What Is Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)?
January 5, 2026
Table of contents
Key takeaway
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) revolutionizes cloud security by shifting focus from protecting infrastructure to protecting the data itself. As organizations face "data sprawl" across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, DSPM automates the discovery and classification of sensitive information—including hidden "shadow data" that traditional tools often miss. By providing continuous visibility into where data lives and who has access, DSPM fills the critical gaps left by CSPM and DLP, allowing security teams to proactively fix risks before they become breaches.
Video Overview
DSPM is a security platform that discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive business data in a diverse technology environment. This solution continuously discovers and classifies data data to assess its security posture and identify vulnerabilities, allowing security teams to make informed data security and governance decisions.
Also referred to as ‘data first’ security, data security posture management made its official industry debut as part of Gartner’s 2022 Hype Cycle for Data Security.
DSPM is particularly effective in securing sensitive information across a multitude of data stores, including cloud data repositories, multi-cloud environments (e.g. AWS and Microsoft Azure environments), and IaaS platforms. Anywhere data is stored, processed, and accessed by a diverse workforce benefits from the use of DSPM. DSPM focuses on minimizing the potential of data exposure by securing organizations’ vital data (e.g. financial data, healthcare data, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property) rather than focusing primarily on perimeter or infrastructure security.
Key DSPM Features and Capabilities
DSPM solutions discover and classify an organization's sensitive data, assess its security posture, and provide remediation guidance aligned with security objectives and compliance requirements. It also establishes safeguards and monitoring to prevent the recurrence of identified vulnerabilities.
DSPM platforms are typically agentless and highly automated, enabling rapid deployment without infrastructure changes. DSPM solutions operate by relying on the following key functions:
1. Data Discovery
DSPM solutions discover and catalog all data assets across an organization's infrastructure, including cloud repositories and on-premises data stores. Through integrations with cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, DSPM platforms scan diverse storage locations and data flows to create a comprehensive inventory, ensuring complete visibility even in complex multi-cloud environments.
2. Data Classification
Once discovered, DSPM solutions classify data based on sensitivity level and regulatory requirements. This categorization helps organizations understand which data is most critical and requires the strongest protection, enabling them to prioritize data protection efforts and allocate resources effectively.
3. Risk Assessment and Prioritization
DSPM platforms evaluate data security posture by identifying vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and potential threats through continuous assessment. This helps organizations prioritize data assets requiring immediate attention, allowing security teams to focus resources on the most critical risks.
4. Configuration and Policy Management
DSPM solutions ensure data security configurations and policies align with best practices and regulatory standards. They verify system and application settings to detect misconfigurations and weak access controls, enforcing security policies consistently across the organization to prevent unauthorized data exposure.
5. Remediation Guidance
DSPM platforms provide actionable recommendations for addressing identified security issues, including detailed guidance on fixing misconfigurations, strengthening access controls, and resolving policy violations. This intelligence helps security teams understand root causes and implement effective fixes.
6. Monitoring and Reporting
DSPM solutions offer detailed dashboards and reports that provide real-time insights into an organization's data security posture. They continuously monitor for changes and emerging risks, classify threats based on potential impact, and alert security teams to critical issues requiring immediate attention.
DSPM vs. DLP
Data loss prevention (DLP) is specifically designed to prevent unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data by enforcing security policies and preventing data breaches and leaks. DLP solutions actively monitor data in motion, at rest, and in use, applying rules to block or alert potential data loss incidents.
While DSPM and DLP serve different primary functions, they can complement each other effectively. DSPM provides the foundational visibility and understanding of data assets necessary for effective data protection, while DLP offers enforcement mechanisms to prevent data exfiltration and misuse. By integrating DSPM's comprehensive data insights with DLP's active prevention capabilities, organizations can achieve a more robust and cohesive data security strategy, ensuring that sensitive data is both well-managed and protected against loss or unauthorized access.
Explore why organizations need more than just DLP to comprehensively protect their data.
DSPM vs. DDR
Data Detection and Response (DDR) is more focused on real-time threat detection and response than DSPM. DDR solutions continuously monitor data activities to identify suspicious or malicious behavior using advanced analytics and machine learning. They are designed to detect potential threats quickly and respond promptly, minimizing the impact of security incidents.
While DSPM is concerned with the overall management and protection of data security posture, DDR provides immediate protection against active threats. These tools complement each other by combining DSPM's strategic oversight and governance of data security with DDR's tactical, real-time threat detection and response capabilities. By integrating both solutions, organizations can ensure that their data is not only well-managed and compliant but also actively protected against emerging threats. This comprehensive approach enhances the organization's ability to safeguard its data assets.
