What is Data Security Posture Management?
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) is a security framework and category of tools that continuously discovers, classifies, and protects sensitive data — helping organizations identify, assess, and reduce data security risk across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
DSPM security tools automate data discovery, classification, risk assessment, and remediation workflows, so security teams always know where sensitive data lives, who can access it, and how well it is protected. The result: continuous visibility, easier compliance with data protection regulations, and measurably lower data risk.
Analyst Research
Thales named a DSPM Leader by Omdia
See why Thales is named a Leader in the Omdia Universe: Data Security Posture Management report
Most DSPM vendors identify risk. CipherTrust DSPM helps reduce it.
Most DSPM tools give organizations visibility into sensitive data risks — but security teams still struggle to act on them. A DSPM solution built for action, CipherTrust DSPM combines discovery, risk analytics, and integrated data protection to continuously reduce data exposure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Understand where your sensitive data lives
Gain a clear view of your most critical data across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and AI environments from a single DSPM platform. Identify sensitive and regulated data, eliminate blind spots, and govern data risk with confidence.
Focus on risks that matter most
Prioritize exposures that create real business impact. Focus on the risks that matter most to reduce risk faster and prevent escalation.
Accelerate risk remediation
Close the gap between insight and action by enabling faster remediation and eliminating disconnected workflows that prolong exposure.
Detect emerging threats earlier
Identify abnormal data access and usage patterns to detect insider and external threats early and guide investigation before risks escalate.
Connect data risk to business context
Correlate data risk with identity, infrastructure, and workflows to improve prioritization and accelerate response across teams.
Deploy with flexibility and sovereignty
Support SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid models to meet regulatory, operational, and sovereignty requirements while maintaining consistent governance.
Truly understand your data and the risks surrounding it
AI is driving an explosion of sensitive and unstructured data across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, hybrid, and AI pipelines—creating massive blind spots and unmanaged risk. CipherTrust DSPM continuously discovers sensitive data, identifies hidden exposure and risky access, and turns visibility into action with prioritized remediation to reduce risk, strengthen compliance, and protect critical data everywhere.
Discover
Identify sensitive data everywhere
Continuously discover, classify, and track sensitive structured and unstructured data to eliminate blind spots and gain real-time visibility across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Identify hidden exposure, prioritize the risks that matter most, accelerate remediation, strengthen compliance, and protect critical data with confidence at enterprise scale.
Analyze
Assess and prioritize exposure risk
Continuously monitor data access and usage to rapidly detect unauthorized activity, insider threats, excessive permissions, and policy violations before they become breaches. Enforce least-privilege access through entitlement management, vulnerability analysis, and misconfiguration assessments to proactively reduce risk, minimize exposure, and strengthen security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Protect
Reduce exposure with integrated data protection
Apply integrated encryption, tokenization, masking, and centralized key management to reduce sensitive data exposure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Go beyond posture management with built-in cryptographic remediation, targeted remediation guidance, and guided resolution to proactively reduce risk and protect critical data at scale.
Control
Govern data without compromising sovereignty
Deploy across SaaS, on-premises, or hybrid environments to maintain consistent control of sensitive data while aligning with operational, regulatory, and data sovereignty requirements. Eliminate one-size-fits-all deployment limitations and enforce centralized visibility, protection, and policy control across the entire data estate.
All the Power of DSPM. None of the Overhead.
Request a free trial of the SaaS-based CipherTrust DSPM and see how quickly teams can move from data visibility to risk reduction without deploying or managing additional infrastructure.
Discover data, prioritize exposure, and connect insights to protection and control through a cloud-delivered experience that accelerates time to value, simplifies operations, and scales as your data grows.
Don’t just take our word. See what others have to say about us
The best thing about CipherTrust is that it provides end to end data protection from discovering sensitive data to encrypting and controlling access all through a single centralized platform.
We think Thales DSPM is a strong option for organizations that need a single platform covering discovery, classification, and native data protection without stitching together multiple vendors. The case is particularly strong for regulated industries and organizations with on-premise or hybrid infrastructure, where cloud-native DSPM tools often fall short.”
I like Thales CipherTrust Data Security Platform’s centralized approach to data protection, especially its strong encryption, key management, and access controls. It provides comprehensive visibility and security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This platform brings all my separate data security tools together in one place. With centralized key management, fine-grained access controls, and continuous monitoring across multi-cloud setups, it makes it much easier to stay audit-ready.
