Level Up Your Data Security Game: It’s Time to Go Beyond Visibility

If you took a power nap for the last 5 years, here’s a brief recap of how data security evolved:

CSPMs (Cloud-Security Posture Management tools) made a huge leap since the beginning of the decade, going from 0 to mainstream adoption in record time. To understand how pivotal this market is, consider that the key player in this industry, Wiz, refused a $23B acquisition.

There’s good reason for this hockey stick growth in the CSPM market. It addressed a real (huge) pain for security teams, who were in need of a map or guide when mitigating their cloud risks. CSPMs give you that level of visibility, allowing you to prioritize your efforts in mitigating risks, along with a good set of capabilities to satisfy compliance requirements.

The promise of a DSPM (Data Security Posture Management) is evident. Just like your cloud, you want the same level of visibility for your data. This helps you navigate your data security strategy, understand where you have gaps, and fill them.

However, as a stand-alone solution, DSPM has enjoyed a different level of adoption than CSPM. There are several reasons for that, but the main one might be that a lot of what DSPMs do is either currently covered or close to being covered by CSPM platforms. For example, Orca and Wiz have released DSPM offerings as part of their CSPM.

So you’ve got visibility over your Cloud Security and your Data Security. Why do you even need another evolution to your data security? Here are the main reasons:

Not only is data more distributed than ever across different data stores, such as databases, data warehouses, and data lakes, but its access requirements are much more dynamic. Users (be they humans, applications, or even AI agents) require flexible access and granular restrictions.

The risk of insider threats that willingly or unwillingly abuse their access to sensitive data is growing, requiring tighter monitoring and provisioning of access.

Another issue is third-party vendors and contractors’ access to data, which needs monitoring and control.

Compliance frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and, lately, the EU AI Act, are stricter and require more control over sensitive data. Of course, non-compliance can result in significant financial and reputational damage.

It’s very hard to secure what you don’t know you’re facing. However, what happens in many cases and companies is that they are overloaded with alerts and findings from their posture management platforms. This leaves two main gaps in posture management alone:

1. Being able to rapidly control the data, applying appropriate access controls in a scalable way.
2. When it comes to a Data Security Platform versus a CSPM, the main difference is having a data-centric security approach. With a data security platform, the focus is on protecting sensitive data, rather than network and infrastructure.

This is where a data security platform, like ours at Satori, fills these gaps.

Using Satori as a data security platform gives you full capability to secure your company’s sensitive data. This means that the same platform is used to get both visibility and control. Moreover, this is not only for a specific subset of datasets, such as your analytics warehouses but also for operational databases.

This makes it easy to answer the primary data security questions across databases, data warehouses, and data lakes:

• Where are my data assets (databases, warehouses, etc)?
  Satori continuously discovers and monitors data assets.
• Where is my sensitive data?
  Satori continuously classifies data and tags it with appropriate data type tags.
• Who has access to what data?
  Satori analyzes your data store configuration to give you data access governance and understand what users have access to what data.
• Who has access to what sensitive data?
  When combined with Satori’s continuous data discovery and classification, you know who has access to a specific database or table and what types of sensitive data are used.
• Who is doing what, with what data?
  Satori gives you complete Data Activity Monitoring across all your data stores in a central location. That way, you know exactly what users were doing with the data, who approved these activities, and what security policies were applied.

Just as importantly, Satori also makes it easy to enforce the appropriate security controls at scale:

• RBAC (role-based access control) and ABAC (attribute-based access control). Satori allows organizations to apply RBAC and ABAC universally, even on platforms that do not have such native support.
• Temporary data access. When users need access to data, they can get it in an automated manner for a set amount of time. This relieves the organization of over-privileged data access, one of the main root causes of sensitive data exposure.
• Fine-grained access control across multiple data stores. For example, you can apply data masking to your Snowflake cloud data, as well as your MSSQL and Postgres databases.
• Enforcement of approval workflows. In many cases, access to most datasets requires approval from data owners or data stewards. Satori makes it easy to implement such a process directly or by integrating with workflow tools like Jira, ServiceNow, or even Slack.

One of the clear benefits of using Satori’s Data Security Platform over a manual process is having a very clear data security policy that is automatically enforced.

While CSPMs and DSPMs are essential tools for cloud security, they are insufficient to address the complex challenges of modern data environments. This is especially true when sensitive data is used and compliance requirements must be met.

Data security platforms like Satori offer a more comprehensive approach to protecting sensitive data, helping organizations achieve the required security maturity level. If you want to discuss this topic further and understand how Satori fits into your data security strategy, book a demo meeting with our experts.