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Wed, 09/30/2026 – 20:13
Todd Moore | Global VP of Data Security Products at Thales
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Somewhere inside a building, a fire burns. It's small for the moment, but that doesn't mean it's contained. Alarms ring and panic spreads, and there's no tangible action anyone can take to stop the fire itself from spreading. At least not until a firefighter shows up who knows exactly what to do…
Once the firefighter is on-site, the real work starts. They read the scene. Where are the people who need to get out? Where's the fire likely to spread next? Is there a gas line or a structural weak point that turns a bad fire into a catastrophic one?
Based on what they find, they decide the next move and direct the team accordingly.
An active blaze threatening lives gets remediated immediately. A risk that hasn't ignited yet, like a frayed wire or a stack of exposed chemicals, gets mitigated before it becomes a bigger problem.
Either way, the area gets contained before anything spreads further.
That's what a Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) program is supposed to do: detect exposed data, infrastructure, and AI workloads, then act, remediating active threats and mitigating risk before it turns into a breach. A DSPM program that only sounds the alarm, without the built-in capacity to act, leaves you exactly where the building above was: aware of the danger, but no closer to stopping it.
Halfway is no way. A DSPM program that detects but can't respond isn't partial data protection. It's a blind spot with a really loud alarm.
Backlogs, Bluster, and Breaches
For security teams, a DSPM solution that can only detect incidents is an operational nightmare.
Imagine a team of, say, three analysts, all arriving for work in the morning. They make small talk for a while, then grab a coffee and head to their desks. By the time they log on, DSPM alerts from their new detection tool are already rolling in.
Alerts will differ by company. A financial organization might receive alerts on exposed transaction records, a healthcare organization on electronic patient health records. A large company will need to monitor an entire complex, siloed ecosystem. A smaller one will only watch critical production databases.
Either way, thousands of alerts may pour in, all without context, all noise and no signal. Analysts will waste hours digging through cloud computing settings and logs to figure out who owns the data. They will route raw alerts to engineers, only for them to reject them because they lack context and the necessary remediation steps.
As time goes by, ticket backlogs will balloon to monstrous proportions waiting for a deus ex machina to resolve them. Work piles up faster than anyone can address it. The fire spreads. Tickets sit unassigned, and analysts ignore the most critical alerts because, at this point, everything is a priority.
90 days after the initial implementation, the team might send executives a list of vulnerabilities they've found…but not the ones they've fixed. Worse of all, they might not even have a clear plan to remediate the risks and fortify the data environment.
They've met compliance standards, but the organization isn't any safer. It’s all bluster, without any actual reduction in exposure. Nothing but noise and overconfidence that exceeds actual capability.
Eventually, attackers will exploit a known, alerted shadow database. Why? Because it was buried on page 45 of the alert queue. The breach the team was supposedly guarding against happens anyway, in plain sight of a tool that saw it coming.
The alarms are still ringing, but the building has already burned down.
Shiny New Tool, Same Old Posture
This is a trap far too many security teams get stuck in. It’s understandable, but not something that organizations can accept as an inevitable reality of DSPM.
The vendor market is awash with shiny new detection tools. A good number of them position themselves as the answer to all of a security team’s problems: total visibility, lightning-fast detection speeds, and comprehensive coverage across every environment.
Naturally, teams buy in, expecting a comprehensive solution. Then they fail to define who actually owns the response. The constant slew of unprioritized alerts gives the illusion of efficacy. Visibility itself becomes the goalpost. Teams say, with full confidence, “we deployed it, and we ran the scans,” without taking any meaningful steps towards an outcome.
But the team’s security posture isn’t any better than it was before they implemented the tool. They feel prepared for anything, but if a fire started, they’d have no way to put it out.
Alerts Are Alarming, Not Reassuring
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