Cloud Security Posture Management Explained
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a tool that secures multi-cloud environments with enhanced visibility, risk and misconfiguration identification, posture assessment, and compliance protocols.
CSPM tools continuously monitor cloud infrastructure, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), to:
Improve real-time visibility
Contextualize and prioritize cloud risk
Automate cloud compliance and policy enforcement
Enhance incident response
Gartner describes the core of CSPM as a solution that "applies common frameworks, regulatory requirements and enterprise policies to proactively and reactively discover and assess risk/trust of cloud services configuration and security settings."
CSPM solutions are important because modern enterprises need to manage, operate, and protect complex and perimeterless multi-cloud IT infrastructures where misconfigurations, poor visibility, compliance challenges, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities are common.
Did you know that less than 60 seconds after a virtual machine is exposed to the internet, an unknown IP attempts to access the instance?
Wiz Research Team
The CSPM Buyer's Guide [RFP Template Included]
Navigating the alphabet soup of cloud security tools is challenging – CSPM? CNAPP? CDR? We've simplified your decision-making process and laid all the criteria for a modern CSPM solution.
Download Guide
Why CSPM is important
Most modern businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud infrastructures, embarking on digital transformation journeys, and leveraging agile methodologies that prioritize operational efficiency.
However, without a CSPM solution, a misconfiguration resulting from default settings, rapid deployment, complexity, and visibility issues can quickly lead to a data breach. The following are the five primary reasons why organizations need CSPM.
1. Visibility into blind spots
Enterprises often struggle to maintain visibility across multi-cloud environments and compute types like serverless, virtual machines, and containers. Poor visibility can have serious consequences like data breaches, compliance failures, incorrect performance measurements, and IT budget leaks.
Weak spots, hidden vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations are unlikely to be identified if organizations don’t have comprehensive topographic coverage of their IT environment.
A lack of visibility will cause other challenges in an enterprise’s IT environment to snowball. It can also severely hinder the digital efforts of organizations. Modern businesses need to be able to scale their cloud infrastructure and operations ad hoc, and poor visibility can be a major handicap.
2. Risk context and prioritization
Several cloud security solutions, including older iterations of CSPM tools, can identify misconfigurations in cloud environments. However, a lot of misconfiguration identification can lack context, which is essential in perimeterless environments.
Organizations need robust CSPM to provide them with context around identified misconfigurations so they can prioritize or focus on the misconfigurations that pose a risk to their environment. CSPM can help organizations prioritize cloud misconfigurations and challenges so they become easier to address.
Alert fatigue, which occurs when enterprises receive a barrage of alerts about context-less cloud misconfigurations, can slow down security teams. CSPM can help organizations reduce alert fatigue and only address legitimate cloud concerns.
3. Compliance requirements
Manual compliance processes of the past cannot keep up with rapidly scaling cloud architectures. Businesses require continuous compliance to avoid legal penalties caused by a breach in regulatory frameworks including NIST CFS/SP/800-171/800-53, PCI DSS, SOC2, HiTrust, and CIS benchmarks for cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba.
The breach of these regulations can have severe repercussions. Meta was fined $1.3 billion for compliance failures in 2023, Instagram was fined $445 million in 2022, and Amazon was fined $887 million in 2021. Multinational giants may be able to overcome such penalties but most other businesses wouldn’t be able to survive.
Businesses may also need to implement and assess their compliance posture for customized regulatory frameworks. These could be a combination of existing frameworks, duplicates, or unique policies framed by the organization. CSPM tools provide capabilities to do this along with automated mechanisms to assess an enterprise’s entire compliance posture and identify regulatory red flags.
4. Operational efficiency
Businesses are employing agile methodologies and pipelines like DevOps and CI/CD to make the most of their cloud infrastructure. The nature of traditional security tools can sometimes contradict the approaches of developers in agile IT environments. Traditional identification and remediation of security risks can be slow and may struggle to keep up in a high-octane dev environment.
