What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions help mitigate and minimize cloud security breaches. CSPM tools can automatically assess an IaaS or PaaS environment against cloud security best practices and verify that all cloud configurations follow compliance standards, such as CIS, GCP, and Azure benchmarks as well as NIST, PCI, and HIPAA frameworks. The goal of CSPM solutions is to help remediate cloud configuration and security issues, mainly through automatic detection and remediation. 

The Need for Cloud Security Posture Management

Here are several challenges that CSPM helps solve:

Misunderstanding the shared responsibility model of the cloud

Cloud providers are not entirely responsible for security  —  they are only responsible for securing the cloud infrastructure back end. Organizations migrating to the cloud must take measures to secure their assets in the cloud, from secure authentication and encryption to event logging. These security measures help prevent data breaches and other security incidents.

Public cloud misconfigurations

Cloud users must configure their cloud environment appropriately to secure their data and applications. However, not all cloud users know how to properly set up federated identity, secured logging, store passwords securely, etc. Public cloud infrastructure, for example, is programmable through application programming interfaces (APIs), and misconfigurations in API operations can put organizations at risk of leaks or breaches. 

Cloud permissions misconfigurations

Misconfigurations are often caused by the mismanagement of several connected resources, such as Kubernetes, containers, and serverless functions. Typically, this occurs due to a lack of visibility of data and communication flows across the cloud and between cloud resources. This prevents organizations from applying the least-privilege principle when assigning permissions to resources. This applies for to service accounts and user accounts.

The importance of CSPM

Threat actors exploit cloud misconfigurations often, and as more businesses migrate to the cloud, more breaches occur. CSPM solutions keep track of cloud assets and containers, then continuously and automatically check for cloud misconfigurations that may lead to data leaks and breaches. This type of automated detection helps mitigate risks on an ongoing basis.

How Does CSPM Work?

CSPM provides the visibility to detect cloud threats and risks and can help remediate those issues. The goal of CSPM is to help automatically protect cloud environments. CSPM solutions can detect many cloud issues, including insufficient encryption, improper encryption keys management, and other account permissions issues and misconfigurations. Here is how it works:

Visibility into all cloud assets and configurations 

CSPM solutions establish a single source of truth across the entire cloud ecosystem, providing automated discovery of assets and any misconfigurations, as well as activity around metadata, security, and networking. CSPM centralizes the management of security policies across all cloud assets, including projects, accounts, virtual networks, and regions.

Eliminate and remediate cloud security risks 

CSPM solutions assess cloud application configurations by comparing them against industry and organization benchmarks. This enables quick identification as well as remediation of any issue that may leave your cloud resources exposed, such as unauthorized modifications, misconfigurations, and open ports. This can reduce the likelihood of costly misconfigurations. 

Additionally, CSPM solutions monitor data storage locations, verify that the appropriate permission levels are in place, and ensure that database instances responsible for encryption, high availability, and backups are enabled.

Targeted threat identification and management

This approach provides proactive detection of potential threats. CSPM solutions continuously monitor cloud environments and apply real-time threat detection. This helps detect suspected malicious activity as well as unauthorized access events. By focusing on the areas that threat actors are most likely to attack, CSPM solutions help achieve several objectives: 

• Reduce risk by identifying over-permissive policies 
• Prioritize vulnerabilities according to severity and cloud environments
• Mitigate risk through ongoing monitoring
• Address compliance needs for maintaining security controls for cloud environments

Reduce overhead and remove complexity and friction in multi-cloud environments

CSPM solutions provide a cloud-native posture management solution allowing organizations to centralize visibility and control across all cloud assets. It offers security and DevOps teams centralized visibility across multi-cloud environments. This enables teams to prevent compromised assets from propagating across the network, software builds, and application life cycles. 

CSPM can also integrate with your existing security information and event management (SIEM) solution, which offers additional insights and extended visibility into misconfigurations and policy violations. Finally, the integration of CSPM with DevOps toolsets can help ensure quicker response and remediation.

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you better optimize and enhance Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions:

Utilize multi-cloud monitoring dashboards Many organizations use multiple cloud providers. CSPM should offer a unified dashboard that tracks compliance, threats, and configurations across all cloud platforms in use (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) for seamless oversight.

Integrate threat intelligence feeds for proactive defense Go beyond misconfiguration checks by integrating real-time threat intelligence feeds into your CSPM solution. This helps detect known malicious IPs or domain activities that standard configurations may miss.

Leverage role-based access control (RBAC) for CSPM access Ensure that only trusted users with the appropriate roles have access to your CSPM platform. Granular RBAC limits exposure in case of insider threats or credential compromise.

Automate response workflows with SOAR Integrate Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools with CSPM to automate responses to common misconfigurations and threats. This can dramatically reduce the time to remediate high-risk vulnerabilities.

