The DSPM “Success Tax”: Why Per-GB Pricing Undermines Security at Scale

As a CISO, you’re expected to do two things at once:

1. Reduce risk across an expanding data footprint
2. Keep security spend predictable and defensible

Traditional DSPM and DLP platforms quietly make those goals incompatible.

As organizations migrate to the cloud, modernize applications, and accumulate more data, many security leaders discover an uncomfortable reality: their DSPM costs scale faster than their risk reduction. What begins as a reasonable line item becomes a variable expense that increases every time the business grows.

This is the hidden “success tax” of per-GB and per-event pricing.

When Pricing and Security Are Misaligned

Usage-based DSPM pricing is often justified as fair: pay only for what you protect.

In practice, it creates a structural conflict between financial governance and security coverage.

When every scan has a marginal cost, organizations are forced into trade-offs:

• Comprehensive visibility vs. budget discipline
• Continuous scanning vs. quarterly audits
• Full data coverage vs. “risk-based sampling”

Over time, cost containment wins—and security posture quietly erodes.

The Executive Risk: The “Unprotected Gap”

Selective scanning inevitably creates an unprotected gap—areas of the environment that fall outside regular inspection because they are perceived as lower priority or too expensive to include.

This gap typically includes:

• Legacy backups and archives
• Development and test environments
• Cloud storage created outside central governance
• Data inherited through acquisitions

From a risk perspective, these areas matter disproportionately. They often contain sensitive data, lack strong ownership, and escape routine controls. From a governance perspective, they represent unknown exposure—the hardest category of risk to explain to regulators, auditors, or a board.

The Hidden Cost Drivers CISOs Inherit

1. Incomplete Coverage Becomes the Norm

Per-GB pricing incentivizes partial visibility. Over time, “temporary exclusions” become permanent blind spots, and the organization loses confidence that it truly understands where sensitive data lives.

2. Data Movement Introduces New Risk and Cost

Many SaaS-based DSPM platforms require copying data into their own cloud for analysis—often incurring additional costs from providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure, while expanding the organization’s attack surface.

3. Continuous Security Becomes Financially Infeasible

Effective data security is continuous, not episodic. When re-scanning is expensive, organizations settle for infrequent assessments—creating long windows of exposure between scans.

The Architectural Root Cause

These challenges are not operational failures—they are architectural consequences.

Traditional DSPM platforms are centralized SaaS systems designed to ingest customer data. Their economics depend on:

• Volume-based ingestion
• Vendor-managed processing pipelines
• Pricing models that grow as customer data grows

This aligns vendor revenue with customer data growth—not necessarily with improved security outcomes.

A Model Designed for Predictability and Coverage

Inspect-Data Risk Finder was designed to realign economics with security objectives.

Rather than pulling data into a centralized platform, Risk Finder runs inside your environment as a lightweight Docker container. Analysis happens where the data already resides.

For CISOs, this delivers three strategic advantages:

• Cost Predictability: Flat-fee licensing eliminates budget volatility as data grows
• Comprehensive Visibility: No economic penalty for scanning everything
• Reduced Exposure: No data movement, no mirrored storage, no added attack surface

Security coverage becomes a policy decision—not a pricing negotiation.

Governance Without the Meter Running

With flat-fee, localized scanning:

• Backups, dev systems, and cloud storage can be included by default
• Continuous scanning becomes operationally and financially viable
• Security teams stop optimizing for cost avoidance and start optimizing for risk reduction

This is especially critical as AI, analytics, and regulatory scrutiny continue to increase pressure on data governance programs.

Eliminate the Success Tax

Growth should not make your security posture harder to defend—or your budget harder to explain.

Inspect-Data Risk Finder enables organizations to scan all data, continuously, without per-GB fees, egress costs, or architectural compromises.

Learn more about Risk Finder’s flat-fee approach | Try Free Risk Scanner | Get started on Docker Hub

If you’re evaluating DSPM platforms—or questioning whether your current model is working against you—Inspect-Data Risk Finder offers a fundamentally different approach: predictable costs, complete visibility, and security that scales with the business.