CSPM vs DSPM

As your organization moves more and more of its operations and applications to the cloud, managing security becomes an increasingly complex endeavor. Ensuring the security of your cloud environments and data is critical, but it’s also a challenge.

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) and data security posture management (DSPM) help you tackle this challenge. CSPM enhances visibility and compliance across your cloud environments, helping you identify and mitigate cloud risks. Meanwhile, DSPM safeguards your sensitive data in the cloud by ensuring it is correctly identified, classified, and protected.

In this post, we’ll explore these two key cybersecurity components. We’ll look individually at their roles and benefits. Then, we’ll consider the importance of having both within a comprehensive, all-in-one cloud security platform.

Understanding the basics

Before we dive in, let’s establish some foundations with basic definitions and core concepts.

CSPM is a framework designed to automate security risk identification and remediation in your cloud infrastructure. Considering the dynamic nature of cloud environments, you need comprehensive visibility to maintain continuous security and compliance.

DSPM focuses explicitly on data security within your cloud environments. It scans your environment to discover where sensitive data is at rest, in motion, and in use. Then, it classifies that sensitive data, helping your organization ensure that its data handling practices comply with regulatory standards. DSPM tools help you with real-time risk assessment, policy enforcement, and incident response.

With these basics in mind, let’s go deeper into each of these two frameworks.

Exploring CSPM in detail

CSPM helps your organization address the unique challenges of securing cloud infrastructure. In this section, we’ll examine the main problems that CSPM is designed to solve as well as its features and benefits.

Problems that CSPM solves

Cloud environments are dynamic. Infrastructure components are constantly being spun up and down to meet scaling needs, and your network topology is continually changing. In addition, today’s cloud environments no longer have a physical perimeter. Your applications may comprise components distributed across multiple clouds and providers scattered around the globe. With this kind of setup, it’s no surprise that traditional security measures are insufficient.

CSPM provides automated tools to help you manage and secure your environments against misconfigurations, unauthorized access, and compliance violations.

Main features and capabilities

A CSPM solution bundles together several capabilities to help you ensure the security of your cloud infrastructure.

• Discovery and visibility: CSPM tools scan your cloud environments, identifying all your assets, their configurations, and the relationships between them. This kind of comprehensive visibility is crucial for managing cloud security, especially as your needs and operations scale. The comprehensive visibility from CSPM helps you ensure that no part of your cloud infrastructure goes unmonitored.
• Misconfiguration management and remediation: With the complexity and scale of modern cloud setups, misconfigurations are common — and they can lead to significant security vulnerabilities. As a CSPM solution scans your cloud environment, it can identify these misconfigurations and provide guidance for remediation. In some cases, a CSPM solution can perform automated remediation.
• Continuous threat detection: Continuous monitoring also means that CSPM tools can detect threats in real time. By providing round-the-clock threat detection, CSPM ensures you have proactive threat management to maintain a robust security posture.
• DevSecOps integration: A CSPM solution integrates with your DevSecOps processes to make cloud security a fundamental part of your development life cycle. This integration helps enforce security policies and compliance requirements throughout an application’s deployment and maintenance.

Benefits of CSPM

What are the benefits that a CSPM implementation brings to an organization’s cloud security strategy? Here are some of the key advantages:

• Unified visibility: Providing a holistic view of your cloud environments is crucial for their effective management and protection.
• Prevention of misconfigurations: Performing automated checks helps prevent the introduction of misconfigurations that could lead to a security breach.
• Reduced alert fatigue: Prioritizing and filtering security alerts reduces the noise, enabling security teams to focus on the most significant threats.
• Streamlined compliance and security management: Simplifying reporting and tasks helps ensure compliance with industry regulations and security standards.

Exploring DSPM in detail

Sensitive data in your cloud-native applications requires special handling. Let’s explore the problems that DSPM addresses and how it secures this sensitive data.

Problems that DSPM solves

As the components in your cloud-native applications are distributed across clouds and your applications scale, you will face critical data security challenges. First, you must contend with data fragmentation across multiple platforms. You also need to guard against unauthorized access, either from security breaches or from insider threats. Finally, you must deal with the compliance risks of handling sensitive data.

DSPM focuses on data protection, helping you secure the sensitive information in your systems throughout its life cycle — from creation and storage to transmission, usage, and deletion.