CSPM can help organizations bridge the gap between operational velocity and robust cybersecurity by baking in security earlier on in the development lifecycle (aka 'shift left'). If your security team can give developers the context, prioritization, and specific remediation guidance they need to fix issues on their own, you get to have your cake and eat it too (shipping code fast and securely!).
5. Challenges with complex multi-cloud architectures
Cloud infrastructure offers simplified granular scalability. Increased scalability is a powerful attribute, but it also introduces complexities. New cloud applications, resources, and assets can be procured very easily, and quickly expand an enterprise’s cloud architecture.
CSPM tools can help organizations identify misconfigurations in rapidly scaling multi-cloud architectures with automated mechanisms. Manual management of scaling and distributed enterprise architectures is unrealistic and susceptible to security mishaps. CSPM can mitigate those challenges and enable companies to fully leverage their cloud platforms.
How CSPM tools work
CSPM is a robust cloud security solution that can provide companies with many advantages. But how does exactly it help secure cloud environments?
When describing how CSPM tools work, a typical approach can be broken down into several key steps:
1. Discovery and visibility
Asset discovery: The first step involves identifying and cataloging all cloud resources, services, and configurations within the environment. This covers everything from compute instances and databases to identity configurations and storage buckets. CSPMs typically use APIs and native integrations to gather information from cloud providers.
Real-time mapping: Continuous scanning ensures that newly created resources are automatically added to the inventory, creating a full, up-to-date map of all resources and security configurations.
End-to-end visibility: CSPM tools give a complete view of the cloud environment, allowing security teams to see how different services are connected and configured. This visibility helps detect misconfigurations, open ports, or unused services that might go unnoticed.
2. Risk assessment and prioritization
Risk identification: Once assets are discovered, the tool assesses their security posture by comparing configurations against established security policies and best practices.
Contextual risk analysis: Instead of treating every misconfiguration equally, a modern CSPM will assess risk based on factors like:
Exposure: Is the resource accessible from the internet?
Sensitivity: Does the resource contain sensitive data or critical services?
Potential impact: What would happen if this resource were compromised?
Risk prioritization: Issues are ranked based on the level of risk they pose to the organization, helping security teams prioritize what to address first. For example, an unencrypted public-facing storage bucket is flagged as a critical issue due to its exposure and attack path to sensitive data.
3. Remediation
Remediation guidance: After identifying risks, CSPM solutions provide detailed recommendations on how to fix them. For example, it might suggest tightening IAM permissions, closing open ports, or applying encryption to sensitive data.
Automated remediation: Most solutions allow for automated fixes, where security configurations can be adjusted without manual intervention. For instance, automating the closing of open security groups or enforcing encryption standards can greatly reduce the risk window.
Integration with devOps: CSPMs can also integrate with devops workflows, ensuring that insecure configurations are identified and remediated before deployment. For example, misconfigured infrastructure-as-code templates can be flagged and corrected automatically before being deployed.
4. Compliance and reporting
Compliance audits: CSPM tools help organizations maintain compliance by regularly checking cloud configurations against regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, or internal security policies. Most will automatically identify areas where the environment is non-compliant, reducing the burden on manual audits.
Customizable compliance policies: Organizations can tailor policies to specific regulatory requirements or industry standards. This allows for flexibility depending on regional or business-specific compliance needs.
Automated reporting: Security tools generate detailed reports that show compliance levels and the steps taken to address violations. CSPM dashboards provide a snapshot of the overall security posture, compliance status, and risk mitigation efforts.
Audit trail: Many tools also provide an audit trail, documenting security changes and remediation actions for future reference, useful for compliance or incident investigations.
5. Continuous monitoring
Real-time threat detection: Once all critical issues have been addressed, continuous monitoring ensures that new issues or misconfigurations are immediately detected. This includes monitoring for unauthorized changes, newly introduced vulnerabilities, or deviations from established security baselines.
Alerting and notifications: When an issue is detected, the tool sends real-time alerts to security teams, ensuring that threats are addressed promptly. Alerts are prioritized based on the severity of the issue and potential risk to critical assets.
