Context is key for protecting data in the cloud. Learn how an integrated CNAPP approach moves beyond basic DSPM and takes into account identities, misconfigurations, and AI workloads to pinpoint the greatest risks to your cloud data.

Data is simultaneously your organization's most valuable asset and its greatest vulnerability. As enterprises embrace multi-cloud strategies and AI-driven innovation, the volume and variety of sensitive data stored across cloud environments has exploded. Customer records, intellectual property, financial information, and proprietary AI training data now reside in diverse repositories—from object storage to NoSQL databases to SaaS applications—creating an expanding attack surface that traditional security tools struggle to protect.

The challenge isn't just about having data in the cloud. It's about knowing where that data lives, understanding who can access it, and preventing the misconfigurations that could expose it. According to Tenable Research, 38% of organizations face a "toxic cloud trilogy"—workloads that are publicly exposed, critically vulnerable, and excessively privileged. When sensitive data enters this equation, the risk multiplies exponentially.

Beyond discovery: Understanding your data landscape

Tenable Cloud Security offers end-to-end protection for cloud environments, third-party SaaS solutions, and on-premises infrastructure. A modern cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), Tenable Cloud Security excels at continuously detecting misconfigurations and issues that could increase risk exposure, then facilitating their rapid remediation. 

Tenable Cloud Security automatically discovers and classifies data in cloud storage and database resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and SaaS environments. This goes beyond finding files. It understands the sensitivity of your data. Tenable Cloud Security assigns sensitivity levels to different data types, from publicly shareable information to restricted data containing personally identifiable information (PII), payment card data, health records, or intellectual property.

Your own personal data security command center

The main dashboard provides security teams with an aggregated view of all data resources across their cloud footprint. This single pane of glass displays critical classification statistics, including data categories, sensitivity levels, and overall posture metrics. It's the 30,000-foot view that executives need to understand their organization's data-exposure landscape at a glance.

But real security work happens in the details. The dedicated data dashboard enables security practitioners to execute powerful queries and drill down into specific concerns. Users can filter and investigate based on multiple dimensions:

• Data labels and classifications (e.g., PII, financial data, health records)
• Security-finding severity (critical, high, medium, low)
• Account and resource filtering across multi-cloud environments
• Public accessibility status
• Data sensitivity levels (viewing only restricted data, for instance)

This granular visibility transforms data security from a guessing game into a precise science. Instead of wondering whether sensitive data might be exposed, security teams can definitively identify where restricted data intersects with risk.

From alert to action: Investigating real threats

Let's walk through a common scenario that keeps security leaders up at night: publicly accessible storage buckets containing restricted data.

Using Tenable Cloud Security, you can quickly identify buckets that meet multiple risk criteria—for example, those that contain restricted data and are configured for public access and have been flagged with critical security findings. This is where the toxic combination becomes visible and actionable.

For each concerning bucket, the platform provides:

• Specific data type visibility: See exactly what types of restricted data are present—whether it's credit card numbers, social security numbers, health information, or proprietary source code.
• File-level exploration: Navigate through individual files and objects to understand the scope of exposure.
• Data sampling: View actual samples of found data (properly redacted, of course) to confirm the classification and understand the business context.

This level of detail is critical for incident response and remediation prioritization. Not all data exposures are created equal, and Tenable Cloud Security helps teams focus on what matters most.

The full story: Context that empowers decisions

Data security doesn't exist in a vacuum. Understanding a data exposure requires seeing the complete picture—how the resource was created, who can access it, and what's been happening with it.

Tenable Cloud Security provides comprehensive context for every data resource:

• Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) mapping: Trace back to the CloudFormation, Terraform, or other IaC templates that created the resource. This enables teams to fix issues at the source, preventing the same misconfiguration from being redeployed.
• Identity and access management (IAM) configurations: View exactly who and what has access to the data—human users, service accounts, federated identities, and third-party integrations. The platform's cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities reveal privilege escalation risks and excessive permissions that could be exploited.
• Activity logs: Access an easily readable activity timeline showing who's been interacting with the resource and what actions they've taken. This is invaluable for investigating suspicious behavior and understanding normal access patterns.
• Security findings with remediation guidance: See all relevant security issues in context, complete with severity ratings and step-by-step remediation instructions. No more bouncing between tools or documentation to understand how to fix a problem.

Securing the AI era: Protecting training data and models

As organizations rush to embrace AI and machine learning, they're creating new data security challenges—and opportunities for attackers. Custom AI models trained on sensitive company data represent both enormous business value and significant risk if exposed or misused.

Tenable Cloud Security extends its data protection capabilities to AI resources, including services like AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Services, and Google Cloud Vertex AI. The platform's AI security posture management (AI-SPM) features identify:

• AI training datasets containing classified or sensitive information
• Misconfigured AI service endpoints that could expose models or data
• Excessive permissions on AI resources that violate least-privilege principles
• Unusual access patterns to AI services that might indicate compromise

This is crucial because training data often contains the most sensitive information in your organization—everything from customer interactions to proprietary business logic. A data breach involving AI training data could expose years of competitive intelligence or customer data in a single incident.

Staying ahead: Custom policies for your unique environment

Cloud infrastructure is dynamic by design. New resources spin up constantly, configurations change, and permissions evolve. What was secure yesterday might be exposed today.

Tenable Cloud Security enables organizations to configure custom policies tailored to their specific security requirements and compliance obligations. These policies continuously monitor your environment for conditions that might otherwise slip through the cracks:

• Sensitive data appearing in new, unmonitored locations
• Permission changes that create risky access combinations
• Configuration drift that violates your security standards
• Compliance violations specific to your industry requirements

When a policy violation is detected, the platform doesn't just alert—it provides the context and tools needed for investigation and remediation. Security teams can identify violating identities, trace the change history, and take corrective action, all within a unified workflow.

The unified advantage: Data security as part of your CNAPP

What makes Tenable Cloud Security's approach to data protection particularly powerful is that these capabilities are an integral part of its CNAPP architecture. Unlike standalone data security posture management (DSPM) tools that operate in isolation, Tenable Cloud Security brings together:

• DSPM for data discovery and classification
• Cloud security posture management (CSPM) for infrastructure misconfiguration detection
• Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) for identity and access governance
• Cloud workload protection (CWP) for runtime security
• Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM) for container security
• AI security posture management (AI-SPM) for AI resource protection

This unified approach delivers context that standalone tools simply cannot provide. When you can see how a data exposure connects to an overprivileged identity, a vulnerable workload, and a misconfigured network, you understand the true attack path—and can prioritize accordingly.

Bottom-line - Don’t just ‘check the box’ 

Sensitive data protection isn't just a compliance checkbox or a nice-to-have security feature. It's an integral part of securing modern cloud and AI resources. Data breaches continue to make headlines, regulatory requirements grow more stringent, and the business impact of exposure becomes more severe with each passing year.

Tenable Cloud Security provides the comprehensive, context-rich protection that today's dynamic, multi-cloud environments demand. From automatic discovery and classification to detailed investigation capabilities to custom policy monitoring, the platform empowers security teams to proactively control data exposure before it becomes a breach.

By unifying DSPM capabilities with broader cloud security controls, Tenable enables organizations to secure their entire infrastructure stack—from code to cloud, from data to AI, from identity to workload. Because in the modern cloud, protecting your data means protecting everything connected to it.

Ready to see how Tenable Cloud Security can protect your cloud data? Request a demo to experience the platform's comprehensive data security capabilities firsthand and to explore how unified cloud security can transform your organization's security posture.