What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) in Cybersecurity?


Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a set of cybersecurity technologies that improve the security of cloud data. CSPM is a novel idea that arose from the growing trend of companies migrating their traditional processes to the cloud. Cloud security posture management is an automated procedure that allows businesses to defend their cloud infrastructure while mitigating risks.

  • 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. Compliance monitoring, DevOps integration, incident response, and risk assessment and visualization are some of the activities that it is utilized for.

  • CSPM may also apply the best practices to cloud security across hybrid, multi-cloud, and container systems and infrastructures.

  • CSPM can apply best practices for cloud security across hybrid, multi-cloud, and container systems universally and can be used for risk visualization and assessment, incident response, compliance monitoring, and DevOps integration.

How Does CSPM Work?

To improve the security posture of cloud systems, CPSM solutions identify and fix hazards generated by cloud misconfigurations. Softwareas- a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-asa- Service (IaaS) solutions are all included in these settings.

CSPM technologies successfully monitor and mitigate risk across the whole cloud attack surface of a company. Their core capabilities - are visibility, constant monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows.

CSPM provides discovery and insight into cloud assets and settings. It creates a single truth across all cloud environments, ensuring that metadata, misconfigurations, networking, and security changes are all immediately discovered. It also provides a single platform for managing security rules across accounts, projects, regions, and virtual networks.

Misconfiguration Management and Remediation

One of the essential functions of CSPM is to identify and eradicate cloud security threats.

  • It accomplishes this by comparing cloud application settings to industry and organization benchmarks, allowing violations to be recognized and remedied promptly.

  • CSPM aids businesses in identifying problems like misconfigurations, open ports, and illegal changes.

  • CSPM reduces the risk of exposed cloud resources and guarantees developers don't make costly mistakes.

  • It also keeps track of data storage locations, checks for proper permission levels, and promises that database instances responsible for backups, encryption, and high availability are all turned on.

Continuous Threat Detection

CSPM employs a focused approach to threat identification and management, allowing businesses to detect possible risks ahead of time.

  • It focuses on the regions that are most likely to be targeted by attackers, reducing the number of alarms, prioritizing vulnerabilities depending on the cloud environment, and preventing vulnerable code from reaching the production stage.

  • Through real-time threat detection, CSPM also continually monitors cloud environments for potentially harmful activities and illegal access events.

Integration with DevSecOps

CSPM saves overhead and eliminates the complexity and friction of managing many cloud accounts and providers.

  • CSPM delivers a cloud-native and agentless posture management approach that gives you centralized control and visibility over all of your cloud resources. This provides a single pane glass for DevOps and security teams, allowing them to prevent compromised assets from traversing through their application lifecycles.

  • CSPM can also be integrated with a security information and event management (SIEM) solution, providing further insight and visibility into policy violations and misconfigurations. Integrating DevOps toolsets with CSPM also allows for faster remediation and response.

What is the Importance of CSPM?

A cloud may join and disconnect with hundreds or even thousands of different networks throughout a day. Clouds are strong because of their dynamic nature, but they are also difficult to protect. The difficulty of safeguarding cloud-based systems gets increasingly significant as a cloudfirst attitude becomes the norm.

Traditional security does not operate in the cloud because of the following reasons −

  • There is no border to keep manual procedures at the size or speed required.

  • Due to lack of centralization, achieving visibility is incredibly challenging.

  • While cloud computing saves money in the long run, the security component of the jigsaw may get into the ROI since there are so many moving parts to handle such as microservices, containers, Kubernetes, serverless operations, and so on. The famed cybersecurity skills gap is particularly pertinent here, as new technologies emerge quicker than locating security specialists with suitable experience.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a concept that combines these new technologies by allowing infrastructure to be controlled and provided using machine-readable specification files. This API-driven approach is critical in cloud-first settings because it will enable quick infrastructure changes while also making it easy to program in misconfigurations that leave the environment vulnerable.

The greatest vulnerability lies behind all of these problems: a lack of visibility. There are hundreds of thousands of instances and accounts in settings as complicated and fluid as the average business cloud, and understanding what or who is running where and doing what is only conceivable with sophisticated automation. Without it, vulnerabilities caused by misconfigurations might go undiscovered for days, weeks, or even months, or until a breach occurs.

CSPM tackles these concerns by continually monitoring cloud risk through prevention, detection, response, and prediction of where risk may occur next.

Benefits of CSPM

Following are some of the major benefits of implementing Cloud Security Posture Management −

Locating Misconfigured Network Connectivity

CSPM solutions find network connectivity misconfigurations that lead to a data breach or leak. They do so by comparing cloud networks to business standards and best practices, allowing them to notice any mistakes right away.

Benchmarks in the market are its examples. Using these benchmarks as a starting point, CSPM can detect infrastructure misconfigurations, inform security teams, and give a proposed remedy.

Risk Assessment of Data

CSPM helps businesses to discover possible data threats that may be created by human mistakes or that are not detected by their cloud provider. This might include flaws caused by developers rushing to launch a new application or virtual machines, exposing the company's network. In cloud settings, CSPM proactively discovers and mitigates these data vulnerabilities.

Detection of Excessively Liberal Account Permissions

CSPMs employ an organization's security rules and best practices to keep an eye on occurrences that result in account privileges being compromised or overstepped. As a result, if a person attempts to access a resource that is not authorized in their department or job position, it will be identified and blocked instantly.

Monitoring the Cloud Environment Constantly

CSPMs examine and monitor cloud environments on a regular basis to verify that enterprises follow their compliance standards. Any departure from these policies is promptly detected, ensuring that the error or risk is automatically addressed and mitigated.

In some cases, it automatically corrects the misconfigurations. CSPM solutions provide reports and offer suggestions for resolving an identified misconfiguration. In other situations, however, they can automatically correct the misconfiguration, ensuring that any possible vulnerability is fixed quickly and the danger of exploitation is eliminated.

Best Practices Compliant with Common Standards HIPAA, SOC2, and PIC CSPM systems, for example, use a set of standards and best practices to identify cloud security misconfigurations. This is great for assisting firms in complying with increasingly strict data and privacy standards such as the HIPAA System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC2), and the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) Regulation.

Updated on: 14-Apr-2022

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