What is CSPM?
CSPM stands for Cloud Security Posture Management. It is a security approach that has been explicitly designed to help organizations have continuous monitoring and visibility into their cloud infrastructure configurations. Through these insights, enterprises can ensure they align with the industrial best practices, compliance standards, and regulatory obligations.
Furthermore, it enables the proactive identification, remediation, and continuous mitigation of misconfigurations and security risks across various cloud services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
CSPM has emerged as a highly relevant and essential strategic initiative for businesses that represent more than a simple compliance checkbox to be filled. Leveraging CSPM, organizations gain real-time visibility and continuous monitoring of their cloud environments, ensuring that infrastructure configurations adhere strictly to industry best practices and relevant regulatory standards. Furthermore, critical tasks such as risk identification, prioritization, and remediation processes can be completely automated, ensuring a proactive approach where vulnerabilities are both identified and mitigated before they can cause any significant damage.
The following blog delves deep into the importance of CSPM and how it differs from other prevalent cloud security tools. It outlines the features that make CSPM such an effective solution and, most importantly, the best practices to consider during its implementation.
Read on to learn more.
Why Is CSPM Important?
According to a report, 94% of all enterprises today are using cloud services. This has enabled petabytes of data to be created, stored, and shared digitally without relying on traditional on-premise storage. Such an arrangement has not only saved businesses an incalculable amount but has also allowed for data to be leveraged in a far more efficient manner than previously possible.
However, the surge in cloud adoption and infrastructure has amplified both the opportunities and risks. CrowdStrike’s 2024 Cloud Threat Report found that simple cloud misconfigurations alone account for nearly 70% of all cloud-related security breaches. This highlights the urgency and necessity for businesses to effectively manage their cloud security posture.
Consider the case of Capital One in 2019. A former AWS employee exploited a misconfigured Web Application Firewall (WAF), thereby gaining unauthorized access to Capital One’s AWS environment and more than 100 million customer records, including users’ names, addresses, credit scores, and Social Security numbers. A lengthy barrage of investigations and legal issues followed, resulting in Capital One incurring $270 million in fines and remediation costs.
Cloud adoption has proven to be an incredibly transformative leap for most businesses. However, as the Capital One breach highlighted, it introduces significant risks related to infrastructure complexity, rapid scalability, and compliance challenges. CSPM is designed to address these risks and challenges effectively. Its automated assessment and remediation capabilities enable the rapid and secure deployment of cloud-based applications and services, which in turn facilitate agile development practices and workflows. In simpler terms, it ensures both security and agility within the cloud environments without compromising on growth or innovation.
How CSPM Works
CSPM relies heavily upon continuous monitoring and evaluation of cloud environments. Such a consistent overview ensures that all security risks are identified, prioritized, and resolved based on each organization’s unique requirements and preferences. This is done via a structured cycle that involves discovery, assessment, prioritization, and remediation, ensuring business continuity and compliance within the cloud infrastructure.
Asset discovery is the initial phase, where the cloud infrastructure and environments are thoroughly scanned and assessed. This helps identify all relevant resources, including databases, storage buckets, virtual machines, network settings, and user access permissions. The automation of this process is critical, as cloud resources are highly dynamic and frequently change, which would result in highly inefficient outcomes if done manually. Through automated CSPM, the inventory is updated in real-time, ensuring all relevant resources remain visible and accounted for.
Following the discovery phase, security assessments are conducted for each asset’s configuration. This is done in accordance with established industry and regulatory security benchmarks and compliance frameworks. These can include CIS benchmarks, GDPR, HIPAA, or other industry standards. Any potential misconfigurations, such as publicly accessible data buckets, overly permissive user privileges, unsecured network ports, or improperly encrypted databases, are then identified and addressed. CSPM can then deploy predefined rules and security policies.
Afterward, CSPM leverages the automation and analytics capabilities to prioritize all the identified issues and vulnerabilities. This prioritization can be based on their severity, exploitability, and potential impact on business operations. Furthermore, it enables IT and security teams to address the most urgent issues first, thus improving operational efficiency and reducing the immediate security risk for the organization. Modern CSPM platforms have relied on ML and AI-driven analytics to predict potential threats, predefine their priority, and instill remediation plans in place before they occur, thereby enhancing overall proactiveness.
