Cloud security posture management (CSPM)

What is CSPM?

Essentially, CSPM is a cybersecurity technology that automates and unifies the identification, assessment, and remediation of security risks and misconfigurations across diverse cloud environments and services. Unlike conventional security tools that may require agents or proxies to be installed, CSPM solutions work in an agentless fashion. They connect directly to cloud providers' APIs (application programming interfaces) to gain real-time visibility into an organization's entire cloud estate.

By leveraging this API-based connectivity, a CSPM solution can continuously monitor an organization’s cloud infrastructure across different environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This includes a wide array of cloud resources, such as virtual machines, servers, containers, databases, storage buckets, and identity and access configurations.

CSPM is designed to manage security posture across three cloud computing models, based on the level of service offered by the providers:

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): IaaS provides the basic building blocks of cloud computing: virtualized computing resources such as servers, storage, and networking. With IaaS, the provider manages the physical infrastructure, while the user is responsible for managing the operating system, applications, and data. It's like renting a vacant lot and building your own house on it—you get the land and foundational utilities, but you construct everything on top yourself.

• Platform as a service (PaaS): PaaS provides a development platform and tools for building and deploying applications. With PaaS, developers can focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure, server management, or software updates. Think of it like a fully equipped workshop—you bring your own materials and build what you want, but all the tools and workspace are provided for you.

• Software as a service (SaaS): SaaS provides ready-to-use software applications over the Internet. The provider manages everything, including the application, data, and all underlying infrastructure. It's the most common model for end-users. It's like buying a fully furnished and functional apartment—you just move in and use the space, but you don't own the building or worry about maintenance.

Through continuous monitoring and assessment, CSPM ensures that configurations align with security policies and compliance standards. It basically acts as a diligent detective, tirelessly combing through your cloud environment for any signs of trouble, such as overly permissive access controls, unencrypted data, exposed credentials, or misconfigured network policies. The ultimate goal is to identify and remediate weak spots before any cloud security breaches can occur.

The shared responsibility model: the foundation for CSPM

To understand the absolute necessity of CSPM, one must first grasp the shared responsibility model—a crucial concept in cloud security. Cloud security breaches are a common occurrence today, with many resulting from misconfigurations and errors involving a lack of understanding of this model.

The shared responsibility model clearly delineates security responsibilities between the cloud service provider (CSP) and the cloud customer (the organization using the cloud services):

• CSPs are responsible for the security of the cloud. This means they secure the underlying infrastructure—the physical data centers, routers, switches, servers, and hypervisors—that support the cloud services. Their role is to provide a secure foundation on which customers can build and operate their applications.

• Organizations (CSPs' clients) are responsible for the security in the cloud. This includes securing the applications, data, hosts, containers, functions, networks, identities, access, and resource configurations they use or create. This is where CSPM becomes invaluable. Since public cloud infrastructure is programmable through APIs, incorrect settings pose a serious risk to businesses. Misconfigurations are often unintentional, but they are a primary cause of security incidents, allowing unauthorized access to systems and data. CSPM tools are designed to help organizations fulfill their end of this responsibility.

Why is CSPM necessary?

The shift to cloud computing has introduced significant new security challenges that a CSPM solution is uniquely equipped to address.

The proliferation of multi-cloud and hybrid environments

Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud (using services from multiple cloud providers) and hybrid cloud (combining public and private cloud infrastructure). While this offers flexibility, scalability, and accelerated digital transformation, it also creates significant complexity.

Security and DevOps teams must manage security and compliance across numerous providers, each with its own unique infrastructure, architectures, and terminology. Manually tracking and managing all these disparate components—which can number in the thousands—is nearly impossible. CSPM centralizes security management, unifying and normalizing cloud services from different providers into a single, comprehensive console, thus reducing complexity and preventing security blind spots.

