providing manual remediation steps for teams to address the issue or by automating the remediation process through the solution itself.
5. Continuous monitoring: CSPM involves ongoing monitoring to prevent security misconfigurations as existing cloud resources are modified or new cloud resources are added to the environments over time.

Importantly, although CSPM tools may discover cloud storage resources or a managed database containing data, they lack data understanding and, hence, treat all data resources uniformly.

Therefore, with a CSPM solution alone, it's impossible to know which misconfigured data asset needs immediate protection among the hundreds of thousands of assets across the cloud environment containing petabytes of data.

What is DSPM & How Does It Work?

According to Gartner , DSPM is the process that provides insights into where sensitive data is located, who has access to it, how it has been utilized, and the security posture of the data store or application.

Unlike CSPM solutions that lack understanding of the data within a cloud data asset, DSPM adopts a data-first approach to cloud security. To understand better, let's revert to the fortress example discussed earlier.

In the fortress analogy, the focus is on security measures like walls or guards that safeguard the castle. But what about the treasure within that castle? What if the castle is successfully invaded; would the treasure remain secure? Not unless there's a strong security vault to protect the treasure.

Likewise, DSPM is about the controls, policies, and technologies deployed to protect data across public clouds.

On the whole, DSPM addresses the following questions:

• What sensitive data do we possess, and where is it located?
• Who has access to the data, and what level of permissions do they hold?
• What is the data's lineage, and how has it evolved over time?
• What misconfigurations exist in our multi-cloud, and how can we identify and rectify them?

8 Key Features of DSPM

The fundamental features of a typical DSPM solution include:

1. Discovery of data assets: DSPM solutions are capable of discovering data assets, including shadow or dark data assets, in addition to native data assets.
2. Classification of sensitive data: DSPMs have robust detection capabilities that classify sensitive data in structured and unstructured data repositories in public clouds.
3. Data lineage: DSPM employs data lineage capabilities to provide insights into the data transformation lifecycle.
4. Configuration best practices: These are guidelines ensuring all necessary security settings are in place to optimize the data security posture. This includes implementing strong encryption, setting up passwords, configuring firewalls, or applying appropriate access controls.
5. Access visibility and controls: This feature provides visibility into who has access to data and implements access controls to help enforce a least-privilege security policy.
6. Compliance management: This feature aligns the metadata with relevant data protection regulations, such as GDPR, CPRA , PIPEDA, etc., to facilitate compliance.
7. Risk assessment: Risk assessment and management identify and analyze potential misconfiguration, access, and compliance risks associated with an organization’s data, including sensitive data.
8. Continuous monitoring: Due to the incessant growth of enterprise data, ongoing monitoring is essential for continuous data protection.

How DSPM And CSPM Complement Each Other

CSPM and DSPM are two distinct strategies for cybersecurity. While there might be some overlapping areas, there are key differences between them.

Primarily, CSPM focuses on protecting the cloud infrastructure and its resources, covering only IaaS and PaaS components like virtual private clouds or machines, relational databases, compute instances, lambda functions, and serverless components. From a risk management perspective, CSPM lacks data intelligence to prioritize data assets.

On the other hand, DSPM emphasizes the security posture of data in public clouds. It delves into data, gaining insights into its type, sensitivity, geography, transformation over time, and how it's accessed or utilized. With such extensive data intelligence, DSPM aids teams in improving the configuration security posture. This includes controlling access to prevent unauthorized access and encrypting or masking sensitive data to comply with global data privacy regulations, particularly policies around cross-border data transfers and sensitive data sharing.

Despite the differences between DSPM and CSPM, both technologies are vital for comprehensive cloud security. CSPM, while not particularly effective at protecting data, is crucial for securing computing and network resources. DSPM is more effective in prioritizing data risk based on the type and sensitivity of the data.

Conclusion

With a Unified Data Controls framework, Securiti’s DataControls Cloud? aids organizations in optimizing and enhancing the security posture across all their corporate data. Securiti provides top-notch DSPM capabilities by unifying intelligence around data (both at rest and in motion), access governance policies and controls, data transformation insights, data mapping automation, and the capacity to decrease misconfigured data systems.

Securiti surpasses typical DSPM solutions that support only the public cloud by offering a unified solution that secures data across public clouds, private clouds, data clouds, and SaaS. Securiti Data Controls Cloud has been recognized as the Gartner Cool Vendor in data security for assisting customers in mitigating liabilities around sensitive data as they embark on their digital transformation journey while reducing operational cost and complexity.