Lastly, the remediation process can be either fully automated or semi-automated, depending on organizational preference or available resources. When potential misconfigurations are identified, they can trigger immediate alerts, and remediation and corrective measures can be implemented automatically.
Common Misconceptions About CSPM
Arguably, the biggest challenge related to CSPM deployment is the various misconceptions about it. These misconceptions cloud enterprises’ overall assessment of CSPM’s suitability for their needs and hinder its effective adoption.
The first is that CSPM is primarily a compliance-oriented tool. This implies that CSPM’s most important value propositions will only be for businesses operating in highly regulated sectors where data management is heavily scrutinized. While CSPM facilitates compliance tremendously by allowing for continuous monitoring of cloud configurations, its relevance extends beyond just regulatory adherence and compliance. It enables the proactive identification of vulnerabilities that, if left unchecked, could result in millions of dollars in lost business, operational breakdowns, regulatory fines, and compromised customer trust.
Next is the notion that CSPM as a framework is redundant for enterprises that already rely on Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) or Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP). In reality, each of these frameworks addresses different security domains. CASB manages application-level security, CWPP is optimal for managing workloads such as virtual machines and serverless environments, while CSPM is designed to address infrastructure-level misconfigurations and compliance risks. Hence, CSPM should not be seen as an alternative or replacement for any of these solutions but as a means to complement them and enhance the overall cloud security posture within an organization.
Then, there is another myth that CSPM is only necessary for large enterprises with extensive cloud operations or that its implementation is so complex, resource-intensive, and disruptive to existing workflows that it makes it affordable only for such large enterprises. In reality, organizations of all sizes are equally susceptible to security breaches that may occur due to cloud misconfigurations. Through CSPM, they can automate detection and remediation tasks, significantly reducing manual workflows and providing much-needed security coverage. Moreover, it is designed with ease of integration in mind. CSPM can seamlessly connect with existing cloud environments via API, with its AI-driven analytics and intuitive dashboards simplifying deployment and daily management altogether.
4 Core Capabilities Of CSPM
A robust CSPM solution delivers several critical capabilities that are tailored to address the various challenges organizations face in managing their cloud security. Among them, the four most important capabilities that a reliable CSPM solution must have include the following:
Continuous Visibility & Asset Discovery
Unquestionably, the most fundamental aspect of any CSPM solution is the ability to automatically inventory and continuously monitor all cloud assets. As mentioned earlier, cloud assets such as virtual machines, databases, storage buckets, and user permissions are consistently created, modified, or removed. This makes accurate and real-time visibility into the cloud infrastructure significantly more important.
Misconfiguration Detection & Prevention
Misconfigurations are a significant threat vector within cloud environments, accounting for the majority of cloud security breaches. CSPM ensures the entire cloud infrastructure is consistently and thoroughly assessed for misconfigurations based on industry benchmarks, international standards, and regulatory requirements. Such proactiveness significantly reduces the security gaps that attackers exploit, thereby protecting the organization from incidents that may lead to substantial fines, legal issues, and loss of user confidence.
CSPM is more than just identifying the problem and forwarding it to the appropriate departments. It can be leveraged to automate the corrective measures required to resolve vulnerabilities. For instance, when a misconfigured resource is detected, a CSPM solution can instantly revert settings to a secure state. This not only saves valuable time and resources but also ensures the security team can continue focusing on strategic initiatives rather than manual reconfigurations.
Risk Prioritization & Advanced Analytics
Modern CSPM solutions enable proactive cloud security management by leveraging AI and ML algorithms to analyze vast volumes of security data. Through such analysis, trends and patterns can be identified, which can indicate potential threats. Prioritization based on severity and other metrics allows security teams to respond strategically, addressing the most critical risks first. Furthermore, this elevates CSPM to more than just a simple monitoring tool as it helps mold the organization’s overall security posture management into a forward-thinking security discipline.
Conclusion
While CSPM is a highly effective option for organizations seeking to strengthen their cloud security, there are alternatives that may be better suited to their unique cloud data security needs.
One such alternative is Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). Compared to CSPM, DSPM offers a more data-centric security approach that focuses on the organization’s granular data assets rather than macroscopic infrastructure-centric monitoring. Furthermore, DSPM is optimized to address the various data security and privacy-related issues concerning sensitive data. It can identify and mitigate all issues in such assets directly wherever they are stored, across multiple cloud environments and workloads.