6. Integration with boader security stack
Unified security management: Cloud security tools often integrate with a broader set of security solutions, such as cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP), to provide a unified approach to securing the entire cloud ecosystem. By combining security information from multiple tools (e.g., workload protection, identity management, and vulnerability scanning), the security team gains a more holistic view.
Identity-centric security: Most CSPMs integrate with cloud identity and access management (IAM) solutions to ensure that identity risks, such as over-permissioning or identity sprawl, are managed and reduced. This is particularly important as misconfigured identities are often a leading cause of cloud breaches.
Automation across tools: Through integrations with other cloud security tools (e.g., DevSecOps pipelines, SIEM systems), these solutions ensure automated detection and remediation across the entire cloud environment. For example, a detected misconfiguration can trigger automated actions in other security systems to minimize exposure.
Comprehensive cloud protection: When integrated into a broader CNAPP framework, the tool covers not only cloud infrastructure but also workloads, containers, and serverless functions. This allows organizations to secure cloud-native applications at every layer.
These steps showcase how a well-designed CSPM can provide continuous visibility, risk assessment, automated remediation, and compliance management. When integrated with a broader security stack, these tools contribute to a unified, automated, and proactive security approach for cloud environments.
The benefits of CSPM
As we've explored the inner workings of CSPM solutions and the challenges they address, the advantages may seem apparent. But in case you're still not sold, let's take a moment to clearly outline the key benefits that posture management tools offer:
Continuous monitoring and real-time visibility
Full-Stack Visibility: CSPM solutions provide comprehensive visibility across the entire cloud stack, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), containers, and serverless environments. This holistic view ensures that no resource is overlooked.
Agentless Architecture: An agentless approach allows for rapid deployment and extensive coverage without impacting performance. This means organizations can quickly adapt to changing cloud environments without the overhead of managing agents.
Multi-Cloud Support: With support for all major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CSPM tools offer unified visibility that simplifies security management across diverse cloud environments.
Context-Rich Insights: Beyond mere data collection, CSPM solutions deliver rich context around cloud resources, helping security teams understand the implications of potential issues and prioritize their responses effectively.
Automated compliance and policy enforcement
Cloud-Native Compliance: CSPM tools adopt a cloud-native approach to compliance with key industry standards, like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and SOC 2, addressing the unique risks associated with cloud environments rather than relying solely on traditional checklist-based methods.
Customizable Policies: Organizations can create and enforce tailored security policies that align with their specific requirements and risk tolerance, ensuring a more effective security posture.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Real-time compliance monitoring is essential, moving beyond point-in-time assessments to provide ongoing assurance that cloud configurations meet regulatory and organizational standards.
Compliance Across the Full Stack: CSPM solutions assess compliance across all layers of the cloud stack, including infrastructure, applications, and data, ensuring comprehensive coverage and risk management.
Risk reduction: identification, prioritization, and remediation of cloud risks
Contextual Risk Prioritization: CSPM tools prioritize risks based on their potential business impact rather than just technical severity, helping organizations focus on the most critical vulnerabilities.
Graph-Based Analysis: Utilizing graph-based analysis allows CSPM solutions to understand the relationships between cloud entities, identifying complex attack paths that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Cloud-Native Vulnerabilities: These tools are adept at identifying cloud-specific vulnerabilities that traditional security solutions might overlook, ensuring a more robust security posture.
Actionable Remediation Guidance: CSPM solutions provide clear, actionable steps for remediation, tailored to the specific cloud environment, enabling security teams to respond effectively to identified risks.
Enhanced incident response
Cloud-Native Threat Detection: CSPM tools excel in detecting cloud-specific threats and attack patterns that may be missed by conventional security solutions, enhancing overall threat visibility.
Contextual Alerts: Alerts generated by CSPM solutions come with rich context, allowing security teams to quickly grasp the full scope and potential impact of an incident, leading to faster and more informed responses.
