The DSPM Solutions Guide: Finding the Right Data Security Posture Management Tool for You
There was a time when cybersecurity was only about keeping threats out. Today, DSPM solutions have redefined that approach — but once, traditional security tools focused on networks or applications. Firewalls, antivirus tools, and intrusion detection systems defended the perimeter.
Their goal? To stop viruses, malware, and other external attacks from getting in.
However, we now live in a cloud-first, data-driven world. The biggest risks often come from within. You don’t need malicious actors to create vulnerabilities. Instead, these could come from simple mistakes made by well-meaning employees.
That’s why modern security leaders turn to data security posture management (DSPM).
And, DSPM solutions can help you implement these protections within your systems. Are you evaluating such tools or exploring how they fit into your broader cloud security strategy? This guide will help you understand how the various solutions work, how they differ, and which features matter most.
What Is Data Security Posture Management?
DSPM is both a framework and a set of tools designed to protect data. It continuously discovers, classifies, and secures sensitive data across your environment to protect it, both in the cloud and on-premises.
A comprehensive DSPM solution provides continuous visibility into data exposure, misconfigurations, and compliance risks. This allows your team to take corrective action before problems lead to breaches or violations.
Instead of protecting only the network or infrastructure layer, DSPM identifies where your business information resides, who has access, and whether it’s properly protected.
In short, it helps you secure data, whether it’s in the cloud, in SaaS applications, or on your premises.
Want a more detailed description of DSPM?
Why DSPM Solutions Are Important For Data Governance and Protection
Your business information is one of your most important assets; it’s also the most vulnerable. The problem is that it’s no longer centralized.
Modern business environments include cloud services and infrastructure, SaaS platforms, and distributed work models. Information is stored in databases, moved across networks, and processed in various applications and software.
Because everything is spread out, it’s difficult to get a cohesive view of your data landscape. In fact, most security teams simply don’t know what information they have, where it lives, or who can access it. Without that context, maintaining a strong data security posture is nearly impossible.
DSPM solutions continuously discover and classify sensitive information to give you more visibility and control over anything that has drifted beyond traditional boundaries, ensuring that sensitive data stays properly managed and protected.
The challenges they solve are:
Complex Cloud Environments
As of 2025, 89% of enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy, with the average business using 3.4 different cloud providers. They all have their own access controls, permissions, and configurations. Most of the time, each service is managed by a different team.
Data may move between AWS S3 buckets, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud projects, or SaaS tools without consistent oversight. You now have to track permissions, manage encryption settings, and map data residency across all those systems. This process can quickly become unmanageable and impractical to oversee manually.
DSPM platforms bring it all together. They connect to each environment and aggregate metadata. Then, they present a unified view of where sensitive data lives and how it’s exposed. Your security team can now easily identify risky configurations and enforce consistent policies to reduce the likelihood of breaches or exposure in complex, hybrid-cloud environments.
The Volume and Sensitivity of Data
Businesses are generating more content than ever before. The global big data analytics market is projected to grow from $348 billion in 2024 to over $960 billion by 2032.
Meanwhile, the total volume of data in existence is estimated at around 149 zettabytes. A lot of it is stored across disparate cloud and SaaS environments.
Not all of that information is equally valuable, but a significant and growing portion of it is sensitive. That means it contains personal, financial, or other regulated information. Such information needs to be protected, as per frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
As you use this information across various tools and environments, those records are increasingly duplicated, shared, and stored in new locations.
This sensitive information is often what threat actors are targeting. Case in point: In 2023 alone, over 133 million records were exposed in U.S. healthcare incidents.
Data security risk is no longer about the network; it’s about the data itself. A DSPM platform helps you protect it better.
Rising Threats and Compliance Pressures
The threats to your data constantly evolve, and the costs of failure to protect it continue to rise. It doesn’t matter whether it was a misconfiguration, an insider error, or an external attack that led to the data breach or privacy violation. Data exposure can lead to financial, regulatory, and reputational consequences.
And, if your business falls under regulations such as the GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI DSS? You need to demonstrate ongoing security and compliance across systems and processes.
If you work in a dynamic, multi-cloud environment — and let’s face it, you probably do — this can be very difficult to do manually.
DSPM solutions help enforce these controls. They continuously monitor for compliance drift, map data flows to business processes, and generate audit-ready reports.
This reduces the burden on your security and compliance teams. At the same time, it also provides the documentation needed to prove due diligence during audits or investigations.
Internal Risk and Excessive Access
As we said earlier, not all risks come from outside your organization. Many data leaks originate from within.
Legitimate users with excessive privileges? Inherited permissions? Access that no longer aligns with their role? These are all threats to your data privacy and security. When too many people can move or copy data, it spreads across new locations. Over time, this leads to redundant, duplicated information, which is more susceptible to exposure.
