Understanding the Cloud Security Posture Management

Quick Summary: CSPM allows organizations to discover and remediate security risks across cloud infrastructures. It is an essential process to protect cloud infrastructure from cybersecurity risks. Keep reading to understand more about CSPM and how it benefits organizations.

Cloud computing is playing a critical role in today’s businesses. They offer cost benefits, scalability, and ease of IT management. However, security is a key challenge when it comes to cloud computing, and most organizations grapple with it.

Misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are reasons for cloud security breaches. Identifying and resolving them is crucial to protect your cloud infrastructure from cybersecurity risks. CSPM helps organizations to handle cloud misconfigurations, compliance, and other security issues efficiently.

It is a process that involves evaluating cloud environments, identifying security flaws, and remediating them to mitigate cyber security risks. Vulnerability assessment is an integral part of this process that involves identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing vulnerabilities.

This blog provides a complete understanding of CSPM, its importance, and the way it works for organizations. Let’s dive into the details!

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What is CSPM?

CSPM or Cloud Security Posture Management is a category of tools and technologies designed to automate cloud security and ensure compliance. It is also a process to uncover and remediate cybersecurity risks across multiple cloud infrastructures. It assesses IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service) for risk visualization, incident response, compliance monitoring, and more.

In simple words, CSPM helps to identify cloud misconfigurations and other security issues to mitigate cybersecurity risks and ensure compliance. There are lots of CSPM tools that help to manage cloud security and compliance from a common platform.

Why is CSPM Needed?

The cloud is a powerful means of IT infrastructure with its ability to handle multiple networks at a time. So, there is a significant demand for cloud-based services today. However, the complexity and scale of cloud infrastructure also make it hard to secure. There are so many pieces to be managed when it comes to security like microservices, containers, serverless functions, and more.

Hence, you need a robust strategy to manage the security of your cloud systems and infrastructure. That is where CSPM plays a crucial role. It helps to identify misconfigurations that lead to cyberattacks. Misconfigurations cause most cloud breaches, and in 95% of cases of security breaches, they were found to be the main reason.

Using CSPM, organizations can discover potential security issues and protect their cloud environments from cyberattacks. It offers many advantages from detecting and remediating cloud configuration errors to resolving compliance issues. The following are all the benefits of cloud security posture management.

Discover Data Risks

A CSPM solution helps to detect possible data risks related to the cloud infrastructure. The risks could be those not spotted by the cloud vendor or caused by human error. This could also include the vulnerabilities left behind by the developers when hurriedly launching virtual machines or new applications.

Prevent Cloud Blind Spots

Cloud Security Posture Management is an effective measure to prevent cloud security blind spot that stands for misconfigurations. These are misconfigurations that even experienced administrators fail to identify and cause security issues. CSPM helps to prevent common blind spots including:

• IaC (Infrastructure-as-a-Code) misconfigurations.
• IAM (Identify and Access Management) errors.
• Rapidly changing cloud environments.
• Sprawl and Shadow IT.
• Unable to understand shared responsibility.

Continuous Monitoring

A robust CSPM constantly monitors cloud resources in various environments like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS. It involves automatic evaluation of assets across containers, servers, storage, and more. You can also apply customized security and access rules by monitoring the server workloads.

Better Control

CSPM provides robust control over the security of your cloud environment by easily managing security policies. You can leverage automation and AI across large-scale cloud environments to streamline and automate security and compliance. You can manage your virtual machines and the cloud environment to ensure optimal security to be compliant with regulations that change frequently.

Help in Compliance

CSPM tools use a standard approach to identify misconfigurations and other cloud security issues. Besides, they use benchmarks that comply with prevalent industry standards. Therefore, these tools are helpful for organizations in achieving their compliance requirements. They help organizations meet stringent data protection compliances like HIPAA, GDPR, SOC2, and PIS.

Uncover Hidden Threats

CSPM helps to identify hidden security threats by scanning the entire cloud infrastructure for potential vulnerabilities and errors. It helps to discover security issues that could expose your organization’s network and data.

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How to Implement Cloud Security Posture Management?

Let's check out the effective way to implement cloud security posture management.

Examine Cloud Environment

In order to implement CSPM, first perform an initial assessment of your cloud environment to get an idea about its architecture, configuration, and existing security measures.

Select a Suitable CSPM Tool

It's very important to select a tool after conducting thorough research. This ensures the selected tool's offerings and the organization's requirements align with each other.

