FAQs
What Is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?
Cloud Security Posture Management describes how prepared or vulnerable to attacks your cloud environment is. Ensuring that your attack surface is minimized and that there are no weaknesses or vulnerabilities in your network will result in good cybersecurity posture. There are many ways that your posture can be weakened, such as not implementing access management controls, using unpatched and vulnerable services, or being unable to detect and respond to an active threat quick enough, or at all.
CSPM solutions can identify and remediate some of the issues that result in poor cybersecurity posture. These solutions constantly scan your environment to identify risks and changes in real time, then either offer automated remediation or suggest some possible remediation options for you to carry out.
One of the biggest risks that your cloud environment is susceptible to is misconfiguration. A misconfiguration could be as simple as a solution not being deployed correctly, or as complex as a fundamental programming error. These errors or glitches can result in a cloud service not operating as it should and can leave doors open for threat actors to breach your environment. CSPM solutions can identify these vulnerabilities and remediate the simpler issues or notify admins of more complex cases.
What Are The Key Features Of A CSPM Solution?
CPSM solutions have a diverse feature set to identify and address a range of cloud security vulnerabilities. Some of the common features that a CSPM solution will have include:
- Asset inventory – Your chosen solution should be able to discover and manage all the components that are active on your network. This ensures that you get a complete picture of your network, rather than only being able to monitor a part of it.
- Risk analysis – It’s important that a CSPM solution can accurately assess the scale and relative risk that a vulnerability poses helps you to understand the significance of a threat. These scores also help to prioritize threats, enabling you to address the most urgent threats first.
- Comprehensive network assessment – Conducting a detailed and accurate analysis of your network will help ensure that all risks are properly accounted for. You should also be able to assess how different parts of your network link up to understand how an attacker could move laterally.
- Real-time and continuous monitoring – This ensures that you can be made aware of any security threats or vulnerabilities in a timely manner, thereby reducing an attacker’s dwell time.
- Vulnerability identification – As your CSPM solution scans your cloud environment, it should analyze the data that it has gathered to identify vulnerabilities or weaknesses that an attacker might exploit.
- Automated remediation capabilities – Once a vulnerability is detected, the solution should be able to perform remediation actions to eliminate or reduce the scale of the threat. For more complex cases, a SOC team may be needed. In this case, the SOC should be notified automatically.
- Compliance monitoring and auditing – Regulatory frameworks are designed to protect both your customers and your organization itself. Many frameworks will stipulate how your cloud environments should be configured and used. CSPM solutions will be able to check that your environment is compliant with a range of frameworks, carry out audits that are aligned with regulatory frameworks, then share details of network status and policies with key stakeholders.
What Are The Benefits Of A CSPM Solution?
The main advantage of a CSPM solution is that it will identify any issues or vulnerabilities relating to your cloud infrastructure that could pose a security risk. It enables you to gain visibility across your network, then assess your assets to ensure that they are all configured correctly and operating as they should.
Beyond this, CSPM solutions are also able to check that you are achieving compliance with regulatory frameworks. They also create detailed logs of all activity that happens on your network, including admin activity within the CSPM solution itself. These logs can be exported for auditing purposes.
CSPM solutions will increase visibility into your network and its configuration, allowing you to gain a detailed understanding of how your infrastructure is coping. This will reduce the likelihood of a data breach through continued monitoring and analysis.
Whilst monitoring your network for technical issues and configuration errors, CSPM solutions can also monitor for policy and compliance violations. Many solutions have a selection of the most common compliance frameworks in-built, making it easy to monitor and enforce compliance across your network.
One final benefit of CSPM solutions is that they can be highly automated as both a monitoring tool and a remediation tool. This allows you to enforce a high level of security, without spending extensive human resource on managing the system.
