Cloud Security Posture Management

Cloud misconfiguration occurs when a cloud infrastructure’s security architecture violates a configuration policy. CSPM provides insight across cloud environments, allowing you to detect and correct configuration issues through automation.

CSPM tools monitor and mitigate risk across an organization’s entire cloud attack surface using:

• Continuous monitoring
• Threat detection and prevention
• Remediation workflows

Any workloads that do not match security criteria or identified risks are flagged and added to a prioritized list of issues to address. This enables you to implement these guidelines to mitigate the likelihood of attacks on each of your cloud assets.

Why is CSPM important?

As the number of people and companies moving to the cloud grows, so does the number of purposeful and unintentional security vulnerabilities.

And, while data breaches are common, the majority of errors are still caused by cloud misconfigurations and human error.

Threats to cloud security configurations and infrastructures, as well as the increasing risk of inadvertent disclosure, can take various forms. A CSPM can protect your company from the following:

• Misconfiguration
• Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
• Account hijacking
• Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
• Lack of visibility
• Unauthorized access
• Insecure interfaces/APIs

1. Identifying misconfigurations

CSPM systems offer standard configuration checks, also known as policies. These configuration checks continuously scan cloud environments to identify misconfigurations across cloud services and resources.

CSPM products can identify misconfigurations such as:

• Open network ports
• Missing security patches
• Publicly available Kubernetes Service endpoints
• Overly permissive roles
• Exposed storage buckets

 

2. Incident response

Some CSPM systems provide incident response capabilities, along with remediation suggestions, and DevOps integration in hybrid and multi-cloud environments/infrastructures.

These tools provide a set of protocols to follow when threats are discovered, and documentation for reacting to and resolving such threats. Moreover, these platforms enable users to integrate incident data with ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira), and alerting systems (e.g., Slack).

This enables security operations managers and analysts to monitor current and high-priority detection alerts and cases, as well as identify the hosts and people associated with them.

3. Cloud compliance monitoring

Numerous compliance frameworks and rules vary by region, state, and/or country. CSPMs continuously monitor these standards across your cloud accounts and Kubernetes clusters, allowing your organization to identify, manage, and remediate threats.

Common compliance frameworks include the following:

• ISO 27001
• PCI-DSS
• SOC 2
• Center for internet security (CIS) benchmarks
• General data protection regulation (GDPR)
• Health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 (HIPAA)

4. Threat detection

Traditional security techniques rely on proxies and sensors to identify threats like malware, and data exfiltration. CSPM enables security teams to identify breaches in action by leveraging telemetry from cloud providers such as network traffic (e.g., Amazon VPC flow logs) and events (e.g., AWS CloudTrail event logs). These systems use policies to constantly check logs and events for abnormalities and suspicious activities.

Company A example:

Company A automates threat detection with CSPM, SOAR, and XDR:

Company A, a life insurance provider, utilizes a CSPM platform alongside security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and extended detection and response (XDR) systems to enhance its cybersecurity posture.

By leveraging these technologies, Company A automates critical security processes, enabling real-time threat detection, quick incident response, and mitigation. This integrated approach helps the company to proactively detect and prevent modern threats across its operations.⁸

5. Shadow IT detection

Shadow data refers to any organizational data that occurs outside of a centralized and secure data management system. This includes data duplicated, backed up, or kept in a way that does not adhere to the organization’s desired security architecture.

CSPMs monitor sensitive data through the cloud, assisting enterprises in identifying and automatically remediating data issues by:

• Discovering shadow data where it should not be.
• Identifying sensitive data with poor security postures.
• Detecting duplicate data, and tracking it across multiple environments

Real-life example:

Company B eliminates shadow IT

Company B is a third-party administrator of life insurance contacts.  Company B relies on a multi-account structure in AWS. Within those accounts, there are 500 EC2 instances with several hundred security groups and multiple users who are authorized to make configuration changes.

Company B used a CSPM solution to eliminate any shadow IT activities. The solution automatically notified the Company B team when a new workload was created, helping the company gain visibility across cloud and on-premise environments.⁹

6. Risk prioritization

CSPM technologies may identify and classify security concerns based on their severity. This is especially crucial for teams managing large amounts of security alerts.

Here’s an example of how CSPM platforms may identify risks in a cloud environment:

• S3 buckets that are publicly available, or a cloud database service with poor or no authentication, would be considered a high-priority risk since they may result in a significant data breach.
• S3 buckets that may be accessed by numerous users, as well as databases with an excessive number of administrative users, are considered low-priority risks.

Real-life example:

Company C leveraged CSPM to prioritize risks: 

Company C leveraged its CSPM solution to prioritize risks within its cloud environment. Here’s how the company utilized CSPM to achieve this:

• The platform analyzed cloud misconfigurations and permissions and ranked risks based on their severity.
• By focusing on the highest-priority risks first, the team addressed vulnerabilities without overwhelming resources.

By leveraging CSPM for risk prioritization, Company C was able to:

• Address critical risks within two months.
• Avoid manual, resource-intensive processes that would have taken months for multiple security professionals.
• Scale its cloud security strategy across all AWS environments, including Kubernetes.¹⁰

7. Monitoring and reporting

As security teams consistently discover and remedy cloud infrastructure misconfigurations, they should observe a decrease in risk over time.

CSPM products with built-in reporting features assist security teams in validating their work and communicating with important stakeholders. Organizations implementing regulated apps on public cloud infrastructure can use CSPM to address compliance posture concerns such as:

• Do I pass or fail my compliance checks?
• How much of my environment is compliant?
• Which resources are not compliant, and how can I address them?

CSPM systems provide the ability to generate easily consumable reports. For example, security teams may produce a PCI DSS report in PDF format, displaying each PCI rule and proving that their cloud architecture satisfies each control.

Real-life example:

A banking Company D secures 5,000+ public cloud resources with CSPM:

One of the largest banks in the region uses a CSPM platform that continuously monitors and collects policy, configuration, and check data from the client’s AWS and Azure cloud accounts, as well as running distributed data analytics pipelines to generate reporting.

The reporting provides automated measurements and trends on cloud posture, compliance violations, key performance indicators, and alignment with customer goals and external standards. This helps savings of 1-2 hours per week of manual reporting.