The CISO Imperative: Leveraging DSPM to Transform Data Security Visibility

Throughout my career as a CISO and my years consulting in cybersecurity, I've witnessed a remarkable transformation in our industry. In the earlier days, the security landscape was relatively straightforward. We built strong perimeters, controlled access points, and focused on keeping threats out. 

Those days are long gone—and sticking with outdated approaches carries real cost.

Today, data flows continuously across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, on-premises systems, and endpoint devices. Traditional security approaches—still focused on infrastructure, endpoints, and networks—are failing to protect what attackers actually want: your data. This fundamental disconnect has created an urgent need for a revolutionary approach.

The Breaking Point of Traditional Security

Over the past few years, I’ve advised boards and executive teams across industries. The same pattern keeps showing up: massive investments in security tools, but no clear answers to three critical questions:

1. Where is our sensitive data?
2. Who has access to it?
3. How is it protected?

Without answers, security teams are forced to stay reactive. Incidents happen, and then you scramble. It’s not a tooling issue—it’s a visibility issue. And the longer you operate in the dark, the greater the risk.

The data backs this up:

• 67% of organizations host sensitive data in the public cloud, but only 31% have unified visibility across environments. (Cloud Security Alliance)
• Nearly half of companies have experienced a cloud data breach. (Ponemon Institute)
• And 49% of those breaches are due to misconfiguration—often involving publicly exposed or unencrypted data. (Cloud Security Alliance)

Malicious insiders and zero-days are real threats—but they’re not the only ones. Some of the biggest risks come from the everyday gaps: sensitive data copied into analytics environments without oversight, access left open after a project wraps, backups containing PII that were never encrypted. These aren’t edge cases—they’re common, and they’re often invisible until it’s too late.

This is where traditional tools hit their limit. They weren’t built to follow the data.

Enter DSPM: A Data-First Security Model

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) offers a new path forward. It puts data at the center of your security program—making your existing controls smarter, and in some cases, replacing them entirely.

Think about how weather forecasting evolved. Meteorologists didn’t stop tracking storms—but they got better at predicting where they’re headed, how strong they’ll be, and what to do before they land. DSPM brings that same proactive approach to data security: continuous visibility, smarter modeling of risk, and early action—before damage is done.

DSPM is built on three essential capabilities:

1. Comprehensive Data Discovery and Classification

Not a one-time scan. Not regex matching. DSPM provides continuous, automated discovery across all your environments—cloud, SaaS, on-prem, hybrid. It builds a real-time inventory of where your sensitive data lives and how it’s used. That includes shadow data, ghost datastores, and unstructured data that are often invisible to legacy tools

2. Risk-Based Exposure Analysis

Once you know where your data is, the next step is understanding risk. DSPM maps access, context, and controls to surface what’s truly exposed. That could be:

• Plaintext credentials stored in config files
• Open external access to sensitive data
• Unencrypted regulated data (PCI, PII, PHI)
• Public exposure through misconfigured access controls

This helps security teams move away from chasing alerts and toward remediating the issues that matter most.

3. Continuous Monitoring and Remediation

Posture is not a point-in-time exercise. DSPM gives teams continuous monitoring to stay ahead of risk - surfacing changes in exposure, identifying emerging vulnerabilities, and flagging new threats as they appear. Teams can act faster—with less noise—and keep posture aligned as environments evolve.

Why This Matters for the Business

The value of DSPM extends far beyond security. When implemented effectively, it delivers tangible business benefits:

• Accelerated innovation: Security teams can confidently support digital initiatives knowing they have visibility into data risks
• Operational efficiency: Automated discovery and prioritization eliminate manual efforts and reduce alert fatigue
• Regulatory compliance: Continuous monitoring ensures ongoing adherence to evolving requirements
• Cost optimization: Identification of redundant or forgotten data stores reduces storage and processing expenses

As one healthcare CISO told me recently:
DSPM transformed our security operations from reactive firefighting to strategic risk management—and helped us identify and remediate a critical exposure that could have resulted in a significant breach affecting patient data.

The First Step: Know Where You Stand

You don’t need to replace your existing tools to take action. A Data Risk Assessment is the fastest, smartest way to get started — revealing what data you have, where it lives, and how exposed it really is.

The Cyera Advisory Services Team has compiled insights from real-world customer assessments into a new report: Top 5 Findings From Cyera Data Risk Assessments. 

It’s a practical resource to help you benchmark your current posture and prioritize what to fix first.

Download it now — and take the first step toward full data visibility and control.