CSPM comes with a wide variety of security considerations and tools to help teams reduce the risk of compliance issues and cloud security. Cloud workload protection is one of the essential parts of every online business that wants business continuity and success. CSPM is designed and maintained to identify misconfiguration issues and compliance risks in any cloud environment, helping teams continuously monitor cloud infrastructures.
We’re going to answer the following questions in the next sections. So, if you want to find out more about what cloud security posture management is, follow us in this article.
● Why do security misconfigurations occur in cloud environments?
● Why is cloud security management so important?
● What are the main benefits of CSPM?
● How does cloud security management work?
● What is enterprise-level cloud security management?
What is Cloud Security Posture Management?
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) works to identify and remediate risks that are associated with cloud environments. It empowers teams by taking into account a lot of security considerations, including the following:
● Centralized visibility
● Continuous monitoring
● Threat detection and monitoring
● Remediation workflows
Nowadays, cloud technology offers many solutions, and businesses can make use of IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and FaaS in their growth journey. However, securing these environments through cybersecurity standards is key to maintaining that growth.
The Importance of Cloud Security Posture Management
● According to our analyses, more than 90% of cloud cybersecurity breaches are caused by misconfiguration issues that can be prevented through CSPM.
Cloud platforms prioritize security as a default setting, with a multitude of security measures in place when providing cloud services. However, making a minor mistake in configuring APIs or cloud storage can cause critical data breaches.
In November 2020, at least 10 million files containing lots of sensitive data were breached that was due to an improperly configured S3 bucket in AWS.
CSPM Benefits
There are two types of cloud security risks: Intentional and unintentional.
Most cloud security programs focus on intentional cyber attacks that can hit an online business at any time.
CSPM emphasizes that unintentional risks can impact an organization as much as those intentional risks.
Increased Visibility Into Your Cloud Environment
Visibility tells everything about our cloud environment security. Cloud security management software tools are geared to provide a visible and transparent environment in which every incoming and outgoing traffic can be tracked and monitored.
For both cloud native and hybrid cloud environments, CSPM tools can work as a central source of truth for monitoring and controlling problematic security issues.
Increased visibility across all parts of the cloud environment is one of the main benefits of cloud security posture management.
Note that CSPM creates unified visibility in cloud native, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, enabling cybersecurity teams to monitor everything from a central point of operation.
Disjointed Visibility can have severe consequences like deadly data breaches, and compliance failures are also inevitable in cloud environments that lack good visibility.
Improved Compliance with Industry Regulations
Integrating one or more cybersecurity frameworks into your organization and providing compliance reports can produce fruitful benefits along the way.
Complying with cybersecurity standards such as HIPAA, ISO, and SOC 2 works as a competitive advantage when you always want to be ahead of the competition.
Cloud security posture management helps cybersecurity teams always monitor their workflow in cloud environments to avoid legal penalties and fines.
Reduced Costs
The cost of a data breach, including consequent fines and legal penalties, can be more than $10M for a small-medium business.
The situation is even worse when it comes to large organizations and enterprises.
Cloud security management can prevent a wide range of data breaches and security issues by continuously monitoring and providing real-time insights into your cloud environment.
Detectable Misconfigurations and Automatic Remediations
Cloud security management focuses on eliminating risks and boosting the performance of cloud platforms by consistently monitoring misconfigurations and offering remediation solutions.
Cloud security management can check out misconfigurations, open IP ports, and user privileges to detect problems that may cause issues in the future.
Remember that your cloud storage will also be monitored so your cybersecurity team can check improper permissions all the time and set proper privileges if needed.
The Ability to Map The Current Configuration to a Security Framework or Regulation Standard
CSPM covers a lot of security considerations that you can find in cybersecurity frameworks.
As a result, you will be able to map those security practices to the security framework you’re going to apply to your IT infrastructure.
Mapping the current security efforts and tasks to other frameworks can be challenging for large companies. Large companies may find it challenging to align their current security efforts and tasks with other frameworks, but this isn’t the case when it comes to cloud security posture management.
Smoothly Working with IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS in Containerized, Hybrid Cloud, and Multi-cloud Environments
Cloud security management can be applied appropriately to all cloud technology models, and there is no problem in this case.
You can use the standard for Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service without any issues.
The standard is completely adaptable according to different situations and the type of your industry.
