A few years back, data was constrained to the on-premise infrastructure. Data management, governance, and protection were fairly uncomplicated in this enclosed environment. The emergence of cloud computing and multi-cloud infrastructures has not only introduced more complexity in data management and governance, but it has also increased security risks significantly.
Consequently, organizations have turned to solutions like Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to mitigate those security risks and cope with the growing demand for cloud adoption.
There are notable differences between DSPM and CSPM, leading one to wonder whether to pick one over the other or to use both.
Cloud Security Posture Management
CSPM is a cloud infrastructure-focused security application. The job of CSPM is to ensure that every resource, workload, or instance in a cloud or multi-cloud environment has the proper security policies and controls implemented, and that those controls align with the regulatory or compliance standards. CSPM solutions allow security teams to identify misconfigurations or misconfigured cloud security settings, assess security risks, and resolve those errors to protect the assets.
As an example, imagine a medieval castle. A castle has hidden doors, passageways, tunnels, or unguarded towers or walls that could pose serious risks. CSPM identifies those vulnerabilities across cloud environments, including IaaS and PaaS, and remediates them prior to a serious security breach.
A CSPM solution uses best practices from standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), or the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to identify and resolve misconfigurations. The solution scans the IaaS and PaaS environments against security vulnerabilities like publicly exposed storage, opened ports, and unencrypted instances.
Let’s take a look at some of the key aspects of CSPM:
- CSPM protects only the assets and not the data, since it lacks an understanding of data.
- CSPM solutions monitor and analyze configurations across the cloud environment against industry best practices and regulations, offering remediation steps to help security teams to ensure compliance.
- CSPM solutions are limited in their scope of cloud security. Hence, the solution doesn’t cover SaaS applications, and is limited to IaaS and PaaS systems.
Since CSPM solutions do not analyze the data, all the data resources are treated alike. This creates the situation of false positive alerts. For example, a CSPM solution may trigger an alert about publicly exposed datastore misconfiguration without knowing whether the datastore has sensitive data or a dataset that is intended to be publicly accessible, such as the media files of a website hosted on the datastore.
Data Security Posture Management
Unlike CSPM, DSPM offers a completely data-centric approach to cloud security. The solution saves the time and effort of security teams by focusing on protecting cloud assets containing sensitive data. According to Gartner, DSPM is a set of strategic processes that offer security teams “visibility as to where sensitive data is, who has access to that data, how it has been used, and what the security posture of the data store or application is.”
To understand it better, let’s reexamine the analogy of the medieval castle from the CSPM example. While CSPM focuses on finding vulnerabilities like unguarded towers or castle doors and hidden passages, DSPM focuses on protecting the castle's treasure. Hence, even if the castle is breached, the treasure would remain protected if it is well-guarded by a reinforced security vault and strong guards.
A DSPM solution answers the most important questions of an organization looking to govern and protect its data.
- What sensitive data the organization has across its environment, and in which assets does that data exist?
- Who has access to the sensitive data, and what level of permissions do they have while accessing it?
- How has the data moved across systems, and how has it transformed over time?
- What misconfigurations or errors exist in the environment, and how can they be resolved?
Final Thoughts
CSPM and DSPM are important components of cloud security. CSPM focuses on IaaS, PaaS, and compute instances, identifies misconfigured settings, and resolves them. DSPM, on the other hand, focuses more on protecting data in those assets across public clouds. Both the components are their strengths and limitations. Just as the best protection for a medieval castle required protecting the structure as well as the treasure it contained, to best protect your data castle, you should use a combination of both components.
About the Author:
With a strong background in the SaaS and IaaS industry, Syed Sayem Mustufa has extensive experience in Marketing. Over the years, Sayem has served some of the top data intelligence and cybersecurity brands, including Securiti.ai. He loves nothing more than breaking down and simplifying highly complex product details into easy-to-understand benefits for end users.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this and other guest author articles are solely those of the contributor, and do not necessarily reflect those of Tripwire.
