How Does Forcepoint DSPM Compare to Varonis?

If you rely on sensitive information to stay competitive – and most enterprises do – you must also ensure it remains protected against exposure, misuse or regulatory violations. Doing this at scale calls for more than just reactive security solutions. To maintain compliance and prevent data breaches, you have to actively see and control your data to minimize risk.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions work to empower security and shore up organizations against data risk, but not all solutions provide comparable return on investment. Varonis provides a DSPM solution with relatively high degrees of cost and complexity, while Forcepoint DSPM takes a different approach. It combines discovery with built-in remediation, continuous compliance monitoring and seamless integration across a unified data security platform. The result is stronger protection with less overhead and greater ROI.

Complement data visibility with native remediation

Pinpointing where sensitive data resides is only the beginning of effective risk reduction. Without the ability to remediate, visibility leaves organizations with more questions than answers.

Varonis can highlight at-risk data but often requires multiple add-ons to take corrective action, driving up both cost and complexity.  

And the challenge becomes more significant during cloud migration. When organizations move from Varonis on-prem to Varonis SaaS, custom classification rules, remediation workflows, ownership mappings, and policy tuning do not migrate. Instead, they must be recreated manually in the SaaS interface. This reimplementation effort delays time-to-value and introduces the risk of policy drift—where sensitive data remains exposed simply because legacy rules were never fully replicated.

Forcepoint DSPM addresses this challenge directly. Out of the box it delivers capabilities such as de-duplication, permissions management, quarantine, archiving and deletion. All without requiring extra modules.

In practice, this makes a measurable difference. A healthcare provider can remove duplicate patient files immediately to reduce HIPAA exposure. A bank can restrict portfolio information to authorized advisors without waiting for external tools. With Forcepoint, visibility turns into action in real time.

Governance and compliance demand speed

Timely detection of risky behavior is critical for staying compliant. Delays can mean regulatory fines or reputational harm that no enterprise can afford.

Forcepoint DSPM monitors activity continuously and generates alerts the moment a policy is violated. Varonis, by contrast, often forces teams to juggle workflows or buy additional Managed DDR services before they can respond, introducing dangerous lag time.

With Varonis, because past access history and user behavior baselines do not transfer, organizations effectively start from zero.

Take a retailer processing millions of cardholder transactions daily. With Forcepoint DSPM, security teams receive instant notification if payment data is improperly shared, allowing them to intervene before damage occurs. A similar scenario in a Varonis environment could involve chasing alerts across separate systems, slowing the response and increasing risk.

Unified security covering hybrid and legacy systems

Enterprises want protection that scales with them, anticipating future needs but also handling the realities of where sensitive data resides.

Varonis is currently pushing customers to cloud- and subscription-based models, withdrawing support for on-premises deployments. For larger and more well-established companies with a significant amount of sensitive data stored in legacy systems, making Varonis SaaS-only will translate into coverage gaps that enable catastrophic breaches.

When Varonis customers transition to SaaS, there is no simple conversion. It's more like a "forklift" upgrade as many rules, workflows, alerts and data sources must be recreated in the SaaS deployment. As such, customers must consider the undocumented cost of time and labor involved.

Forcepoint DSPM is delivered as part of Forcepoint Data Security Cloud, a platform that unifies DSPM with Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Data Detection and Response (DDR) and cloud security capabilities. The platform provides end-to-end protection for data on endpoints, in the cloud and across on-premises environments, all from a single console.

For a manufacturer, this means sensitive product designs can be safeguarded consistently no matter where they are stored. With Varonis, lack of protection for sensitive data in on-prem storage systems and endpoints leaves companies with major gaps that attackers can exploit. Forcepoint’s unified approach simplifies operations, lowers the total cost of ownership and offers assurance that all sensitive data is known and protected.

Smarter AI adapts to your business

Artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in identifying and classifying sensitive data. The distinction lies in how flexible that intelligence can be.

Varonis applies its own AI and relies on prebuilt compliance templates. Forcepoint DSPM introduces an AI Mesh that can be trained to an organization’s unique data environment. This allows a financial institution to recognize proprietary transaction codes or a manufacturer to flag sensitive design patterns – tailoring protection to what matters most.

By aligning AI with each customer’s data landscape, Forcepoint makes it possible to achieve more accurate results than a one-size-fits-all model.

Leadership that enterprises trust

Forcepoint has been delivering data protection to some of the world’s most regulated industries for decades. Analysts consistently highlight Forcepoint’s leadership, especially in the mature field of Data Loss Prevention. That expertise is now amplified through tight integration with DSPM in Forcepoint Data Security Cloud.

Varonis, while established, remains heavily rooted in on-premises data governance. In today’s environment where cloud and endpoint workloads dominate, those limitations create obstacles for enterprises that need flexibility and scale. Forcepoint offers a future-ready alternative backed by long-standing industry recognition.

Choose a platform built for the future

DSPM has become a cornerstone of modern data protection. But to be effective it must go beyond visibility to deliver remediation, governance and scale – without driving up cost or complexity.

Forcepoint DSPM provides the depth Varonis cannot match, with built-in remediation, real-time enforcement, AI tailored to your data and seamless integration with a proven DLP leader. Combined in the Forcepoint Data Security Cloud, these capabilities offer a complete and cost-efficient solution for reducing data risk across the enterprise – with coverage for not just cloud-based systems but endpoints and on-prem storage as well.

To preview Forcepoint DSPM and start measuring your data risk across OneDrive in minutes, sign up today for a free Data Risk Assessment.