What is a CSPM and why should you consider using one?

Some CSPM tools may be limited to only one cloud provider, others can be used to detect misconfigurations in a multi-cloud environment, but they all share a purpose: to examine your cloud infrastructure and compare it against a set of best practices, policies and known security risks, in order to help you improve your compliance with certain regulations, as well as your cloud security posture.

By now we should all be aware of the Shared Responsibility Model practiced by the cloud providers. According to these rules, the customer is entirely responsible for his security configuration. The cloud provider's responsibility is the data center's security only.

Once you understand that the security offered by cloud providers is insufficient against cloud threats, you might want to look for more efficient tools to secure your cloud assets.

So why should you consider using this type of tool?

Here are just some of the CSPM capabilities that might make you want to start using one for your cloud infrastructure:

Misconfiguration detection and prevention

Misconfigurations are most often caused due to a lack of visibility and mismanagement of interconnected resources.

Cloud infrastructures are complex, and they differ from one provider to the other, meaning that misconfigurations can easily happen, and the making of the organization can be vulnerable to attacks and open to the possibility of data breaches.

Let's consider the CSPM your configuration drift prevention tool.

In many situations, a CSPM solution offers cross-cloud visibility, while potentially dangerous events are highlighted for you to see faster. (Events such as users' accounts being granted excessive permissions, having accidentally granted public access to storage buckets or containers, and other similar mistakes)

Compliance monitoring

Cloud resources being created and destroyed often, having data frequently duplicated across regions - these represent common events in a cloud infrastructure, but when it comes to managing compliance, they become challenges that were not encountered before, in an on-premises configuration.

The CSPM tools offer predefined frameworks for the most popular benchmarks and compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NIST 800, PCI DSS, SOC 2, CCPA which may help you meet these challenges.

Once you have set up the policies you consider relevant, the CSPM will give you instant notifications for compliance drifts.

Built-in remediation advice or actions are provided in some cases, making it easier for your team to have the dynamic approach needed to follow cloud compliance requirements.

Security investigation & Incident response

To effectively apply security best practices, you need to be able to visualize what assets exist, what is the current protection in place, and what are high-risk alerts that you need to attend to first.

Fast response in case of a security incident is crucial.

Having automated monitoring, misconfiguration detection and real-time analysis in your cloud security configuration is an important aspect when it comes to keeping your organization audit ready.

CSPM solutions enable organizations to automate cloud security processes and evidence collection and help mitigate attacks.

Risk visualization & assessment

The CSPM will continuously monitor the cloud environments in real-time for threat detection.

It will automatically assess your security posture immediately after onboarding, and you will have the possibility to create policies that meet your needs.

A quantifying risk will be presented for all detected security violations, so that you can prioritize solving the issues brought to your attention.

There are different approaches depending on the vendor, but one thing is clear: “The use of a CSPM tool can reduce cloud-based security incidents due to misconfigurations by 80%”. (According to Gartner)

You just need to find the CSPM solution that suits your security and compliance needs and gives you the best possible visibility over your cloud assets.

Cyscale for example, has an innovative approach to CSPM, allowing you to map, secure, and monitor your cloud assets across platforms in less than 5 minutes after onboarding.

The solution is called Cyscale Cloud Platform, and it will most definitely help you understand how assets are interconnected.

Unlike other CSPM solutions that provide you with endless lists of logs, Cyscale Cloud Platform makes it easy for you to understand context by placing your cloud assets in a unique Security Knowledge Graph™ view.

It will surface crucial issues of all your interlinked cloud assets, helping you improve your security and data governance procedures.

Complete visibility over your infrastructure and deep contextual understanding of your cloud assets inventory is possible only by using the unique power of Cyscale Cloud Platform, so start your free trial today!

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