Chaos to Clarity: Demystifying Cloud Security Posture Management

The very agility, scalability, and accessibility that make cloud technology desirable also breed a complex environment that’s ripe for exploitation. The cloud is just a misconfiguration away from major disaster. 

With a big surface area of attack and no clear boundaries to fence, conventional security measures that depend on manual effort just don’t cut it.  

This is why robust Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) practices and solutions are essential for safeguarding your cloud environment.

CSPM ensures your cloud business runs smoothly, corrects misconfigurations, and enables business continuity and growth. Take it from an industry veteran in cyber security. 

“Security is an investment, not a return. Since effective working controls are the ultimate goal, you want to invest in tools that ensure accountability, transparency, and momentum. Like Sprinto!”

Anurag Prabhakar, CISO, MoveInSync

TL;DR 

Today’s cloud systems are complex, rendering traditional approaches obsolete. CSPM is the new standard to continuously detect and remediate anomalies and configurations in cloud infrastructure.

Switching between multiple tools and disjointed dashboards makes it harder to manage the cloud security posture. CSPM solutions unify information and workflows for different cloud vendors – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud – and more to centralize security management.

There are other cloud security solutions like CWBBs and CASBs, but CSPM handles more complexity, depth, and compliance.

What is Cloud Security Posture Management? 

Cloud Security Posture Management is the process of upholding resilience by continuously monitoring defenses, detecting threats, and centralizing monitoring and remediation workflows on the cloud. Cloud systems are very vulnerable by their nature of operation. Thus, certain guardrails against misconfigurations and risks lurking in the environment must be set. 

To put it in perspective, imagine securing a large facility. You’ll put checks in place at the perimeter, detect trespassers, place facility access controls, and systems to manage authorization. Moreover, you’d also patrol the facility at a given frequency to detect any trespassers or breaches that went past security checks. 

CSPM is the digital equivalent of your cloud infrastructure, with automated systems and digital controls that continuously monitor the systems. CSPM spans across cloud services like: 

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (Saas)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) 

Importance of CSPM

CSPM is important in today’s time because cloud environments are becoming increasingly complex, and heterogeneous, leading to fragmented visibility and control. A CSPM solution offers a consolidated view to monitor and secure a hybrid cloud environment with greater efficacy and efficiency. 

At one point, cloud environments were relatively homogeneous, with predictable access patterns and a centralized security perimeter. This simplified security management and enabled organizations to work with conventional security strategies. In such a controlled ecosystem, identifying and mitigating risks was a more straightforward endeavor.

But today, most companies opt for a multi-cloud setup up, and critical services and data are dispersed across multiple cloud providers, giving rise to problems like: 

• Uneven cloud coverage: Cloud infrastructure has become increasingly fragmented, with organizations utilizing a mix of platforms like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Each of these providers offers its own security tools and capabilities, resulting in a lack of visibility and an inconsistent patchwork style of protection.
• No single pane of glass: The lack of standardized dashboards and visibility across multiple cloud environments creates a significant challenge. Without a unified platform view, organizations struggle to gain comprehensive insights, monitor risks effectively, and enforce security controls consistently.
• Costly misconfigurations going undetected: Misconfigurations in multi-cloud environments can quickly escalate into major incidents. A single misconfigured setting, like storing sensitive data in a public S3 bucket, can expose sensitive data to unauthorized access. This, in turn, can lead to data breaches, financial loss, and severe reputational damage. 
• More chaos, less clarity: Securing multi-cloud models is chaotic, rife with guesswork, and disconnected from reality. Moreover, the sheer scale of potential threats can make it unfathomably difficult to document and enforce remediation workflows. With security budgets stretched thin and smaller teams, the problem quickly spirals into chaos. CSPM offers a centralized way to contain the chaos and build true resilience against threats that matter.  

How cloud security posture management works: Core principles

At the heart of every Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution, there’s continuous monitoring of cloud environment for misconfigurations and control performance, ensuring compliance with security standards. This is done to proactively plug vulnerabilities before they snowball into run-time issues 

Identification of vulnerabilities 

Cloud risks might lurk in misconfigurations, metadata, and networks. Moreover, different regions of operations might introduce new varieties of threats or misconfigurations. Thus, CSPM solutions reveal these vulnerabilities across cloud services and other components. This includes the associated metadata, default security settings, and documented misconfigurations –  enabling you to set up guardrails for them. 

Continuous monitoring 

Misconfigurations and malicious activity detection are the heart of any CSPM solution as some anomalies may arise during run-time. For example, a CSPM tool may continuously check for risk of data storage in public buckets and overly permissive access policies. 

Real-time remediation and misconfiguration management 

As cloud security posture management tools continuously detect anomalies and assess security risks against industry and organizational benchmarks, they provide real-time and contextual alerts, pinpointing the source of anomalies and guidelines to remediate them as per security standards like ISO, NIST, CIS, and more. Moreover, some CSPM tools automate remediation up to some level, meaning they can resolve anomalies in real-time without the need for human intervention.  

Centralized dashboard

A cloud security posture management solution connects with your systems and cloud resources – DevOps, DevSecOps, fragmented infrastructure – to collect information like changes in policy or metadata and centralizes all security actions from one place. 

What makes CSPM different from other cloud security solutions?

