Cloud Data Protection: How DSPM Helps You Discover, Classify and Secure All Your Data Assets

In this fourth installment of Tenable’s “Stronger Cloud Security in Five” blog series, we turn our attention to securing cloud data, a complex endeavor as data grows exponentially and threats become more sophisticated. Check out five DSPM best practices to sharpen your cloud data security and compliance.

As the volume of data stored and processed in your cloud environments grows, so does the complexity of protecting it from cyber thieves and of complying with strict regulations.

While on-premises data centers offer a more controlled environment, data generated in the cloud can be less structured and is often stored in a more diverse array of repositories, increasing the risk that it will be improperly secured.

As GigaOm Analyst Paul Stringfellow tells us, cloud repositories are often deployed outside of normal controls due to their ease of use and their perceived low cost.

“Often, they are used for specific tasks and then discarded and forgotten by original project owners,” he writes. “This leads to shadow data repositories that exist outside of established data storage and security controls.”

The solution? Data security posture management (DSPM) systems, which offer unified visibility of all your cloud data — even if your organization uses multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) — along with other data protection capabilities.

“A key element of data resilience is understanding where sensitive data stores are located and what is inside them. You can't secure something you don't know about, and DSPM helps identify and categorize data stores,” Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Todd Thiemann indicates.

At Tenable, we believe a key element for securing your cloud data is to have your DSPM tool integrated as part of a comprehensive cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP). 

Combining DSPM functionality with other CNAPP components gives you holistic cloud security that also includes protection for workloads, identities and more, as Tenable Senior Product Marketing Managers Diane Benjuya and Lior Zatlavi explain. 

“In light of the massive increase in data-related breaches – and their cost – integrating DSPM in CNAPP is essential to reduce risk. It also simplifies security efforts, improves compliance and ensures that data security is an integral part of your overall security strategy,” they write.

Below we unpack five DSPM best practices that are key for securing your data across your multi-cloud environment.

1 - Continuously discover and classify cloud data 

You need to have full, continuously updated visibility into all your data — including AI models, cloud workloads and storage buckets. It’s particularly important to detect unknown “shadow data” that is generated and stored without the knowledge of the IT and security teams. In fact, IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024” found that “shadow data” stored in unmanaged data sources were involved in 35% of all data breaches. 

All data assets must be assigned risk-severity levels based on their sensitivity, as well as be organized into categories, such as confidential company data and customer personal information.

When this data visibility is combined with other CNAPP functions, such as cloud security posture management (CSPM), organizations can pinpoint security gaps, toxic combinations and potential breach impacts, as well as prioritize necessary prevention and mitigation measures.

2 - Proactively prevent data breaches

It’s critical to leverage advanced analytics and flag suspicious activity that could lead to data breaches. With these actionable insights and recommendations, your team is empowered to stay a step ahead of attackers by proactively investigating and addressing these risk scenarios.

For example, integrating DSPM with your CNAPP’s cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) alerts you to anomalous behavior from human or machine identities that might endanger the security of sensitive cloud data. With these insights, you can take the appropriate corrective action and block a potential attack path by, say, reducing or entirely revoking a suspicious identity’s data access.

3 - Streamline comprehensive regulatory compliance

The number of data privacy and data security laws, regulations, industry mandates, internal policies and voluntary frameworks increases with each passing year, making compliance a daunting challenge.

To stay on top of all these data-protection rules and requirements, you need to continuously assess your data-security compliance posture by automating the processes of: 

• discovering and classifying cloud data; 
• enforcing your data-protection policies;
• addressing violations like unauthorized access with step-by-step remediation guidance;
• and generating detailed, audit-ready compliance reports.

Here again, a CNAPP-integrated DSPM not only automates these processes but also offers invaluable insights with rich-context on the threats to your cloud data that put you at risk of non-compliance, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and overprivileged identities. 

4 - Conduct fast, precise incident response

If a data breach happens, time is of the essence. You need to respond quickly and decisively. With the context-rich analytics provided by your DSPM, your security team is better able to: 

• Assess the scope of the breach
• Pinpoint its cause
• Flag the compromised data
• Prioritize remediation
• Contain the breach

To get this expansive visibility and understanding of a data breach, it’s key for your DSPM to perform a comprehensive analysis – leveraging its CNAPP integration – that takes into account the full context of the incident, since your data protection posture can’t be assessed in a vacuum. As we learned from Verizon’s “2025 Data Breach Investigations Report” (DBIR), data thieves use a variety of attack methods — particularly their preferred ones: compromising credentials and exploiting vulnerabilities.

5 - Bake data security into your cloud growth

As your multi-cloud deployment inevitably grows, data security and compliance must be at the heart of your environment’s expansion. In this growth scenario, a CNAPP-integrated DSPM empowers your security team to build data-protection organically into these efforts in a number of key ways, including by:

• Having complete, continuously updated visibility of cloud data and its risks
• Providing context-rich insights into the data security posture of the mapped data stores, including configurations and identity permissions
• Categorizing data assets’ sensitivity
• Identifying which human and machine identities have access to cloud data
• Helping prioritize issues and prescribing actionable, concrete remediation steps 

Find out how you can take action to boost your cloud security in just five minutes.

Learn more:

• "Stronger Cloud Security in Five: The Importance of Cloud Configuration Security"
• "Stronger Cloud Security in Five: How To Protect Your Cloud Workloads"
• "Stronger Cloud Security in Five: Securing Your Cloud Identities"