Data Security Posture Management
Maturity Assessment
How resilient, scalable and future-proof is your organization’s data security posture?
Thales provides security at scale for more than
30,000 organizations worldwide
$150 Trillion
in interbank money transfers
protected every year
113+ Billion
application attacks
blocked every month
184
countries monitored for threats
every day
Security that integrates with your technology ecosystem
With one of the industry’s largest cyber security technology ecosystems, Thales solutions integrate with the most widely used technologies to protect and secure access to your mission-critical applications and data.
Related solutions
Explore adjacent Thales capabilities that strengthen discovery, protection, and control across the data estate.
Enhance your security
See how we can help you protect sensitive data anywhere at scale.
Additional resources
Further your understanding of CipherTrust DSPM
Best DSPM solutions for enterprise data security
Explore how enterprise buyers evaluate modern DSPM solutions and what differentiates platforms that move beyond visibility to risk reduction.
RESOURCES & FAQS
Related resources
Frequently asked questions about DSPM and CipherTrust
CipherTrust DSPM goes beyond visibility and posture management by combining discovery, risk analytics, and integrated data protection in a single platform. Unlike solutions that only identify problems, CipherTrust DSPM helps organizations reduce risk through targeted remediation, encryption, tokenization, masking, and centralized key management.
| Capability | Thales | Varonis | Cyera | BigID | Microsoft Purview |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery & Classification | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Contextual Data Risk Analytics | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited |
| Data Centric Behavior Analytics / UEBA | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Database Activity & Risk Intelligence | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | Limited |
| Risk Prioritization | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrated Data Protection and Remediation | Yes | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| Cryptographic Control & Key Management | Yes | Limited | Limited | Limited | MSFT Environments |
| Encryption and Tokenization Risk Reduction | Yes | No | No | No | MSFT Environments |
| Hybrid & Multicloud Data Protection | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes | MSFT Environments |
Source: Thales internal research and publicly available information. Information is provided for comparative purposes and may be incomplete or subject to change. Validate current capabilities with the respective vendors.
CipherTrust DSPM supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, on-premises repositories, databases, file systems, object storage, and AI pipelines. It continuously discovers and classifies both structured and unstructured sensitive data across the enterprise.
CipherTrust DSPM correlates data sensitivity, access exposure, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, AI interactions, and entitlement risks to identify the exposures most likely to create material business impact. This enables organizations to prioritize remediation, reduce attack surface, enforce least privilege, and accelerate response.
CipherTrust DSPM helps organizations maintain continuous visibility into sensitive data, access, and protection status across environments. Flexible SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid deployment options support operational, regulatory, and data sovereignty requirements while enabling centralized governance and audit readiness.
CipherTrust DSPM integrates with SIEM, CSPM, ticketing, identity, HR, and broader security ecosystems to correlate data risk with infrastructure, user, and threat context. These integrations improve prioritization, streamline workflows, and help security teams operationalize remediation faster.
DSPM streamlines data protection through a multi-step process: data discovery and classification, risk assessment, security posture analysis, monitoring and threat detection, and remediation and prevention. It automatically identifies and classifies data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments; evaluates risks such as overexposed data, misconfigured permissions, and shadow data; analyzes security configurations and vulnerabilities; continuously monitors for emerging threats; and helps teams prioritize vulnerabilities and strengthen overall resilience.
The difference between DSPM and CSPM: DSPM secures the data itself — where sensitive data lives, who can access it, and how it is protected — while Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) secures the configuration of cloud infrastructure. CSPM tools monitor infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service environments for misconfigurations, compliance violations, and cloud services risks, whereas DSPM focuses on the data itself—where sensitive data lives, who has access to it, how it is used, and how risk can be reduced across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Compare DSPM solutions on five criteria: coverage of every environment where sensitive data lives (cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and AI pipelines); accuracy of discovery and classification across structured and unstructured data; risk prioritization tied to business impact; integrated remediation such as encryption, tokenization, masking, and key management — not alerts alone; and deployment flexibility to meet data sovereignty requirements.
DSPM for AI extends data security posture management to AI pipelines, copilots, and agents. It discovers sensitive data flowing into models, detects shadow AI usage, and applies protection and governance policies so organizations can adopt AI without exposing regulated data.