Define Security Policies

Establish security policies and compliance requirements on the basis of industry standards and regulatory frameworks applicable to your organization.

Configure a Tool

Set up a cloud security posture management tool to monitor your cloud environment. Further, integrate the tool with your cloud platforms and configure it to fit well with your security policies.

Perform Initial Scan

Run an initial check of your cloud resources in order to ensure that it detects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps properly.

Integrate with DevOps

Once the initial scan is performed and validated, integrate CSPM practices into your DevOps pipeline to ensure that security is maintained across the entire development and deployment lifecycle.

Cloud Security Posture Management: How It Works?

The following are some of the ways that CSPM works for organizations.

Cloud Visibility

Organizations continually expand that leads to change in their existing cloud environment. With this change, misconfigurations can happen when migrating processes from one cloud environment to another.

Cloud Security Posture Management helps to discover cloud infrastructure assets and configurations and make them visible to security experts. It provides a single point of truth (SPOT) across different cloud environments and accounts.

CSPM tools provide automatic visibility into cloud resources and information like metadata, security group policy, misconfiguration, etc.

Managing Misconfigurations

Comparing the configurations of cloud applications with industry benchmarks or organizational standards helps to mitigate security risks. It allows security experts to identify gaps that violate security and remediate the issues in real time. Security issues like unauthorized modifications, open IP ports, and misconfigurations can be resolved.

Constant Threat Detection

Security experts can proactively identify security issues across the application development lifecycle with continuous assessment of cloud environments. CSPM provides a targeted security approach with integrated threat identification and management eliminating the noise of multi-cloud environment security alerts. It offers prioritized vulnerability results to prevent critical vulnerabilities from reaching the production environment.

DevSecOps Integration

CSPM provides a single source of truth between the DevOps and security teams offering efficient management of vulnerabilities through the application development lifecycle. It streamlines the visibility into misconfigurations and policy violations that lead to security loopholes. Integrating it with DevOps tools helps teams to quickly identify and remediate security flaws that lead to an efficient DevSecOps model.

What are the Key Advantages of Cloud Security Posture Management?

Let's check out the surprising benefits of cloud security posture management.

Improved Visibility

Cloud security posture management offers detailed insights into cloud configurations and security settings, which helps businesses to detect and fix misconfigurations.

Automated Compliance

Compliance checks are pretty complicated to conduct, but CSPM automates compliance checks and audits against regulatory standards. This relatively decreases the risk of non-compliance.

Centralized Management

Cloud security posture management provides a unified platform to handle and monitor security policies across different cloud environments.

Incident Response

Cloud security posture helps organizations with speedy detection and response to security incidents by offering actionable alerts and remediation recommendations.

Policy Enforcement

CSPM automates and streamlines the enforcement of security policies and best practices by ensuring consistent application across multiple cloud resources.

Integration with DevOps

CSPM supports integration with DevOps workflows to embed security practices into development processes. This enables secure coding and deployment practices.

Comparing CSPM with Other Cloud Security Approaches

There are many other cloud security approaches that organizations adopt to discover security risks and protect their infrastructure. Below is a comparison of other cloud security approaches with Cloud Security Posture Management.

CASB

CASB (Cloud Access Security Brokers) are points that enforce security between the providers and consumers of cloud services. Before accessing the cloud network, traffic is checked to ensure compliance with security policies.

CASBs are typically utilized for authentication, data loss prevention, malware detection, and firewall protection. On the other hand, CSPM monitors the existing infrastructure as well as creates policies defining the desired state of the infrastructure.

CIEM

CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) focuses on access management to prevent unauthorized access to cloud resources. It monitors the activities and permissions of entities to ensure that they operate within the defined access controls and prevent excessive entitlements. CSPM helps your organization to ensure compliance with industry regulations and data privacy.

CWPP

CWPPs (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) are designed to protect only workloads. On the other hand, CSPMs evaluate and secure the entire cloud infrastructure.

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To Wrap Up

Cloud security is a complex task as there are various pieces that need to be considered for security like containers, microservices, APIs, and more. Assessing these pieces for vulnerabilities is crucial to evaluate overall cloud security posture.

You need a modern dynamic application security testing tool like ZeroThreat to identify and manage vulnerabilities within your cloud infrastructure. ZeroThreat is well-suited to testing microservices, APIs, and applications to identify vulnerabilities.

Try ZeroThreat and discover vulnerabilities to protect your cloud infrastructure.