Attack Path Analysis: The ability to visualize and analyze potential attack paths within the cloud environment helps prioritize response efforts, ensuring that the most critical threats are addressed first.
Integration Ecosystem: CSPM solutions integrate seamlessly with a wide range of security tools and cloud-native services, enhancing overall incident response capabilities and enabling a more coordinated security effort.
Modern vs legacy CSPM
Legacy CSPM capabilities have helped businesses for many years by identifying cloud misconfigurations, keeping an inventory of cloud resources, monitoring those resources in real time, and evaluating cloud compliance.
However, they also feature an overwhelming volume of contextless misconfiguration alerts and a fragmented approach that isn’t compatible with modern operational processes. Modern CSPM has strengthened the foundation of legacy solutions and added new pillars for support.
Legacy CSPMs have significant feature gaps that differentiate them from modern CSPMs. The main gaps they have are:
Lack of context: Legacy CSPMs lack information surrounding a misconfiguration. They don’t take into account factors like network paths, identity exposures, sensitive data, etc.
Noise without prioritization: Legacy CSPM doesn’t have the capabilities to identify the level of criticality of an issue found. Without this information, the security team can’t prioritize the most critical risks first or reduce alert noise.
Operational inefficiency: Legacy CSPM makes security operations inefficient by requiring additional tools, often owned by a different team and requiring different processes.
The table below expands on the specific feature differences between modern and legacy CSPM tools:
| Features | Modern CSPM | Legacy CSPM |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance Standards and Custom Frameworks | Yes | Yes |
| Near Realtime Configuration Evaluation | Yes | Yes |
| Agentless Cloud Workload Scanning | Yes | No |
| Contextual Cloud Risk Assessment | Yes | No |
| Offline Workload Scanning | Yes | No |
| Agentless and Contextual Vulnerability Detection | Yes | No - requires agent |
| Agentless and Contextual Secure Use of Secrets | Yes | No - requires an agent and cannot identify lateral movement |
| Agentless and Contextual Malware Detection | Yes | No - requires an agent installed on the workload and manual correlation |
| Data Security Posture Management | Yes | No |
| Kubernetes Security Posture Management | Yes | No |
| Effective Network Analysis | Yes | No |
| Attack Path Analysis | Yes | No |
| Effective Identity Analysis | Yes | No |
| Multi-hop lateral movement | Yes | No |
| CI/CD Scanning | Yes | No |
| Comprehensive RBAC Support | Yes | No |
The approach of modern CSPM bridges these gaps with innovative features and actionable context. It ensures that detected vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, and compromised secrets inform and enrich attack path and identity analyses.
These modern capabilities secure cloud environments with context-based fortifications, prevent lateral movement for threat actors, fuel DevOps and CI/CD, reduce attack surfaces and blast radii, and enable data security posture management and kubernetes security posture management.
CSPM vs other cloud security solutions
CSPM is one among numerous cloud security solutions. Gartner predicts that global end-user spending on public clouds will reach approximately $600 billion in 2023. Cloud infrastructure is reigning, and cloud security solutions are in high demand. The following are comparisons of CSPM and other popular cloud security solutions.
What is the difference between CSPM and CWPP?
Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) focuses specifically on protecting workloads from cyber threats in cloud environments. CSPM looks at cloud resource misconfigurations, while CWPP looks at workloads.
What is the difference between CSPM and CASB?
Cloud access security brokers (CASB) are mechanisms to implement security policies and controls in cloud environments. CSPM focuses on identifying and remediating cloud misconfigurations.
What is the difference between CSPM and CNAPP?
Cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a unified platform that brings together traditionally disparate cloud security solutions. A modern CSPM solution is typically part of a greater unified CNAPP platform.
What is the difference between CSPM and CIEM?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) helps businesses analyze and manage cloud entitlements across their IT environments. CSPM focuses on cloud resources misconfigurations rather than identities and entitlements.
What's the difference between CSPM and SSPM?
