DSPM: Five Key Takeaways

In our Zenith Live ’24 DSPM session titled ‘Secure Cloud Data with a Fully Integrated Platform’, Srikanth Nellore, Sr. Director of Product Management at Zscaler, Kalie Radsmikham, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Zscaler, and Guest Speaker Paulo Ricardo Martins Calvo, Information Security at Inter&Co. gave valuable insights into the dynamic landscape of data security challenges and how organizations can future-proof data protection with a fully integrated DSPM solution.

Here are five key takeaways: 

Data Is (Still) Exploding
While multicloud environments and cloud native architectures have enabled rapid transformation and innovation, they’ve also created an explosion of data that’s becoming increasingly difficult for security professionals to manage. Traditional approaches and legacy solutions cannot keep pace with the rate of change and data volumes. During the session, Kalie Radsmikham, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Zscaler highlighted that ‌more than 175 zettabytes of data is expected to move to the cloud by 2025, reaffirming the unstoppable growth of data and its migration to cloud environments.

Cloud Data Is the New Target
The session emphasized that ‌sensitive data, stored in ‌complex and agile multicloud environments, is a prime target for bad actors. We discussed the stats that included 82% of breaches involved data stored in the cloud and $4.45M was the global average cost of a data breach. This stat highlights ‌cloud data as a prime target, and organizations need comprehensive data security strategies to effectively safeguard sensitive data and enhance their overall security postures. 

The Top Data Security Challenges 
In this session, our guest speaker Paulo Ricardo Martins Calvo, Information Security at Inter&Co, shared his first-hand experience in securing data. Paulo also discussed the challenges of securing data in a fragmented, heterogeneous cloud infrastructure, identifying and classifying structured and unstructured data, avoiding data security risks, and maintaining regulatory compliance with limited resources.

We also highlighted visibility and control as mainstream challenges in securing large volumes of cloud data, as most organizations do not know:

- Where sensitive data resides
- Who has access to it
- How data has been used
- The security and compliance posture of the data store or application
 

This session also highlighted the challenge of navigating resource constraints when securing data. Most organizations depend on multiple security tools that require a significant investment in time, money, and personnel, a major concern for organizations with limited resources.
 

The Importance of DSPM In Securing Cloud Data 
This session highlighted Gartner's definition of data security posture management: ”Data security posture management (DSPM) provides 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 stored or application is.”

It also touches on the role of DSPM as part of a greater data protection strategy, how it is inextricably linked to the rapid advancements in cloud technology, and the ever-evolving data privacy and security landscape. 

The Zscaler DSPM Approach to Data Security
To address the complexities and challenges of data security, this session presented the Zscaler DSPM approach. The approach emphasized the importance of a comprehensive integrated data protection strategy that secures both structured and unstructured data across web, SaaS-based services, public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), private applications, email, and endpoints.

Srikanth Nellore also demonstrated Zscaler DSPM’s key capabilities that provide granular visibility into cloud data, classify and identify data and access, and contextualize data exposure and security posture, empowering organizations and security teams to prevent and remediate cloud data breaches at scale. To provide a comprehensive understanding about DSPM, this session also covered top DSPM use cases, which included data discovery, classification, risk investigation and prioritization along with DSPM operationalization. 

Watch the session

To watch the Zenith Live 24 Data Protection session on demand, visit /events/zenithlive2024.