The term Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has been floating around for a while now but it’s meaning has expanded slightly in the last few years. What started as a term to represent a misconfiguration reporting tool, has expanded to include features that can automatically identify and fix those issues.
At its core, CSPM is an organized procedure that allows businesses to defend their cloud infrastructure while also mitigating threats.
CSPM enables enterprises to automatically detect and resolve security vulnerabilities and threats throughout their cloud infrastructure, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. It can handle tasks like compliance monitoring, DevOps integration, incident response, risk assessment, and visualization. CSPM can also be used to implement best practices to cloud security across hybrid, multi-cloud, and container systems and infrastructures.
How does CSPM work?
CSPM is a tool for assessing, monitoring, and managing the security of cloud-based data and applications. It gives you insight and control over your company’s data in the cloud, including where critical data is stored and how it’s configured.
A cloud environment is inspected and compared to a defined set of best practices and known security concerns. When a security issue needs to be handled, some CSPM systems may inform the cloud customer, while more advanced CSPM products will use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically resolve concerns.
CSPM identifies where changes have been made since initial deployment, allowing businesses to confirm that the goal state has been reached. Furthermore, once a company has performed its posture assessment, mitigation solutions that reduce total risk exposure can be established.
Why is it a trend in cloud security?
- Security must be comprehensive in order to be effective. Enterprises are recognizing the importance of controlling their security posture both on-premises and in the cloud. Because organizations can use CSPM to automate a lot of the process of finding and resolving security vulnerabilities on cloud platforms, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has become an increasingly adopted solution. Modern CSPMs can, for example:
- Constantly monitor cloud systems for misconfigurations and issues with compliance regulations.
- Review the identification, quarantine, and remediation of hazards from a central location.
- Organize and classify cloud security concerns across the company.
- Enable granular visibility into cloud asset security.
Benefits of CSPM
CSPM technologies can help with risk visualization, incident response, and DevOps integration, in addition to monitoring for compliance. They also have the capacity to:
- Identify vulnerabilities in cloud-based apps and data
- Compare an organization’s specific data configuration to industry-standard compliance criteria to assess risk exposure
- Provide the ability to analyze multiple data and application settings to optimize resource allocation and determine where expenditures should be made
- Create a security configuration baseline that is thorough
- Provide continuous visibility of data exposure risks by tracking changes in your organization’s sensitive data across clouds
Leaders of CSPM
Cloud Security Posture Management leaders have progressed from only being able to detect and inform users of misconfigurations to now being able to automatically remediate them. Zscaler CSPM, Orca Security, and Trend Micro Cloud Conformity are three CSPM leaders to consider.
- Zscaler: Cloudneeti’s CSPM product was purchased by Zscaler last year. It provides a free 30-day trial. Since then, they’ve added asset inventories, a large number of pre-defined rules, and a query language for creating them, as well as Google Cloud Platform support for AWS and Azure. There are additional 13 compliance frameworks available, albeit each cloud supports a distinct set of them.
- Orca Security: Orca is a new CSPM company with an agentless product that works with all three major public cloud platforms. Its tool has some workload protection features and allows for a thorough examination of containers in each cloud service.
- Trend Micro: recently purchased Cloud Conformity in order to include CSPM in the Cloud One Conformity product. Cloud One Conformity works with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Cloud environments to ensure security, governance, and compliance in public clouds.