Securing your cloud data environment shouldn’t come at the expense of an insecure DSPM solution and deployment. With the evolution of the DSPM market, there are considerable differences in how DSPM platforms are implemented – many of which have broad security implications. When evaluating DSPM, data security platforms, and data security solutions, evaluate these key considerations to ensure an enterprise-level, scaleable, and secure fit for your organization:

Minimizing Access & Privileges to Your Cloud Data

One of the most critical considerations in selecting a DSPM platform is what level of access and privileges are required to be functional. There’s a long held principle in security around enforcing least access and privilege to infrastructure – from maintaining a least privilege model to achieving zero trust.

Most DSPM platforms require organizations to grant the vendor both read and write access across their environment – so they can replicate data stores. Granting any software full access creates considerable supply chain risk if said vendor gets compromised – or even if an employee at the vendor (or a third party) mishandles the privileged credentials. By granting full write privileges, it further risks data being overwritten or modified without proper approvals or audit trail.

BigID allows organizations to manage access at a data source by data source level leveraging existing password vaulting technology for maintaining full security across the privileged credentials. Only minimal read access is required for identifying and responding to data risk – which in return reduces risk of mishandled credentials, insider threats, and improves the overall security profile of your strategic data security implementation..

Leveraging Password Vaults

Loose and overshared credentials are the bane of security organizations. Modern security architectures should leverage password or credential vaults for containing and controlling privileged secrets and infrastructure credentials.

Most DSPM platforms do not today support integrations with popular password vaults like Cyberark, Hashicorp, Thycotic, BeyondTrust, AWS Secrets Manager etc.

BigID does, providing all these integrations out of the box – plus, a generic integration for bespoke vaults. This gives organizations full control, lifecycle management and auditability of their privileged credentials without worry around leaking or sharing credentials with third parties.

Role Based Access Controls

Any product that touches data in an organization requires an ability to regulate who in that organization can see or perform actions on the data. Most DSPM products today merely support a super user with full access. This can hamstring medium and larger organizations that want to limit certain kinds of visibility and remediations to the corporate data – especially in scenarios where data straddles geographies with different data sovereignty requirements.

BigID is unique among DSPM vendors in offering a full RBAC capability that can take roles imported from AD or LDAP, and further scope them down to restrict what specific groups or specific users can both see and do in the BigID platform.

Avoiding Data Duplication and Replication

Most DSPM platforms today perform fast replication on a customer’s data to avoid scanning on live customer development or production environments. While this can be performant in small data estates, it is costly, complex and insecure in larger environments. Creating an offline copy of data creates a large attack vector for bad actors whether external or internal for operating on the duplicated unsupervised data.

BigID never copies or duplicates a customer’s data – avoiding not only the large infrastructure cost associated with duplication of storage and compute, but also the risks associated with replicated data.

Regional Controls

Different countries and states increasingly have specific regulatory requirements for data sovereignty and cross border data transfers. This holds for external transfers as well as internal transfers.

Most contemporary DSPM solutions provide a one size fits all platform that has no controls for regional distinctions. BigID, on the other hand, provides a number of internal controls and deployment options to meet modern data sovereignty requirements.

Obfuscating What Data Can Be Displayed

Modern privacy regulations like GDPR and CPRA prescribe what personal data can be stored and displayed in a product. BigID offers a number of masking and redaction options to ensure regulated data is never displayed inside the product in clear text.

Hybrid Cloud Deployment Options

BigID has fully SaaS, agentless deployment options for your DSPM. BigID also natively supports hybrid cloud deployment options: often larger organizations who also have private clouds – or need to avoid any backhaul of data – need hybrid cloud deployments where data processing remains local to the customer environment.

Step-up Authentication for Product Users

In order to protect against phishing and social engineering attacks, more and more enterprises require step-up proof of identity before users can access and operate a product. BigID provides support for various popular methods and solutions for 2FA and passwordless authentication like Okta and Ping.

Conclusion

Cloud data security has become an overriding priority for organizations owing to growing volume, velocity and variety of data in the cloud combined with a more complicated data regulatory and risk environment. While DSPM aims to address this for public cloud, the benefit is completely negated if the solution itself introduces security risk. That is why BigID – from its inception – has introduced category leading security controls to ensure the action of data security is itself secure.

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