Main features and capabilities

DSPM provides the following vital features to your data protection arsenal:

• Data discovery and classification: The first job of a DSPM solution is to identify and catalog all data across all your environments, tagging any sensitive or regulated data that will require stricter controls. This classification process is foundational for your organization to understand the potential risks and how to implement effective security measures.
• Continuous risk assessment: DSPM tools continually monitor data access and usage, identifying and assessing data security risks in real time. This helps you detect potential vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that could expose sensitive data.
• Policy management and enforcement: DSPM tools enforce security policies that control who has access to what data. These policies are also tied to how data is classified. By validating actual usage against governance policies, DSPM helps ensure compliance with security requirements.
• Data loss prevention (DLP): DSPM incorporates mechanisms to monitor and prevent unauthorized data transfers or leaks. By identifying and stopping data movements that breach established policies, it significantly enhances overall data security.
• Anomaly detection: DSPM solutions utilize advanced algorithms to detect unusual data access or usage patterns. When irregularities are identified, alerts are generated, enabling a rapid response to potential security incidents.
• Compliance support and real-time alerts: DSPM tools support continuous monitoring and reporting to help you monitor your sensitive data. With real-time alerts for policy violations or suspicious activities, your security team can respond swiftly to potential threats.

Benefits of DSPM

The core benefits that DSPM brings to your cloud environments are:

• Enhanced data protection: DSPM secures data at every stage of its life cycle, reducing the risk of a breach or sensitive data leak.
• Improved regulatory compliance: DSPM tools streamline the process of adhering to data protection regulations, reducing your organization’s risk of financial penalties or reputational damage.Improved visibility and control: DSPM offers insights about where sensitive data is stored and how it’s used so that you can have more effective governance and control over your assets.
• More efficient security operations: DSPM solutions automate data security tasks such as classification and risk assessment, freeing up your security team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Comparing CSPM and DSPM

Learning the differences and similarities between CSPM and DSPM can help you better understand their respective roles within a wider cloud security strategy. After considering these aspects, we’ll explore how integrating them with a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) can enhance your overall security.

Key differences

Key similarities

Integrating CSPM and DSPM with CNAPPs

Integrating CSPM and DSPM with a CNAPP offers a holistic approach to cloud security. Modern CNAPP solutions combine various security tools, bundling in CSPM and DSPM. These all-in-one solutions provide the following:

• Unified security posture: By integrating CSPM and DSPM, a CNAPP can deliver a more cohesive and comprehensive view of both infrastructure and data security. This will make your organization more effective in managing and remediating risks across the board.
• Enhanced threat detection and response: CNAPPs combine the strengths of CSPM and DSPM to tackle advanced threat detection. This integration results in faster response times to potential security incidents, addressing both infrastructure- and data-level threats.
• Streamlined compliance and governance: Combining the capabilities of CSPM and DSPM ensures that your entire application operates in compliance with industry regulations and standards. Rather than adopting a piecemeal approach to compliance, your organization can leverage a CNAPP to simplify and consolidate its compliance efforts.
• Reduced alert fatigue: By leveraging a CNAPP integrated with CSPM and DSPM, security teams can correlate alerts from both infrastructure and data perspectives, reducing false positives and providing more meaningful and actionable alerts.
• Seamless security operations: Having both CSPM and DSPM within a CNAPP facilitates smoother security operations by centralizing security management and ensuring consistent policies and practices across the cloud environment and data assets.
• Improved cost efficiency: Integrating CSPM and DSPM into a single CNAPP solution can reduce the need for disparate tools, lowering operational costs and simplifying the security infrastructure.

Integrating CSPM and DSPM with a CNAPP provides your organization with the ability to enact more proactive and strategic security measures across your entire cloud and data landscape.

Protect your cloud and your data with Falcon Cloud Security

As we've explored, CSPM and DSPM are essential to safeguarding your cloud environments and sensitive data.

CSPM automates the identification and remediation of risks in your cloud infrastructure. DSPM protects critical data through continuous monitoring, classification, and policy enforcement, helping you prevent data breaches and ensure compliance with data protection laws.

By integrating with CSPM and DSPM capabilities, a CNAPP offers a unified solution that enhances both cloud infrastructure and data security. CrowdStrike Falcon^® Cloud Security is an all-in-one CNAPP solution with functionalities that seamlessly blend CSPM and DSPM. With Falcon Cloud Security, your organization benefits from enhanced visibility across its cloud and data security postures, enabling proactive threat detection and robust compliance management.

Want to test it out?

Try Interactive Demo