Unlike other cloud security solutions that may focus on specific areas, CSPM offers a holistic approach to maintaining and enhancing the overall security posture of cloud environments by continuously monitoring and flagging vulnerabilities before they turn into security incidents. However, some tools may work in tandem with CSPM to manage cloud workloads, infrastructure, and access controls to bolster cloud resilience. Here are different cloud security solutions other than CSPM:

Cloud Infrastructure Security Posture Assessments (CISPAs)

Back when cloud systems were less complex, and computing needs less demanding, CISPA appeared as the first generation of CSPM, primarily designed to report misconfigurations and flag any security issues. The latest generation of CSPM tools goes a step beyond, automating testing and detection of any anomalies during run-time.  

Some CSPMs also integrate artificial intelligence and industry benchmarks to continuously detect cloud risks, prioritize alerts, and remediate them automatically. 

CISPAs don’t have that capability. 

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs)

Cloud is not only vulnerable to misconfigurations or attacks, it is also vulnerable to anomalies that arise during specific workloads, such as an infected program, or a task that dynamically changes configurations in the run-time. Cloud workload protection platforms are designed to manage the threat environment during specific tasks and ensure the entire infrastructure is not compromised due to a rogue program.

On the other hand, CSPMs offer baseline protection across the cloud infrastructure, including multi-cloud deployments and standardizing security all across. Moreover, CSPMs also bring more rigor with automation and artificial intelligence to detect run-time vulnerabilities and trigger alerts and remediation workflows. 

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs)

Cloud Access Security Brokers, or CASBs, are crucial security checkpoints between cloud service providers and their users. They ensure that all traffic follows set policies before accessing the network. Typically, CASBs offer key security features like malware detection and data protection.  

Moreover, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions provide ongoing compliance monitoring, help prevent configuration drift, and assist in audits. CSPM solutions go beyond just monitoring the static state of the cloud, they but monitor network behavior in real-time as well to ensure it stays compliant with defined security policies, providing a dynamic approach to risk mitigation. 

The benefits of CSPM: What makes it a must-have?

We have already talked about how CSPM centralizes cloud security workflows across multiple cloud service vendors to help you navigate through the chaos. But how big is the impact of such abilities of Cloud security Poasture Management? What is the magnitude of the benefits of CSPM? Let’s get to the bottom of it:

Culls human error

According to a study by Gartner, 99% of cloud environment failures are attributed to human error. That’s a big number, considering that intentional threats only make up 1% of the rest. Mitigating these accidental failures has big benefits for businesses. 

Cloud security posture management solutions detect these vulnerabilities that arise from human error during development or post-production changes. 

Eliminates alert fatigue

A cloud security posture management system integrates and consolidates information from multiple cloud service providers. This means that instead of sifting through different dashboards for each service and remediating alerts from all these services, you can stay on top of your cloud security posture from a single dashboard. With the help of AI, these alerts are prioritized and offer remediation guidance, reducing alert fatigue and streamlining workloads.

Fosters continuous awareness

Thanks to CSPM, staying on top of your cloud’s security posture becomes a breeze. Automation takes the manual lift away and makes it easier to gauge the security status of your cloud assets across servers, databases, storage, and containers. Moreover, it makes it even easier to manage server workloads and implement custom security measures as you get the status in real-time.  

Prevents compliance drift

A cloud security posture management solution makes it easier to adjust to changing regulatory requirements and policies. Automation lets you implement new updates and cloud configurations and triage security controls quickly across groups and services, helping you curb compliance violations.


The next step

Cloud security posture management solution plays a vital role in bolstering the cloud’s resilience against threats and configuration drifts. Modern CSPM solutions automatically detect configuration drifts in real-time and trigger remediation workflows. 

But the sweeping benefit of CSPMs over traditional security approaches is that it unifies and centralizes security workflows, breaking down multi-cloud environment siloes, and ensuring all-round visibility into your posture. 

That’s what Sprinto does. With over 200+ integrations and custom API, Sprinto connects with everything – cloud apps infrastructure, and code repose to give you a centralized view of control performance and assets. Powerful automation continuously tests controls, triggers tiered context-rich alerts when it detects drift. Going beyond just CSPM, Sprinto also ensures you stay compliant with cloud security standards such as NIST by automatically collecting audit-grade evidence of control performance.

FAQ

What are the key capabilities of the Cloud Security Posture Management tool?

Cloud security posture management tools connect across your systems and cloud to centralize management, continuously monitor the cloud environment for misconfigurations, trigger prioritized alerts, and facilitate incident response with automation. 

What is the difference between CASB and CSPM?

Cloud Access Security Brokers, or CASP ensure that all traffic follows security policies before they enter the cloud network. Whereas CSPM enables you to detect cloud misconfiguration in real-time across a multi-cloud setup from a single dashboard and quickly remediate any anomalies with tiered alerts and AI-guided remediation. 

What is the disadvantage of CSPM?

Implementation and maintenance of a CSPM can be costly initially. Time to ROI can be long, and the over-stretched security teams might have a learning curve to understand the CSPM solutions in-depth. 

Is CSPM free?

Most of the CSPM tools available in the market offer a paid subscription. However, the cost can vary depending on the provider, the scope of features, the size of the infrastructure being monitored, and the level of support required. You may get free trials with limited features and scale from some vendors, but it’s hard to find a cloud security posture management solution that’s entirely free for use.