Monitoring Storage Buckets, Encryption, and Account Permissions for Misconfigurations and Compliance Issues
In the case of cybersecurity, prevention is better than cure, especially when you’re working with cloud environments that are exposed to data breach risks.
CSPM works on monitoring storage buckets at the same time as monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic.
Note that encryption and account privileges are also important when working and deploying cloud services and tools, which cloud security posture management helps them as well.
Cloud Security Posture Management Tools: Implementation Process
Cloud security posture management works by deploying professional tools that bring a wide range of benefits to your organization.
These tools are tested and deployed by cybersecurity professionals, and finally, they’re configured based on your IT infrastructure and cloud environment.
Typically, there are 5 important parts within the implementation process, which we’re going to explain in the following sections.
Increased Visibility Into Your Cloud Environment
Visibility tells everything about our cloud environment security. Cloud security management software tools are geared to provide a visible and transparent environment in which every incoming and outgoing traffic can be tracked and monitored.
For both cloud native and hybrid cloud environments, CSPM tools can work as a central source of truth for monitoring and controlling problematic security issues.
Consistent Monitoring
Data security monitoring is like a consistent workflow, and it works at the best performance when security teams use a proactive monitoring approach.
Cloud security posture management is based on this proactive security solution to identify misconfiguration vulnerabilities in the cloud and eliminate them before they can impact your organization.
Threat Detection and Protection
Threat hunting is the process of proactively searching for cyber threats that are potent enough to hit IT Assets.
These threats can offer free-of-charge entrance points for hackers who want to enter a network and quietly collect data.
Threat hunting is essential to cloud environment protection, and experienced cybersecurity professionals perform it.
Remediation Workflows
Effective remediation management is key to growing the security posture of an environment and preventing adverse impacts.
Efficient remediation ensures cybersecurity teams have performed vulnerability detection processes completely, and they can now think about effective solutions.
These reliable remediation workflows can then help teams protect a network by responding to these issues appropriately and comprehensively.
Hardening Networks
System and network hardening refers to the tools and methods used to reduce the attack surface in such critical environments.
Cloud security posture management can directly empower this concept and reduce the overall threat profile throughout an organization.
Modern CSPM vs. Cloud Security Solutions
Although most people think cloud security solutions are all the same, there are some differences between legacy and modern cloud security solutions.
Modern approaches are teamed up with top-notch solutions to offer an all-inclusive cybersecurity strategy to small and large organizations.
These solutions include but are not limited to the following:
● AI technology
● Machine learning tools
● Automation
● Real-time monitoring
Legacy CSPM
Legacy CSPM solutions have helped small and large companies for many years through trustworthy cloud security approaches. Legacy solutions have focused on protecting cloud resources and stored data, and they’ve helped security teams by providing robust monitoring solutions in real-time.
However, they lack an always-dreamed feature that cybersecurity professionals have had in mind for many years. Legacy approaches cause a critical issue called false alerts that can create different issues for security teams.
Except for legacy CSPM and modern CSPM, which work to beef up the security posture in small and large organizations, there are other trustworthy security solutions as follows.
CIEM
CIEM comes with a comprehensive package to manage and control identities and access privileges.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is a powerful security solution, focusing on the principle of granting least privilege access to services, tools, and APIs. This approach can be one of the greatest solutions within the cloud industry since it can inherently defend against data breaches, malicious attacks, and other cloud security risks.
Since cloud environments are dynamic by nature, ordinary IdMs can’t serve our needs completely and comprehensively. As a result, approaches like CIEM come to safeguard these highly dynamic environments.
CISPA
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was first introduced in 2011, and it focuses on preventing the risk of the increasing number of cyber attacks on US businesses.
CISPA allows private sector entities, especially technology and manufacturing companies, to share internet traffic information with the US government to provide better cooperation and help protect networks and prevent cyber attacks.
CISPA can help companies and the US government through 4 main concepts, including identification, assessment, monitoring, and response.
CNAPP
Cloud Native Application Protection Platform is a cloud-native security model that covers many other standards, including CSPM.
CNAPP was initially coined by Gartner with an important goal to emphasize cloud-native security as a complete platform. The platform ensures security and visibility within a cloud environment, and it works as a single platform to offer full-stack security.
CNAPP protects applications at runtime as well as the development process. So, it’s a comprehensive approach to be integrated into your cloud workflows.
CWPPs
Like other cloud security solutions, CWPPs focus on providing a unified cloud security monitoring solution.
