Leading analysts, such as Gartner and GigaOm , have identified a suite of core capabilities that modern DSPM solutions must offer. Collectively, these capabilities help organizations gain visibility into sensitive data, identify risks, remediate misconfigurations, and ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks.
- Automated Data Discovery & Classification
It is the foundational capability that helps automate the discovery of all the data assets across an organization’s diverse environments and the classification of cloud-native and shadow data. This is a baseline component that drives security efforts.
- Contextual Intelligence (Data + AI)
A robust DSPM solution goes beyond metadata analysis, providing comprehensive insights into data and its interactions with systems, applications, and AI.
- Toxic Combinations of Risks
With context into data and AI, DSPM enables security teams to take a holistic view of risks and identify toxic combinations that may appear seemingly innocuous but, when combined, reveal a critical vulnerability.
- Security Posture Management
With this capability, DSPM helps prioritize misconfigurations, such as those that publicly expose sensitive data assets, and automates remediation.
- Data Access Intelligence & Controls
DSPM further enables teams to monitor and track who can access data, when, and how. Security teams leverage these insights to enforce least-privilege access principles.
- Data Flow Intelligence & Governance
Data moves continuously from one data store, cloud, or application to another. DSPMs with integrated data flow intelligence capabilities can better understand data propagation and risks by tracking data lineage.
- ROT Data Minimization
DSPMs are also efficient in detecting and removing redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, optimizing costs, and reducing the attack surface.
- AI Security & Governance
Modern DSPMs play a pivotal role in safely adopting GenAI, with capabilities and controls such as AI risk assessment , access management, and tiered firewall protection.
- Compliance Automation
A DSPM solution must also streamline compliance across data environments. It should help map data with regulatory requirements , provide insights into compliance gaps, and automate controls.
- Automated Remediation
Another core feature of DSPM is automated data security remediation. The solution does so with policy-driven remediation for common risks. For complex issues, the tool provides a federated approach where system owners are notified via tickets. This hybrid approach helps teams reduce remediation timelines and manual effort and lowers the risks of breaches.
- Breach Management
DSPM must offer insights into the scope of data breaches, the volume and type of affected data, impacted identities, and regulatory demands, and help streamline breach management.