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools are designed to ensure the security and compliance of cloud infrastructure environments, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. They continuously monitor for misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks, providing automated assessments and remediation steps to maintain secure cloud resources. On the other hand, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tools focus on securing Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. SSPM tools monitor SaaS application configurations, manage user permissions, control data access, and identify compliance issues specific to SaaS environments. Learn more ->
What's the difference between CSPM and DSPM?
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) focuses on discovering, monitoring, and securing sensitive data across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and SaaS. DSPM tools discover and classify sensitive data, monitor data access and movement, identify data security risks, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. CSPM is primarily concerned with the security and compliance of cloud infrastructure, continuously monitoring for misconfigurations and security risks within cloud environments. Learn more ->
What's the difference between CSPM and APSM?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tools concentrate on securing applications throughout the software development lifecycle. ASPM tools identify application vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, integrate with development pipelines to enforce security policies, provide insights into the security posture of applications, and remediate security issues. While CSPM is concerned with cloud infrastructure security, ASPM focuses on the security of applications, ensuring they are developed and deployed securely to minimize vulnerabilities.
What's the difference between CSPM and SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools focus on real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware. SIEM tools collect and aggregate log data from multiple sources, correlate and analyze this data to identify security threats, provide real-time alerts and notifications, and facilitate incident response and forensic investigations. While CSPM deals with the security configurations and compliance of cloud infrastructure, SIEM provides comprehensive visibility into security events across an organization’s IT environment, detecting and responding to security incidents in real time.
What analyst firms say about CSPM
Gartner
Gartner's view on CSPM is integrated into their broader perspective on CNAPP. Key strategic planning assumptions and market directions include:
Consolidation of CWPP and CSPM: By 2025, 60% of enterprises are expected to consolidate their Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) and CSPM capabilities to a single vendor, up from 25% in 2022. This trend reflects the need for integrated solutions that can provide comprehensive security and compliance management across cloud environments.
Integrated CNAPP Offerings: By 2025, 75% of new CSPM purchases will be part of an integrated CNAPP offering. CNAPPs provide a unified set of security capabilities, including CSPM, to protect cloud-native applications throughout their lifecycle, from development to production.
Multi-Cloud Adoption: By 2025, 80% of enterprises will adopt multiple public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, including multiple Kubernetes offerings. CSPM tools must therefore be versatile and capable of managing security across diverse cloud environments.
Vendor Consolidation: By 2026, 80% of enterprises will consolidate security tooling for the lifecycle protection of cloud-native applications to three or fewer vendors, down from an average of 10 in 2022. This consolidation aims to reduce complexity and improve the integration and effectiveness of security solutions.
2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report, Gartner offers insights and recommendations to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
Download Report
Forrester
Forrester's stance on CSPM emphasizes its critical role in enhancing cloud security by detecting and responding to configuration drifts and potential threats in real-time. They highlight CSPM as a dynamically evolving segment within the cloud workload security (CWS) space, essential for managing the security of compute, storage, and network resources across cloud environments.
KuppingerCole
KuppingerCole's view of CSPM emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and automation to manage cloud security risks effectively. They highlight CSPM's role in providing visibility into cloud service configurations, identifying vulnerabilities, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and organizational policies. KuppingerCole identified the leading vendors based on the strength of their products, market presence, and innovation in their CSPM Leadership Compass.
Wiz's approach to CSPM
Enterprises can find it overwhelming to navigate the cloud security solutions market and choose optimal solutions. CSPM can provide numerous advantages, but companies may be confused about whether it will suit their particular needs and use cases.
The Wiz CSPM solution offers real-time scanning to detect misconfigurations as soon as they happen, identifying the event that triggered the misconfiguration and enabling you to immediately trigger an automated remediation flow (such as automatically adjusting access control settings to restrict public access).
Schedule a demo of the product for an opportunity to chat with Wiz experts, which can help organizations make an informed decision about their cloud security posture management.
See how Wiz reduces alert fatigue by contextualizing your misconfigurations to focus on risks that actually matter.