Implement configuration drift detection Monitor for any configuration drifts in real-time. Even after hardening your cloud environment, drift can occur due to patching or updates, and CSPM should be able to detect and reverse these unintended changes automatically.

CSPM vs CWPP vs CASB

Here is how CSPM differs from the two other main types of cloud security solutions.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs)

CWPPs unify cloud workload protection across several providers, helping protect all types of workloads in any location. CWPPs provide several capabilities, including anti-malware, vulnerability management, and application security adapted especially to satisfy modern infrastructure requirements. 

CSPM solutions are designed especially for assessing the entire cloud ecosystem, not just workloads. Additionally, CSPM solutions provide automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and guided remediation. This ensures that organizations are not only alerted of the issue, but also get instructions on how to remediate. 

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs)

CASBs provide security enforcement points that are placed between cloud service providers and their customers’ networks — some even have mirror proxy capability for unmanaged endpoints. CASBs ensure that cloud traffic complies with industry and company policies before allowing it to access the network or cloud resources. Notable CASB features include firewalls, malware detection, data loss prevention, and authentication. 

CSPMs provide continuous compliance monitoring, alongside configuration drift prevention and security operations center (SOC) investigations. CSPMs also create a policy that defines a desired state for the cloud infrastructure and then ensure that any network activity complies with the policy.

3 Best Practices for CSPM

Prioritize Issues Based on Risk

Do not start remediating issues as soon as you discover each one. The order in which you uncover issues does not necessarily match the level of risk each issue presents. Instead of wasting time on minor issues, concentrate on risk levels in a manner that allows you to focus your efforts on major issues that have the largest potential to harm the application — and thus, your business. 

When prioritizing issues, focus on vulnerabilities that critically impact applications and workloads or issues that may expose data and assets publicly. Apply this prioritization system to all efforts, including vulnerability management, monitoring, and detection. Once high-priority risks are mitigated, you can start handling lesser risks.

Use Benchmarks for Automated Compliance

Make sure to implement CSPM solutions and practices that enable automated benchmarking and auditing of resources. This should include service discovery features that enable new benchmarking components, including private or customizable benchmarks your team creates, to discover assets in the environment.

The majority of cloud providers release benchmarks designed to help you evaluate cloud configurations. Strive to use vendor-specific guides alongside third-party and universal benchmarks. 

Implement Security Checks Throughout the Development Pipeline

DevOps pipelines should incorporate security checks into the workflow. The speed of development and product release in DevOps pipelines can quickly result in an overwhelming amount of vulnerabilities. You can prevent this by incorporating automated vulnerability and policy checks across the entire pipeline. It’s a good practice to establish a central repository for deployment automation, and will help your CSPM run at peak efficiency.

Continuously evaluating security and posture management can help avoid misconfigurations even before software reaches the testing or production stages. It can also help you easily incorporate corrective measures in future releases when issues make it into production.

How Do SIEM and XDR Support CSPM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) solutions that integrate with CSPM can provide a centralized view of all assets and current security risk. The goal of the integration is to enable easier and quicker identification and remediation of misconfigured cloud assets as well as other cloud vulnerabilities.

CSPM tools can also benefit from integrating with DevOps or SecOps tooling and facilitate successful adoption of new cloud security archetypes. These teams can greatly benefit from a view into a SIEM dashboard that provides real-time reporting into the entire environment. 

While SIEM provides the overview, extended detection and response (XDR) products fill in the gaps by providing active defense capabilities, including:

• Activating defensive measures in response to incidents – XDR can interact with other security tools to retrieve data about incidents and activate defenses.
• Providing a unified view of assets – including data drawn from multiple security layers, provided by SIEM, XDR, and CSPM.
• Querying and manipulating in-depth data – using security tools like cloud system entitlements as well as endpoint configuration data.
• Providing a central data lake – lets you store all raw event data from integrated security systems and all data aggregated from your SIEM.
• Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) – improve alert quality and can merge data in new ways that create more complete attack stories.

Exabeam: Enhancing Threat Detection with Advanced Security Analytics

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform delivers a powerful combination of SIEM, behavioral analytics, automation, and network visibility to transform how organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats. By correlating firewall logs with data from endpoints, cloud environments, identity systems, and other security sources, Exabeam provides deeper insights into evolving threats that would otherwise go undetected.

Behavior-driven analytics enable Exabeam to go beyond static rules and signatures, identifying anomalous activity that indicates credential misuse, insider threats, or lateral movement across the network. By analyzing normal user and entity behavior over time, Exabeam surfaces high-risk activities that traditional security tools may overlook.

Automated investigations streamline security operations by linking disparate data points into comprehensive threat timelines, reducing the time analysts spend piecing together incidents manually. This allows teams to quickly identify the root cause of an attack and respond with precision.

Learn more about Exabeam SIEM