Today’s organizations face the challenge of securing vast amounts of sensitive data scattered across increasingly complex and distributed environments. Traditional approaches to data security often fall short, leaving critical gaps that sophisticated attackers can exploit.
This is where Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) plays a crucial role. By providing visibility into sensitive data, identifying risks, and enabling teams to take proactive measures, DSPM helps organizations stay ahead of threats. But success in DSPM doesn’t come from implementation alone—it requires continuous tracking of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These metrics offer a way to measure the effectiveness of security efforts and drive ongoing improvements.
In this post, we’ll go over which KPI’s to monitor, why these KPI’s matter, and how you can improve them for an overall enhanced security posture.
Why KPIs Matter in DSPM
KPIs are the compass that guide an organization's DSPM efforts. They provide measurable insights into the current state of data security, highlighting successes and pinpointing areas needing improvement. Without KPIs, organizations risk operating blindly, unable to assess whether their security posture is adequate, or their strategies are effective.
Tracking the right KPIs ensures:
Continuous Monitoring: Real-time visibility into evolving risks and vulnerabilities, allowing teams to act swiftly and decisively.
Proactive Security: The ability to anticipate and address potential threats before they escalate into incidents.
Team Collaboration: Clear metrics foster alignment between security, compliance, and IT teams, creating a unified approach to safeguarding sensitive data.
By focusing on actionable metrics, organizations can maintain an agile security posture, adapting quickly to new challenges and emerging threats in the cloud landscape.
Key DSPM KPIs to Track
Data Security Critical Issues
Metric: Number of critical issues.
Why it matters: Identifying and addressing critical issues reduces the attack surface by removing paths to sensitive data. Issues detect toxic combinations that can lead an attacker to your crown jewels and represent the most severe attack paths in your environment and require immediate attention. These toxic combinations correlate data risks with other cloud and workload context such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities, network exposures, malware, and lateral movement paths, to detect critical attack paths. By focusing on Issues rather than just data findings, you are able to focus your efforts on the findings that actually pose a risk to your business.
How to improve: Leverage Wiz’s prioritized queue of Wiz Issues, which consolidates complex attack paths into a single, actionable list, with Issues mapped on the Wiz Security Graph. By focusing efforts on these high-impact issues, organizations can dramatically enhance their data security posture.
Data Exposure Risk
Metric: Percentage of exposed critical data.
Why it matters: This metric helps measure and minimize the risk of data breaches, which can result in financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties. Understanding where and why critical data is exposed enables targeted remediation efforts.
How to improve: Use Wiz’s agentless data discovery and classification combined with effective network exposure analysis for comprehensive visibility into exposed critical data and associated risks, helping teams prioritize fixes and implement safeguards effectively.
Compliance Posture
Metric: Percentage of compliance posture score with industry standards.
Why it matters: Maintaining compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA isn’t just a legal requirement—it’s a cornerstone of building customer trust and avoiding costly penalties.
How to improve: Wiz DSPM continuously monitors for compliance gaps, providing insights and recommendations that help organizations align with regulatory requirements and industry best practices. You can quickly understand your compliance score against the frameworks relevant to your organization, and identify areas to improve.
Implementing KPIs for Success
To maximize the value of these KPIs, organizations should:
Set Benchmarks: Establish clear baseline metrics to measure progress over time. This provides a reference point for evaluating the effectiveness of security initiatives.
Automate Monitoring: Use tools like Wiz DSPM to automate data classification and discovery, data risk assessment, secrets scanning, and reporting, reducing manual effort and ensuring accuracy.
Integrate KPIs into Strategy: Align security initiatives with organizational goals, leveraging KPIs to demonstrate ROI and make informed decisions.
Foster Accountability: Assign ownership for specific KPIs to relevant teams, encouraging accountability and cross-functional collaboration.
Wiz simplifies this process by providing tools for real-time monitoring, prioritization, and reporting, enabling security teams to focus on actionable insights that drive continuous improvement.
Continuous Improvement with Wiz DSPM
Wiz DSPM empowers organizations with advanced features to support their DSPM journey:
Continuous data discovery and classification: Gain visibility into your sensitive data with Wiz’s continuous agentless discovery of your critical sensitive data and secrets in buckets, PaaS and hosted databases, data warehouses, serverless, Snowflake, and OpenAI against built-in and custom classifiers.
Data risk assessment: Automatically correlate your sensitive data with underlying cloud and workload context, including public exposure, identities and entitlements, vulnerabilities, malware, and lateral movement to remove attack paths to sensitive data.
Data access governance: Easily answer "Who can access what data in my environment?" to ensure only authorized users to access sensitive data and remove excessive access to critical data.
Continuous data compliance: Continuously assess and report on your compliance posture against regulatory frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, HITRUST, and other. Ensure data sovereignty with a geographical view of data findings.
Actionable remediation insights: Prioritized risk queue and context-driven guidance make resolving issues faster and more effective, reducing the likelihood of breaches.
Seamless integration: Wiz integrates with existing tools, enhancing your security ecosystem without adding complexity or disrupting workflows.
Conclusion
Tracking KPIs is essential for measuring the success of your DSPM efforts and driving continuous improvement. By focusing on critical metrics such as data exposure, compliance posture, and remediation time, organizations can achieve a proactive and resilient security posture that protects their most valuable assets.
