Cloud Security Posture Management

Do you want to use a public cloud securely? Well! You are not the only one concerned about cloud security in this digital landscape. Companies now use public clouds to run applications and IT services quickly. But with this speed comes new risks. Cloud servers and databases spin up fast – but often get configured insecurely in the rush. This leaves easy openings for hackers to steal data or disrupt services. Companies need special security tools that can move and adapt as fast as their clouds do. 

Tools designed to set the right security controls on resources just as effortlessly as IT teams can launch new infrastructure. With this type of cloud guardrail in place, companies can keep innovating rapidly on public clouds without leaving the doors wide open for cyberattacks in the process. Technologies called Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) do this job well. They bring order to complexity so companies can adopt clouds safely while building the future on top of them. Let’s dive into the details of CSPM!

What is Cloud Security Posture Management?

Why Do Misconfigurations Occur?

What Are The Key Features of CSPM?

Compliance Assurance

Dashboards continuously monitor adherence to regulations like SOC2 and ISO 27001, plus best practice frameworks like CIS Benchmarks across hybrid clouds. Mapped controls provide evidence for auditors. Alerts notify teams of drift from compliant configurations or newly released standards.

Security Optimization

Analytics compares provisioned cloud permissions, computing capacity, and retention policies against actual usage over time. Recommendations help turn off unnecessary resources that bloat costs and attack surfaces. Optimization shrinks risk exposure based on business needs.

Advanced CSPM solutions further bolster security with capabilities like embedded cloud security posture assessments, prioritized risk findings, and auto-remediation of common misconfigurations.

The key is choosing a platform flexible enough to enforce policies at cloud accounts, resource groups, or individual resource levels while aligning different projects and lines of business with organization standards.

Benefits of Cloud Security Posture Management

Organizations invest in CSPM to realize several advantages:

Improved Security

Misconfigured cloud settings pose the largest threat to organizations today by enabling data breaches plus outages that disrupt operations and violate compliance rules. CSPM platforms continuously monitor configurations using automated policies that reflect security best practices and internal standards. Any high-risk settings get flagged instantly for teams to remediate proactively. Embedding guardrails and safety checks across cloud projects reduces employee mistakes that lead to incidents. The result is vastly improved security against preventable threats born from complexity, gaps in skills, and fast-paced change.

Risk Reduction

Cloud sprawl leaves companies with hidden, unused resources that bloat costs and insecurity when left unaddressed. CSPM analytics shine a light on unnecessary assets and overly permissive settings across multi-cloud users, data, apps, and APIs. Mapping these relationships uncovers excessive risks related to insider access, redundant remote access portals, zombie cloud servers awaiting abuse, and roles allowing dangerous combinations of cloud permissions. Armed with objective data ranking risks, administrators can quantifiably cull cloud attack surfaces to match business needs.

Compliance Assurance

Dynamic clouds that constantly scale and adapt resources make manual governance and compliance audits futile exercises. CSPMs embed controls for HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOC2 within policy engines. Automation monitors configuration drift continuously to avoid falling out of compliance. Auditors also have access to on-demand evidence reports mapping infrastructure against regulations to demonstrate diligent governance. This reduces audit effort and provides proof of effective oversight for partners/customers.  

Operational Efficiency

CSPM correlation analysis gives response teams accelerated root cause analysis by visually mapping security events against cloud changes and administrative actions across time. Integrated cloud security posture management solutions also auto-generate prioritized incident tickets, including detailed asset and configuration context, to start remediation workflows faster with less manual research needed upfront.

Cost Optimization

Analytics compares cloud permissions, computing capacity, and data retention policies against actual business usage, spotlighting where resources exceed current needs. Turning these off-cuts cloud bills by 10-30% in some cases without negatively impacting security or performance. Optimization thereby pays direct dividends to cloud ROI and total cost of ownership.

Cloud Governance

Flexible policy engines encode company security standards, regulations like HIPAA, and best practices like CIS Benchmarks as code guardrails that reduce reliance on error-prone manual governance. Templates allow centralized policy administration with decentralized enforcement spanning business units and cloud projects, aligning global security objectives with local oversight autonomy.