DSPM platforms integrate with your access management tools to detect and remediate these risks. They combine context with identity analytics to spot overexposed files, orphaned accounts, and shadow access paths. You are able to fix issues before they become incidents.
This, in turn, strengthens internal governance and minimizes the attack surface that threat actors can exploit.
Key Features and Capabilities of DSPM Solutions
Now that we know why DSPM matters, let’s look at what these platforms actually do.
The best DSPM solutions combine automation, analytics, and integration capabilities. Their goal is simple: to give you full visibility and control over your security posture.
They help you locate sensitive data stores, identify their purpose, and tell you if they’re properly protected or not. The following key capabilities make that possible.
Automated Data Discovery and Classification
You can’t protect what you don’t know exists. That’s why every good DSPM product offers automated discovery.
It doesn’t matter if it’s structured databases or unstructured files like documents, backups, and email attachments. Or, if it’s in the cloud or on your premises. DSPM platforms continuously scan every environment to locate all business information.
These tools use prebuilt and customizable classifiers to automatically identify sensitive information, including:
- Personally identifiable information (PII)
- Protected health information (PHI)
- Financial records
Since the process is automated, security teams no longer need to manually track or catalog data assets. The DSPM system detects when new entries appear or information changes location and classifies them in real time. Sensitive information never goes unnoticed, regardless of how complex or fast-changing the environment is.
Risk Assessment and Prioritization
To know what needs the most protection, you must understand what faces the greatest risk and why.
DSPM platforms analyze data in context. They look at where it’s stored and how. Is it encrypted in transit and at rest? Do you enforce access permissions? Is it shared, whether internally or with third-party vendors or partners?
They correlate this with identity and access information, configurations, and security controls to assign risk scores or exposure levels. Then, they turn this information into actionable insights.
Your security team can focus their efforts and reduce alert fatigue. They don’t need to react to every low-level issue. Instead, they can prioritize the risks that carry the greatest potential impact.
Remediation and Response
So, now your DSPM system has identified what’s at greatest risk and provided the context and tools needed to remediate issues quickly. Your security team is dealing with the issues that need a human touch. What about the ones that don’t necessarily need manual intervention?
For such problems, these platforms integrate with existing security systems to automate corrective actions.
What corrective actions, you ask?
- Unnecessary permissions might be revoked
- The appropriate team might be alerted to investigate suspicious access patterns
- Exposed data might need to be encrypted
Some DSPM solutions also support policy-based automation. Your security team just needs to define specific rules. For example, “flag any unencrypted financial data shared outside the U.S.”
The tool will take action automatically when those conditions are met.
Because detection and response are automated, DSPM reduces the time between identifying a vulnerability and fixing it. This minimizes potential damage, maintains compliance, and strengthens your overall security posture.
Continuous Monitoring and Reporting
Data environments are constantly changing. New assets are created as your organization collects user information and generates reports and analytical predictions. Permissions shift as teams grow, regulations evolve, or priorities change. Configurations drift as software and applications update.
That’s why continuous monitoring is a core capability of every mature DSPM platform.
Unlike traditional tools that rely on periodic scans or manual audits, DSPM solutions operate in real time. They continuously track where sensitive data resides, how it moves, and who’s accessing it.
When new data appears, or when there’s a change in access patterns or configurations, the system automatically updates your visibility and risk profile.
This continuous oversight enables early detection of potential threats before they turn into security incidents.
But no amount of monitoring will help you if you don’t know the results of those scans. That’s why reporting features provide a consolidated view of your organization’s data security posture. They highlight trends, exposure levels, and compliance status over time.
These dashboards make it easier to demonstrate regulatory alignment with frameworks like the GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. At the same time, they also give security and compliance teams the metrics they need to brief executives or auditors.
Integration with Other Security Tools
One of the biggest advantages of a DSPM tool is that it doesn’t work in isolation. The most effective platforms integrate seamlessly with other tools to create a unified, automated data security platform.
They work with identity and access management (IAM) systems to help enforce least-privilege access controls, and use cloud access security brokers (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP) tools, and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms to improve security management and coordination.
Evaluation Checklist for DSPM Tools
Before choosing a vendor, make sure the DSPM solution covers the essentials. Use this checklist to guide your comparison process:
- Comprehensive Coverage
- Support for multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments
- Discovery across structured, unstructured, and shadow data sources
- Visibility into hidden or dark data, which may often be overlooked
- Ability to unify metadata and policies across storage types and regions
- Continuous, automated scanning of all connected environments
- Granular mapping of permissions and entitlements
- Risk scores based on sensitivity, exposure level, and business impact
- Native workflows for permission revocation, data masking, or quarantine
- Audit-ready reports for frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PCI DSS
- Cloud-native architecture designed for scale and elasticity
- Role-based access control (RBAC) and fine-grained permissions
- Contextual insights that go beyond alerts to specific remediation steps
- Documented success in large-scale enterprise deployments
Top DSPM Vendors for Your Data and Cloud Security
Here are some of the leading DSPM vendors in the market today. Each one takes a slightly different approach to protecting and managing sensitive data. The right choice depends on your environment, scale, and compliance priorities.