However, there is a great benefit to the cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) since it takes into account automatic monitoring and protection features.
Technologies like CWPP enable organizations to get complete insight into their workload vulnerabilities that can hit their environments and negatively impact them.
Simply put, without comprehensive visibility into a cloud environment, it’s complicated to detect, track, and mitigate potential data protection issues.
Platforms like CWPPs aim to solve those transparency problems.
CASB
CASB aims to protect cloud-hosted services, tools, and applications by taking a lot of security technologies into account. So, CASB is a bundled package comprising access control, DLP, etc.
There are 4 main concepts that empower CASB, including compliance, data security, visibility, and threat protection.
Network Security
Cloud network security is a type of cybersecurity in cloud environments focused on minimizing the chance of accessing, changing, or interfering with workflows in such platforms.
Although the principles for securing cloud networks are similar to those of on-premise infrastructures in some way, there are some exclusive aspects and tactics to consider for cloud platforms.
Essential Tips on Cloud Security Posture Management
Notably, more than 90% of enterprises use cloud platforms, infrastructures, and applications.
Once organizations move some or all of their digital assets to the cloud, many organizations assume that their job is done and there is no need for future maintenance.
But, this isn’t true since cloud infrastructure is based on a shared security model, meaning both the cloud provider and the user are responsible for maintaining and securing the services.
In such a situation, CSPM offers reliable solutions to solve security issues. Here are some tips associated with it to strengthen your security strategy.
Robust Identity and Access Management
Small and large businesses need robust IAM to control user privileges and enable them to deploy effective access management, authentication, and governance.
Cloud security posture management takes advantage of robust IAM solutions by nature, and your security team can modify and improve these solutions according to your future needs.
Continuous Monitoring
As implemented by Nordic Defender, CSPM necessitates using a central, comprehensive, and trustworthy monitoring platform. Eagle-eyed professionals then use this platform to check all the workflows and perform the required actions if needed.
Making use of cloud security management platforms such as Microsoft CSPM provides transparency within all processes and network traffic when using cloud services.
AI-Driven Threat Detection
AI is an emerging technology that promises to transform a large number of tasks that are done manually nowadays.
Legacy CSPM approaches don’t consider using AI-driven threat detection and response, but modern solutions will integrate artificial intelligence into these processes in the coming years.
Enterprise-Wide Incident Response
Creating a working and powerful incident response is the cornerstone of any cloud security strategy. It’s important since it outlines the tasks that should be performed quickly in the time of security incidents in an organization.
A foolproof CSPM strategy should be integrated with a powerful incident response plan to minimize damage and improve recovery time.
Incorporate Security into Development Processes
A lot of organizations ignore incorporating security into their development processes, so they need to compensate for it by spending on detecting and fixing software bugs in the future.
An untreated software bug may cost an arm and a leg for large organizations. These software bugs and vulnerabilities can be found and cured before the production process.
DevSecOps Integration
DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operation. DevSecOps can be a comprehensive solution when it comes to cloud security as it covers a wide variety of cybersecurity requirements and solves a lot of issues before a product is launched.
The Role of CSPM in Online Business
CSPM can be used to evaluate and reinforce the security configuration of your cloud platform and services.
It acts as an essential part of the cloud security strategy to control, monitor, and report vulnerabilities and security issues in real-time.
However, cloud security posture management can be used along with some other solutions to produce even more outcomes for your organization.
Conclusion
Cloud security posture management keeps a constant eye on the security state of your cloud services and applications, and it’s applicable to a wide range of cloud models and services. Companies that have adopted a cloud-first strategy and perform a part of their processes in the cloud need to implement CSPM in order to prevent misconfiguration issues and reduce compliance risks in IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and FaaS environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cloud security posture management?
● Cloud security posture management helps continuously monitor cloud security gaps, and it automates the identification and remediation of risks across your cloud environment.
What does cloud security posture management include?
● CSPM covers the identification and remediation process of misconfigurations and compliance risks in the cloud.
Can CSPM help security teams identify security incidents?
● Yes. It empowers companies to identify and reduce the risks of security incidents and cyber threats.
Why is cloud security posture management so important?
● It’s important since it plays a key role in securing cloud environments by reducing the possibility of data breaches.
What is the main benefit of considering CSPM for cloud environments?
● This approach helps cybersecurity teams implement a wide range of security considerations, and it empowers teams to continuously monitor the environment and assess data risks in real-time.