DSPM vs. IRM
Insider risk management (IRM) specifically addresses the risks posed by insiders, such as employees, contractors, or partners who have legitimate access to an organization’s systems and data. IRM solutions focus on detecting, assessing, and mitigating risks associated with insider threats, whether they are malicious or unintentional. By monitoring user behavior and access patterns, IRM helps identify anomalies that could indicate potential insider threats, allowing organizations to take proactive measures to prevent data breaches or misuse.
When combined, IRM and DSPM offer a holistic approach to cloud data security. DSPM provides the foundational visibility and governance necessary to manage data security effectively, while IRM adds an additional layer of protection by specifically addressing insider threats. Together, they ensure that an organization's data is not only well-governed and compliant but also safeguarded against risks from both external and internal sources, enhancing the overall security posture.
Understand how DSPM, DLP, and IRM work together with our implementation guide.
DSPM vs. CSPM
DSPM and cloud security posture management (CSPM) are both critical components of an organization's cloud data security strategy, but they focus on different aspects of cybersecurity management.
DSPM is primarily concerned with safeguarding data across diverse data stores, making them essential for organizations looking to protect their most valuable asset — the data itself.
On the other hand, CSPM focuses on securing cloud infrastructure by continuously monitoring and assessing the security posture of cloud-native environments. CSPM tools identify and remediate misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations within cloud infrastructures that jeopardize cloud data, ensuring that security settings adhere to industry standards and best practices. By automating the detection and resolution of cloud-native risks, CSPM helps organizations maintain a secure and compliant cloud environment.
While DSPM directly addresses cloud data security, CSPM ensures that the underlying cloud infrastructure is secure, making both solutions complementary in achieving a comprehensive cloud data security posture.
Business Benefits of DSPM
Data security posture management offers numerous business benefits by addressing key challenges in data security.
1. Enhanced Security Posture and Reduced Data Breach Risk
DSPM improves an organization's security by continuously monitoring data stores and data flows for vulnerabilities and threats. It automates the identification and management of misconfigurations, outdated access controls, and excessive permissions, enhancing data protection and reducing the risk of data breaches. This occurs through consistently applying and updating cloud data security controls and identifying violations of principle of least privilege.
2. Improved Regulatory Compliance
Compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS is crucial for avoiding financial penalties and maintaining customer trust. DSPM solutions support compliance efforts by auditing policies against regulatory requirements and identifying potential violations, thereby demonstrating a commitment to data protection and privacy.
3. Complete Data Visibility and Attack Surface Reduction
DSPM solutions offer a comprehensive view of an organization's data landscape, across SaaS, cloud, and on-premises environments. They effectively discover and classify data, reducing the attack surface and ensuring all data assets are accounted for and protected, minimizing unauthorized access risks.
4. Increased Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings
DSPM automates cloud data security processes, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing security team workload. This allows security personnel to focus on high-value tasks, by automating monitoring and remediation. DSPM also helps organizations avoid data breaches and non-compliance penalties, resulting in significant cost savings.
DSPM Use Cases for Securing Sensitive Data
Data security posture management addresses critical data security challenges across modern organizations. Here are the primary use cases where DSPM delivers measurable value:
Securing Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments
Organizations operating across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premises infrastructure face challenges maintaining consistent security policies and visibility. DSPM provides centralized visibility and control by automatically discovering sensitive data across all platforms, integrating with cloud-native APIs to continuously monitor configurations, identifying misconfigurations, and enforcing uniform protection policies. This is essential for organizations managing hundreds or thousands of cloud storage buckets, databases, and SaaS applications, significantly reducing breach risks from configuration errors.
Detecting and Preventing Insider Threats
DSPM continuously monitors user access patterns to detect insider threats—employees, contractors, or partners who may misuse legitimate access maliciously or accidentally. The solution establishes behavioral baselines and identifies anomalies including unusual data downloads, access outside normal job responsibilities, attempts to exfiltrate data to personal accounts, large-volume file copying, and patterns indicating compromised credentials. By correlating user behavior with data sensitivity and access context, DSPM enables security teams to investigate and mitigate threats before data loss occurs.
Automating Regulatory Compliance
Meeting GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CCPA, and other regulatory requirements demands knowing what regulated data exists, where it resides, who accesses it, and how it's protected. DSPM automates compliance by continuously discovering and classifying data according to regulatory requirements, monitoring protection practices against applicable regulations, identifying gaps and violations in real-time, generating audit trails and compliance reports, and providing remediation guidance. This enables continuous compliance monitoring rather than periodic point-in-time audits, demonstrating ongoing due diligence to auditors and regulators.
