If your business follows a cloud-first model, like most of today’s organizations choose to, you’re probably constantly looking for new ways to strengthen your security posture. During this search, you may have already familiarized yourself with CSPM and DSPM. You may even have invested in one or the other for your company.
However, for those who are not yet aware of it, CSPM stands for Cloud Security Posture Management, and DSPM stands for Data Security Posture Management. Both of these are different strategic approaches to cloud security, and they address varied aspects of security. These two approaches play crucial parts in ensuring stringent security throughout your organization.
What is CSPM?
An automated process, CSPM is designed specifically to monitor and enhance the security of your cloud infrastructure. It identifies and remedies any misconfiguration issues, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues within your cloud environment. CSPM offers you real-time visibility and also brings automated remediation, thereby ensuring maximum security across your cloud deployments.
The automation also ensures that your security teams can focus on more pressing matters by taking care of the routine tasks. However, while CSPM solutions are designed for modern cloud infrastructure, some may require additional software and applications to complete the loop while others fit into the native system more easily.
What is DSPM?
DSPM has its focus specifically on safeguarding sensitive data within your cloud environments. It discovers, classifies, and secures your data assets across all your cloud platforms. Using DSPM tools, you can pinpoint exactly where your sensitive data is, manage it, and monitor the access and usage of this data. This ensures that your organization maintains maximum security measures and ensures compliance with data protection regulations.
By enforcing least privilege and access controls throughout the cloud environment, DSPM enables your users to stay clear of data breaches right from the start. Overall, DSPM simplifies how you approach your organization’s data security and compliance through proactive protection, especially when partnering with a professional DSPM provider such as Google.
Choosing a DSPM provider like the Google Security Command Center Enterprise tier gives you threat detection and response, vulnerability management, toxic combination detection, misconfiguration detection, compliance management, and more. Additionally, the Google Security Command Center extends the detection of software vulnerabilities to virtual machines and containers across cloud environments with various built-in and integrated Google Cloud services.
The Core Differences Between CSPM And DSPM
Both the approaches – CSPM and DSPM – make sure that your organization has 100% data security at all times. However, both solutions are different in their focus areas, objectives, and overall methodologies. The following table provides a quick comparison of these two approaches.
| FEATURE | CSPM | DSPM |
| Focus | Overall cloud security posture | Protecting sensitive data |
| Scope | Entire cloud infrastructure (VMs, storage, networking, IAM) | Data assets across cloud environments |
| Objectives | – Ensure secure cloud configuration
– Compliance with industry standards – Prevent misconfigurations and unauthorized access |
– Protect sensitive data from breaches
– Enforce data access controls – Ensure data encryption and privacy |
| Capabilities | – Automated scanning and monitoring
– Policy enforcement – Real-time alerts – Misconfiguration detection and remediation |
– Data discovery and classification
– Access monitoring – Encryption management – Data loss prevention |
| Tools and Techniques | – Cloud provider API integration
– Configuration assessment against security policies – Automated remediation workflows |
– Machine learning for data classification
– Data access pattern analysis – Encryption and key management integration |
| Best Suited For | Organizations with complex cloud environments and compliance needs (e.g., PCI-DSS for payment processing) | Organizations with large amounts of sensitive data or in highly regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance) |
| Typical Protection Scenario | Detecting and restricting public access to an S3 bucket storing customer purchase history | Discovering unencrypted patient data on a cloud server and implementing risk-remediation steps |
If your organization operates in multicloud environments, and utilizes services from multiple cloud providers, you are sure to face additional security challenges. In a diverse environment like this, both CSPM and DSPM play important yet slightly different parts in making sure your multicloud presence is secure.
CSPM brings a single, unified view across the diverse cloud platforms your organization may have. It ensures that you can maintain constant security policies and configurations, reduces the risk of misconfigurations, and aggregates all the security data from the different services for total vulnerability management.
DSPM is vital to process and handle the dispersed data across your various cloud platforms. It helps you provide a centralized approach to data discovery, classification, and protection, ensures continued data protection and compliance, and also offers clear visibility into ‘shadow data’ that you may have unknowingly stored in various cloud services.
CSPM ensures that the underlying infrastructure is secure and compliant across all cloud platforms, DSPM focuses on protecting the data that resides within these environments. Together, they provide a complete approach to cloud security, addressing both the infrastructure and data layers.
Choosing The Right Approach To Security For You
So you’re familiar with the terms, but you’d like to learn more about the right approach to manage security in your cloud environment. You’re wondering whether CSPM or DSPM is right for your business.
At the end of the day, the choice is simple: If your organization has a complex cloud environment with tough compliance needs, opt for CSPM. But if your organization possesses large quantities of sensitive data or is forced to follow strict regulations, go with DSPM. However, if your organization has both – you don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other.
CSPM and DSPM complement each other perfectly in a multicloud environment, offering your organization strict and effective security controls. But like everything else, this comes with its own issues. When you’re juggling multiple disjointed security tools, it can become complex and lead to management issues. If you’re looking to avoid this struggle entirely, your organization can opt for a comprehensive security approach that mixes together the benefits of CSPM and DSPM for total security maintenance.
The benefits of a comprehensive approach to your data security includes:
- Simplification through a single management console
- Automation capabilities for common workflows to increase efficiency
- Heightened visibility across public and private cloud environments
- Efficient detection of security threats
It’s important to ensure that both CSPM and DSPM capabilities are included in your comprehensive approach, as not all platforms offer comprehensive coverage of both areas. If you’re concerned with protecting cloud infrastructure and sensitive data, investing in a solution that covers both strategies is the only way forward.
By understanding the distinctions between CSPM and DSPM, your organization can make informed decisions about your cloud security strategies. Whether they are implemented separately or as part of an integrated solution, these approaches provide the necessary tools to protect your organization better in the world of cloud security, ensuring that both your infrastructure and data remain protected to the best of your capabilities.