How Cloud Security Posture Management Works?

CSPM solutions utilize different techniques to gain visibility and control:

API Connectors

CSPM engines connect with cloud provider APIs to ingest configuration data across infrastructure like virtual servers, storage, databases, networking, and more. Streaming changes in real-time from the native control planes allows continuous monitoring without performance impact. Broad API coverage spans AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other major platforms to consolidate visibility.

SaaS Integrations

Leading posture management tools further integrate with SaaS platforms like Office 365, Salesforce, Box, and G Suite via APIs. This expands visibility into security settings and user activities across cloud apps that hold sensitive data. API connections adapt as vendors update services to maintain uninterrupted visibility.

Cloud Accounts and Roles

Administrators grant CSPM solutions access to cloud accounts, groups, and roles in order to monitor designated scopes, resources, and teams. These permissions allow policy engines to scan configurations without excessive privilege. Selective access improves security while ensuring tools only impact authorized environments per governance guidelines.  

Configuration Scanning

Lightweight agents deployed on cloud servers, containers, and serverless functions provide additional visibility where API limitations exist. Agents dynamically audit operating system-level controls plus apps like Kafka, Cassandra, and MongoDB off the grid. Scanning identifies risks from credential files, platform misconfigurations, exploitable vulnerabilities, and malicious activities across IaaS/PaaS. 

Resource Discovery

Analytics automatically discover all cloud accounts, resources, and dependencies to construct real-time topology maps. Visual relationship mapping links configurations, identities, and activities to accelerate root cause investigation and simplify policy targeting. Dynamic views help capture reliable baseline drift detection.

Policy Templates

Policy engines encode regulations, compliance mandates, and security best practices as codes for standards like SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and CIS Benchmarks. Templates allow fast centralized policy targeting across cloud accounts with embedded controls that automate remediation procedures back into compliance.

Auto Remediation

CSPM policies continuously check configurations against the rules. When violations occur, automated playbooks resolve common issues like overly permissive identities, unprotected storage buckets, and insecure database settings. Automation reduces delays in waiting on manual remediation.

Combined, these capabilities provide comprehensive visibility with policy guardrails to lock down cloud security postures organization-wide.

Differences between CSPM and other cloud security solutions

Common solutions like Cloud Security Access Brokers (CASBs), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs), and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanners take narrow views into limited slices of cloud environments.  

CASB

Cloud Access Security Brokers focus narrowly on securing risky data transactions in SaaS applications. Their inline proxies monitor and control user sessions in high-risk apps like Office 365, Salesforce, and Box to prevent suspicious downloads or uploads based on content inspection. However, CASBs lack visibility into broader resource configurations, identities, and activities across the cloud infrastructure underpinning these apps. Blindspots persist around associated servers, databases, object stores, and CDNs where data eventually resides.  

CWPPs

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms concentrate on application security controls and vulnerability management at the individual server/container level. CWPPs enforce secure configurations, monitor traffic patterns, and detect malware on cloud virtual machines. But they ignore risks emerging higher up the stack – account permissions, software flaws in managed services, authentication policies across directories and trusts. CWPPs also don’t correlate across workloads.

IaC Scanners

Infrastructure as Code tools analyzes provisioning templates and recipes to discover misconfigurations or policy violations before engineers deploy cloud resources. This shifts security left. However, flaws still slip in during late-stage customization or drifting post-deployment. IaC scanners also don’t verify if stacks actually get built as designed. Limited risk coverage leaves gaps.

CSPM Platforms

In contrast, CSPMs take a top-down approach that continuously monitors security configurations across cloud identities, data, workloads, networks, and managed services. Comprehensive visibility combined with embedded compliance rule engines provide guardrails against preventable missteps enterprise-wide. CSPMs embed security deep into multi-cloud foundations.

Implementing Cloud Security Posture Management

Organizations should consider several best practices when launching a CSPM program:

Define Policies

Document the specific regulatory, legal, and industry standards and internal business requirements that cloud configurations must support. Detail technical security guidelines aligned to these mandates down to precise settings across accounts, data, identities, networks, and workloads. This foundational mapping provides policy development guardrails. 

