Storage Requirements for Users and Permissions

This section provides updated guidance for sizing storage related to user to column permission mappings within Forcepoint DSPM. These estimates are intended to complement the existing environment sizing information provided elsewhere in the documentation.

Permissions - Storage Model

Permissions storage requirements scale according to three factors:

  • U – Number of users registered across the governed data sources
  • C – Total number of columns scanned and governed
  • R – Average number of effective roles assigned per user

Each unique mapping between a user, a column, and a role is stored as an internal Complexity Unit, which requires approximately 100 bytes.

Formula

Required Storage = 1 Complexity Unit (≈100 bytes) × U × C × R

This relationship increases proportionally with each dimension, and should be considered when sizing large deployments.

Example Calculation

Scenario Inputs

  • U: 25,000 users
  • C: 10,000 columns
  • R: 10 roles per user (effective average)

Computation

  1. Complexity Units

    25,000 × 10,000 × 10 = 250,000,000 units

  2. Estimated Storage

    250,000,000 × 100 bytes = 25,000,000,000 bytes ≈ 25 GB

Result

A deployment of this scale requires approximately 25 GB dedicated to storing permission mappings.