Discovering and Classifying Sensitive Data
Many organizations lack visibility into where sensitive data resides—a fundamental security gap. DSPM automatically scans structured databases, unstructured files, cloud storage, email systems, and collaboration platforms to discover PII, PHI, payment card data, financial records, intellectual property, and confidential business data. The solution classifies this data by sensitivity level, business criticality, and regulatory requirements, creating a comprehensive inventory that serves as the foundation for effective protection.
Prioritizing Risk Remediation
DSPM helps organizations systematically reduce their attack surface by identifying and prioritizing overexposed data with permissive access controls, publicly accessible storage, excessive user permissions violating least privilege, stale data requiring archival or deletion, misconfigured encryption settings, and unmanaged shadow repositories. Findings are prioritized based on data sensitivity, exposure level, regulatory impact, and business consequences, enabling security teams to focus on the most critical risks first.
Managing Third-Party Data Access
Modern operations require sharing data with partners, vendors, and contractors, creating third-party risk exposure. DSPM monitors what data is shared externally, tracks third-party access and usage, identifies overly permissive sharing and excessive external access, ensures compliance with contractual and regulatory obligations, and detects unauthorized sharing or exfiltration. This is critical for healthcare, financial services, legal, and technology companies sharing sensitive client data under strict controls.
Securing Cloud Migration Projects
Organizations migrating to the cloud face security challenges during transitions when data exists in multiple locations and security responsibility shifts. DSPM provides visibility throughout migration by discovering and classifying data pre-migration, monitoring data movement in real-time, validating security controls in new environments, detecting exposure risks introduced during migration, and maintaining compliance throughout the transition. This prevents inadvertent data exposure from misconfiguration or inadequate planning during cloud transfers.
Why DSPM Matters Now In Data Security
The modern data security landscape has fundamentally changed, creating an urgent need for data security posture management. Organizations today face unprecedented challenges that traditional security tools were never designed to address.
The Perfect Storm of Data Security Challenges
Several converging factors have made DSPM essential for contemporary enterprises:
- Explosive Data Growth Across Distributed Environments: Organizations now manage exponentially more data than ever before, spread across on-premises systems, multiple cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and hybrid infrastructures. This data sprawl creates blind spots where sensitive information can exist undetected and unprotected. Without comprehensive visibility into where data resides, how it moves, and who accesses it, organizations cannot effectively secure their most valuable assets.
- Increasingly Sophisticated Threat Landscape: Cybersecurity threats have evolved dramatically in complexity and scale. Attackers now leverage advanced techniques including AI-powered tools, zero-day exploits, and sophisticated social engineering to target sensitive data. Traditional security approaches that focus on perimeter defense are insufficient when threats can originate from anywhere—external attackers, compromised credentials, or insider risks. DSPM addresses this by using AI and machine learning to detect anomalous data access patterns and hidden threats that conventional tools miss.
- Mounting Regulatory and Compliance Pressures: The regulatory environment has become significantly more stringent, with frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS, and industry-specific regulations imposing severe penalties for non-compliance. Organizations must demonstrate continuous compliance, maintain detailed audit trails, and prove they know exactly where regulated data resides and how it's protected. The complexity of managing compliance across multiple jurisdictions and frameworks makes manual approaches virtually impossible.
- The Inadequacy of Legacy Security Tools: Traditional security solutions generate overwhelming volumes of alerts without adequate context or prioritization, leading to alert fatigue among security teams. These tools often lack the intelligence to distinguish critical vulnerabilities from low-priority issues, forcing security teams to waste valuable time investigating false positives while real threats go unaddressed. Organizations need smarter, more contextual approaches to data security that enable proactive risk management rather than reactive firefighting.
- Complex Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Infrastructure Management: Modern organizations operate across on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), private clouds, and hundreds of SaaS applications. Each platform has different security controls, APIs, and configuration options, making it nearly impossible to maintain consistent security policies manually. This architectural complexity creates configuration drift, policy gaps, and security blind spots that attackers can exploit.
- Critical Data Governance and Risk Management Gaps: Organizations struggle to maintain effective data governance as data volumes and complexity increase. Without proper governance frameworks, security teams cannot identify which data assets pose the greatest risk, prioritize remediation efforts effectively, or demonstrate due diligence to stakeholders and regulators. Data governance and risk management are crucial for minimizing security risks, yet many organizations lack the tools to implement these practices at scale.
Learn more about Data Security Posture Management with our complete guide, Next-Gen DSPM: Built For the AI-Driven Data World.