Assess Existing State

Discover all cloud services and assets currently deployed across the enterprise. Catalog configurations, permissions, and redundancies to establish accurate baselines. Identify shadow IT or abandoned projects. Comparing legacy environments against policies quantifies risks for prioritized mediation planning.

Classify Data and Apps

Conduct data classification and workload assessments to categorize precise sensitivity levels of information and runtime requirements of applications handled in cloud environments. These help tier policy strictness appropriately by workload criticality. Context aids policies in preventing overcorrection that impacts operations.

Focus Quick Wind

CSPM policies that provide the fastest, highest value risk reduction should get prioritized first. Low-effort automation for widespread risks around unprotected data, broad identity permissions, and porous network controls offer big protection gains with minimal disruption during initial adoption. 

Tune Alerting

Too many alerts overwhelm security teams, delaying critical response. Carefully enable notifications for the riskiest violations based on verified incidents and threats intelligence to cut noise. Integrate and correlate alerts into SIEM cloud dashboards, ITSM systems, and communication platforms teams already use daily.  

Standardize Controls

Centrally modeling company standards, regulations, and best practices as policies encoded under version control unifies cloud security across distributed, autonomous teams. Infrastructure-as-code promotes collaboration on guardrails between security architects and project engineers, launching new cloud initiatives and services.

Report Metrics

Measure cost savings, policy coverage, and risk reduction benchmarks over time. Report program progress via executive and board-level dashboards to maintain leadership support and alignment with business goals as cloud posture management capabilities mature. 

Retrain Regularly

Refresh administrators, developers, security analysts, and general staff continuously around secure cloud best practices aligned to company policies via classroom and online education. Require certifications validating skills. Update training as threats evolve.

Combining these steps helps optimize posture management capabilities that evolve alongside business cloud maturity.

FAQs

Who oversees CSPM strategies?

Cloud security teams typically manage posture management programs, but collaboration with cloud infrastructure and engineering groups is essential for sustainable success and effective remediation.

What training do staff need?

Cloud architects, administrators, and security analysts all require cloud security training for major platforms like AWS and Azure. Certifications like the AWS Security Specialty and Azure Security Engineer Associate demonstrate cloud security skills.

How is CSPM adoption prioritized?

Begin with cloud accounts running sensitive workloads or regulated data to maximize risk reduction. Expand controls to lower security environments next. Adding CSPM across newly provisioned cloud projects should become mandatory.  

What is the difference between CSPM and CSA?

Cloud Security Assessments (CSAs) involve periodic audits and penetration testing to provide point-in-time visibility into risks. Continuous CSPM solutions deliver the constantly updated visibility required for dynamic cloud environments through automated policy enforcement. Both can be useful, but frequent manual assessments fail to address cloud velocity and complexity.

How does CSPM integrate with other tools?

Leading CSPM solutions integrate with SIEMs like Splunk for automated alerts. Orchestration tools like ServiceNow enable seamless ticketing and workflows to accelerate response. Tools like cloud infrastructure entitlement managers and identity governance platforms maximize the value of reciprocal capabilities.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that companies now bet their futures on cloud innovation. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Every day, news breaks of preventable data leaks, hacks, and meltdowns from simple cloud missteps. What assurance exists that as organizations accelerate into the cloud, they don’t introduce business-ending risks in the process?

Modern solutions now provide that assurance. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions shed light on the security configurations and compliance of cloud resources, giving teams total visibility and control. With robust CSPM practices in place informing administrators, security teams, and executives of potential issues in real time, organizations can fully utilize the convenience of cloud services while ensuring they don’t introduce additional risks to the business. Maintaining strong security postures aligns cloud adoption with business growth while meeting oversight obligations across regulated industries.

We hope that this overview clarifies key CSPM concepts helpful for determining how posture management practices might benefit your organization. Reach out to VPN.com for more specific guidance addressing your industry compliance mandates or hybrid and multi-cloud complexities.