Data Store
Any system — database, object store, data warehouse, SaaS application, file share — that holds personal or sensitive data.
Full Definition
A data store is any persistent place that holds data. In a typical enterprise it includes transactional databases (Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle), object stores (S3, GCS, Azure Blob), warehouses and lakehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift), NoSQL stores (DynamoDB, MongoDB, Cassandra), SaaS tenants (Salesforce, HubSpot, Workday) and the long tail of file shares, email archives and backup systems. Each store is in scope of a privacy programme to the extent it holds personal data.
For DSPM and data governance tooling, 'data store' is the unit of enrolment — each store is onboarded to the discovery / classification / access-mapping pipeline, and the output flows into the data inventory, the RoPA and the DSR fulfilment pipeline. The number of data stores in a mature enterprise typically runs into the thousands, which is why automated discovery is the only tractable model; manual catalog maintenance is a losing proposition past the first few hundred.
Related terms
Data Inventory
The authoritative list of personal data an organisation holds, together with where it lives, who owns it, and under what lawful basis it is processed.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
A tooling category that continuously discovers personal and sensitive data across cloud environments, classifies it, maps who has access, and surfaces security risk.
Data Catalog
A centralised, searchable inventory of an organisation's data assets with metadata about location, schema, owner, classification and lineage.
Relevant regulations
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