Varonis
Best for: Managing permissions and spotting insider threats
Varonis data security platform is often mentioned by analysts like Gartner Peer Insights for its efficacy in enterprise environments.
This DSPM solution has been a top player in the market for years, and for good reason. It is focused on helping enterprises understand who can access what.
The platform does mapping and permissions across cloud storage. However, it also automates the process of analyzing user behavior and privileges. Any discrepancies spotted, and it will flag them and alert teams.
If your company juggles complex user hierarchies or legacy data stores, this solution can be a strong fit.
Key Features:
- Tracks and audits file and data access in real time
- Maps permissions to uncover risky overexposure
- Detects privilege misuse and insider threats
- Supports least-privilege enforcement with behavioral analytics
- Integrates cleanly with IAM and SIEM tools
Securiti
Best for: Enterprises that need a balance of data security and privacy
Securiti takes a broad view of data protection, which is why it works so well for organizations in highly regulated industries. Its platform combines everything you need for security and privacy under one Data Command Center. If your teams manage multiple AI tools and data types under various compliance frameworks, this platform can be a strong choice.
Key Features:
- AI-driven discovery and classification across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
- Automated risk remediation and policy enforcement
- Built-in DSAR and consent management capabilities
- Real-time compliance posture tracking
- Templates for GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS
Symmetry Systems (DataGuard)
Best for: Teams that need to see how data moves
Symmetry’s DataGuard platform claims it can help you achieve compliance up to 75% faster. It unifies information across your data stacks and helps you visualize sensitive data relationships through graphs.
In other words, it tells you how users interact with systems and vice versa. Its AI-powered automation means that both large organizations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can enforce Zero Trust principles quite easily.
Key Features:
- Graph-based visualization of data flows and permissions
- Continuous discovery of sensitive data across cloud and on-prem environments
- Contextual insights at the identity and role level
- Alignment with Zero Trust and least-privilege policies
Cyera
Best for: Fast cloud data security with contextual risk prioritization
With AI classification powering it, Cyera is built for speed. It’s specifically marketed as a security solution for the cloud infrastructure, claiming high accuracy and the ability to scale rapidly as its strengths. This is a great option if your company has a distributed cloud footprint or DevOps workflows.
Key Features:
- Automated discovery and classification across multi-cloud environments
- Business-context risk scoring and prioritization
- Detection of shadow and dark data
- Automated remediation and guided policy enforcement
Sentra
Best for: Organizations under strict compliance requirements
Sentra’s strength lies in visibility and real-time monitoring. It claims it can analyze your business data across all environments, including SaaS, Paas, and AI applications. It’s especially useful if you operate in a heavily regulated industry — healthcare, finance, government. With a classification accuracy of over 95%, it can help you identify issues before they become incidents.
Key Features:
- Continuous discovery across SaaS, databases, and cloud storage
- Real-time monitoring of exposure and risk
- Prebuilt templates for GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA frameworks
- Contextual data mapping to business processes
Lookout
Best for: SaaS-heavy enterprises that need strong encryption and control
Lookout acquired CipherCloud in 2021 to make its offerings even stronger. As such, it offers strong data protection features such as tokenization, masking, and encryption in addition to its mobile endpoint defense. If you want tight control over your sensitive data, especially in the SaaS and cloud environments, this might be the right choice for you.
Key Features:
- Data discovery and classification across cloud apps
- Strong encryption, tokenization, and masking capabilities
- Policy enforcement to prevent unauthorized sharing
- Integrations with CASB, DLP, and cloud security solutions
BigID’s Ultimate DSPM Solution
Best for: Enterprises that want complete, AI-driven visibility and control
BigID brings DSPM, data intelligence, and privacy automation under one unified platform. Its comprehensive data discovery capability helps you find and classify sensitive data across your organization, no matter where it’s located. It uses powerful AI automation to identify risks and flag them as they appear.
The platform contains everything you need for powerful and effective data privacy and compliance.
Key capabilities:
- Automated Discovery and Categorization: Identifies and labels structured and unstructured data across on-prem and cloud systems
- Risk Identification for Access and Exposure: Surfaces overexposed data and tracks internal and external sharing patterns
- High-Risk Alerts and Policy Enforcement: Flags misconfigurations and insider threats in real time
- Simplified Reporting and Risk Assessment: Delivers audit-ready dashboards and progress tracking
- Unified Privacy and Security Operations: Merges DSPM with privacy workflows, consent management, and retention policies
Want to see it in action? Book a 1:1 demo to explore how BigID approaches DSPM differently.
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