From Fragmented to Unified: Taming Data Sprawl with Zscaler DSPM

Manage, control, and secure your data universe through a single, unified approach.

Data is everywhere – fragmented across cloud environments (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS), endpoints, and on-premises. By 2028 global data is projected to exceed 400 zettabytes, with half residing in the cloud and 90% being unstructured. This explosive growth, compounded by shadow AI, where employees often adopt generative AI and other applications without IT oversight, creates critical blind spots and intensifies pressure on security and compliance teams.

Historically, organizations have tackled this challenge with disparate tools for each data type, resulting in a costly, complex, and fragmented security ecosystem. These siloed solutions lack unified visibility and control, leading to scattered policies, strained resources, and a disjointed response that paradoxically makes business critical data less secure. Without a single source of truth, security operations remain fragmented. This fragmentation underscores the urgent need for a unified approach. 

From Fragmented to Unified: Achieve Complete Data Security with Zscaler

Zscaler Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) addresses today’s profound data security challenges with a unified approach and overcoming the limitations of fragmented tools. DSPM centralizes data security efforts, providing visibility and control across diverse data environments through one intuitive, unified dashboard. Organisations get a precise, comprehensive view of data landscape, allowing you to discover, classify data, and fix associated risks from a single console. This strengthens your overall security, ensures robust regulatory compliance across all platforms.

By integrating data and insights from various sources, DSPM helps to eliminate siloed tools and bridges critical security gaps across the AI ecosystem, SaaS, CASB, endpoints, and both cloud and on-premises infrastructures. This empowers security teams with a single pane of glass, full context, enabling more effective risk identification and mitigation.

The Benefits of a Unified DSPM

Zscaler DSPM provides a single, comprehensive method for securing both data at rest and in motion. It integrates essential capabilities that empower security, risk, and compliance teams to effectively manage and enhance their organization's data security. Key advantages include:

Holistic visibility and control: Highly effective security starts with a complete, contextual map of data landscape. Achieve centralized, real-time visibility into data, data flows, access patterns, potential risks, and violations across entire environment. This insight facilitates quicker incident response, prevents security gaps, and supports comprehensive data discovery, classification, and inventory. This helps organizations with 

• Data Discovery: Sensitive data across IaaS, SaaS, on-prem, endpoint, and data clouds
• Data Classification: Classify and categorize data using advanced LLM classification
• Data Inventory: Understand data storage locations, access, usage, and more

This provides a single, unified view, eliminating the blind spots that exist between different data environments.

Data Access Governance: Based on data classification, DSPM allows security teams to define granular access controls, assigning permissions to users and groups based on their job roles and need-to-know principles. It provides granular visibility into who has access to specific data, what their privilege levels are, and whether that access is appropriate. DSPM helps with 

• Data Access Graph: Provides comprehensive details like ‘Who can access what?’ to map and track data access exposure risk.
• Least-Privilege Access: Identifies and fixes access issues and enforce least-privilege access.
• Access Governance: Enforces granular access controls based on zero trust.

Simplify and Enforce Data Compliance: DSPM helps organisations to seamlessly comply with complex regulations and standards like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), and more. DSPM flags violation and create real-time reports to attest compliance and avoid penalties, regardless of data residency. Security and GRC team get: 

• Compliance Visibility: Complete visibility into AI and data compliance posture.
• Benchmarking: Map AI and data security posture to frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.
• Analytics and Reporting: Get deep analytics and automated reporting for compliance audits.

Risk Mitigation: Organisations benefit from centralized, automated risk analysis, correlation, and prioritization to prevent data loss by eliminating risks such as misconfigurations, exposure, ROT (Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial) data, etc. With all data in one place, teams can easily monitor risk trends, prioritize actions, collaborate effectively, and streamline enforcing consistent security with security intelligence. Security teams can:  

• Identify and Analyze Risk: Map and track critical security risk, data exposure and more  for all channels with unified dashboard and near to real time alerts.
• Correlate Risk: Identify toxic combinations of risks to get rid of hidden attack paths.
• Risk Remediation: Address critical risk effectively by following step-by-step guidance with complete context.

Accelerate Secure AI Adoption with AI-SPM: Organisations can leverage complete visibility, accurate classification, and granular control over sensitive data used in AI cloud services with complete AI-SPM fully integrated with Zscaler DSPM. AI-SPM helps to prevent accidental exposure, overly permissive or unauthorized access, and potential AI compliance violations. It also helps to:  

• Discover Data and AI Models: Get deep visibility into shadow AI, such as what data and AI models are being used.
• Analyze Risks: Correlate data and AI risks such as misconfigurations, exposure, compliance violations, etc.
• Enable AI Governance: Secure sensitive data and AI models and ensure compliance with relevant regulations and industry standards.

The Unified Advantage: Drive Business Value and Reduce Risk

Adopting a unified DSPM approach is more than an operational upgrade—it’s a strategic business advantage. By creating a single source of truth for your data security posture, you can:

• Accelerate Innovation: Empower teams to confidently adopt AI and new technologies with complete visibility into data risks.
• Boost Efficiency & Proactivity: Automate risk detection and prioritization to eliminate manual work, reduce alert fatigue, and address exposures before a breach occurs.
• Simplify Compliance: Maintain consistent policies and streamline reporting to meet regulatory mandates and avoid penalties.
• Unify Teams: Break down silos with a shared understanding of your data security posture, fostering clear communication and collaborative risk management.

Tame your data sprawl and transform security from a fragmented cost center into a unified business enabler.

How does your organization stack up when it comes to securing data everywhere? 

Data is everywhere and organizations need a solution for securing their data all with a comprehensive and unified view. If a unified approach sounds like a relevant strategy to tackle your organisation's data security challenges, join us for a live webinar - Stop the Silos, Secure the Data - A Unified Approach to DSPM where we will discuss the benefits in more detail. You can also watch a DSPM product tour or schedule a demo with Zscaler experts!

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