Organizations are moving to the cloud at a faster rate than ever before. The importance of your cloud security posture develops in tandem with your company’s cloud presence. According to a 2021 cloud security research survey, the majority of firms had some level of confidence in their cloud security, yet over half of them experienced a breach. 

Enter Cloud Security Positioning (CSPM), It is vital to understand what is CSPM security and what it entails for our organizations. 

What Exactly is Cloud Security Position Management (CSPM)?

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) technologies enable you to detect, identify, and correct threats, misconfigurations, misuse, and compliance violations throughout your cloud service provider infrastructure. 

To stay up with changing business needs, enterprises require the dynamic scale and complexity of public cloud installations. CSPM ensures that enterprises and security leaders’ cloud infrastructure and cloud services are implemented safely and in accordance with industry standards, regardless of the pace, complexity, or scale of their cloud deployment. CSPM technologies can help companies with a multicloud strategy install and monitor security and compliance guardrails across many IaaS providers at the same time.

Benefits and Use Cases of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Traditional cloud service management (CSM) products handle assets from major cloud service providers (CSPs) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure Cloud (Azure). Others, such as Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud (OCI), IBM Cloud, SAP, and others, may support public clouds. Almost all CSPM-only technologies have few integrations and support options outside of CSPs.

Cloud security posture management focuses on recognizing the following sorts of enterprise policy and security features:

• Asset inventory of cloud service providers
• Inventory management in multi-cloud environments
• Incorrectly setup cloud assets
• Cloud assets that are accessible via the public internet
• Excessive account privileges
• Accounts do not have multi-factor authentication enabled
• Data storage that is accessible over the internet
• Databases and data storage are not encrypted 
• Lack of encryption on application traffic, particularly critical data traffic
• There is a lack of compliance mapping across cloud assets.

Important CSPM Solution Features and Capabilities

CSPM solutions, at their heart, assist you in managing cloud security risk. Critical competencies for risk management include the ability to:

• Inventory across all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and others
• Identify and correct cloud misconfigurations
• Determine compliance drift in cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud assets should be assigned to a security control framework or a compliance framework.
• Check for cloud misconfigurations in storage buckets, encryption, and permissions.

While these skills can serve as a good starting point for early CSPM programs, they lack other important features required by more complex or cloud-native businesses.

CSPM’s Limitations and Why CSPM+ Is the Next Generation

The advantages of CSPM-only tools are substantial, but so are their limits. They fall short of CSP integrations and support, safeguarding only roughly half of your cloud infrastructure and assets.

As a result, in addition to typical CSPM solutions, organizations have found it necessary to implement additional cloud security technologies such as:

• Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)
• Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)
• Cloud-Native Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
• Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

In principle, each of these products is just a collection of capabilities that packs together to enable various use cases that aid in the security of cloud assets and infrastructure. Therefore, to solve CSPM’s limitations, security firms are upgrading the technology into what some refer to as “CSPM+.”

Yes, another abbreviation. However, industry trends indicate a convergence of cloud security technologies and point solutions. Traditional point solutions like CSPM are being abandoned by security and IT professionals because they cannot successfully scale to manage the increasing complexity of cloud infrastructures and broader cyber asset ecosystems.

Our Next Gen CSPM solution

A CSPM+ solution combines standard CSPM features and capability with additional use cases.

Traditional CSPM plus Cybersecurity Asset Attack Surface Management  (CAASM) features/functionality is one of the fastest growing CSPM+ systems. Additionally, CSPM is concerned with monitoring, reporting, and safeguarding workloads as well as preventing vulnerabilities, whereas CAASM provides total visibility and actionability over much more than just the assets housed in a few CSPs.

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As your security strategy and program expand, choosing CSPM+ solutions with more capabilities to handle your cloud security use cases will scale better. Moreover, you may build a reliable knowledge base for all of your digital and cloud-native activities with the aid of an efficient CSPM+ service.