The risk of cloud misconfigurations

Cloud misconfigurations are the most significant threat that CSPM is designed to mitigate. They occur when a cloud infrastructure's security framework does not adhere to a defined policy, leaving the infrastructure vulnerable. Misconfigurations can happen for several reasons:

• Complexity: The mismanagement of numerous interconnected resources, like Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, and containers, is a common cause of setup errors. This is often a result of not fully understanding how different resources interact.

• Human error: Misconfigurations are often accidental. Developers or IT staff might set overly liberal permissions, fail to review and update default values, or store secrets (e.g., passwords and API keys) as plaintext.

• Lack of visibility: With the sheer volume of cloud resources being enabled and disabled, many companies are unaware of how many resources they are running and how they are all configured. This lack of visibility allows misconfigurations to go undetected for long periods.

• The shared responsibility model: As mentioned above, the mistaken belief that the cloud service provider is entirely responsible for security leads to procedural failures that can result in data breaches and other setbacks.

By automating the detection and correction of these common errors, CSPM dramatically reduces the likelihood of security breaches, unauthorized access, and data exfiltration. It helps organizations proactively connect weak spots and strengthen them before negative impacts occur on the systems involved.

Continuous compliance and regulatory demands

Many industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements and compliance standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, and NIST. A lapse in maintaining proper cloud configurations can lead to noncompliance, which may result in hefty fines, legal repercussions, and serious damage to the brand.

CSPM tools continuously check cloud configurations against these standards, automatically identifying violations and providing guidance for remediation. Many solutions also offer audit-ready reports, enabling security teams to demonstrate compliance in minutes. This functionality is really important, as regulatory changes occur regularly; some CSPM solutions can even automatically apply these updates.

How does a CSPM solution work?

A modern CSPM solution functions as a continuous, automated process that can be broken down into several key steps.

1. Asset discovery and inventory

The first step for any CSPM solution is to gain a complete understanding of the cloud environment. It automatically and continuously discovers and catalogs all an organization's cloud resources, services, and configurations. By pulling data from cloud provider services such as AWS Config, Azure Policy, and GCP Cloud Asset Inventory, CSPM builds a real-time inventory of all cloud assets, from compute instances and databases to storage buckets and IAM (identity and access management) roles. CSPM also ensures that all newly created resources are automatically added to the inventory.

2. Continuous security assessment

Once the assets are discovered, the CSPM tool assesses their security posture by continuously comparing their configurations against a wide array of established security policies and benchmarks. These policies are often based on industry-recognized frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks, NIST, and ISO 27001, as well as an organization's own custom security requirements. The CSPM tool scans for specific misconfigurations, such as internet-exposed virtual machines or storage buckets, open ports, and the use of default settings that can be easily exploited by attackers.

3. Risk prioritization

With potentially thousands of misconfigurations across an enterprise environment, a modern CSPM solution is designed to prioritize risks and avoid alert overload. Rather than treating all findings equally, a sophisticated CSPM uses a score based on factors such as risk exposure, asset sensitivity, and potential impacts to identify which security weaknesses should be addressed first.

Modern CSPM tools with graph database technologies can contextualize misconfigurations with other findings to identify complete attack paths, which pose a greater threat than individual misconfigurations. Prioritizing based on active risk—that is, the risk associated with what is actively in use in the cloud environment—is crucial for managing security effectively.

4. Remediation and automation

After identifying and prioritizing risks, CSPM solutions provide clear, actionable recommendations on how to fix them. They offer detailed remediation instructions, which can be sent to the responsible teams to improve collaboration. Many modern CSPM tools go a step further, offering automated fixes. For instance, a CSPM can be configured to close an overly permissive security group or enforce encryption on a new storage bucket without requiring human intervention.

CSPM can also integrate into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and DevOps workflows. By scanning infrastructure as code (IaC) templates for misconfigurations before they are deployed, CSPM can help embed security practices early on, preventing insecure configurations from ever making it to the production environment.

5. Compliance monitoring and reporting

CSPM regularly checks cloud configurations against regulatory standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. Most tools automatically identify areas of non-compliance and generate detailed reports that show compliance levels and the steps taken to address violations. This significantly reduces the burden of manual audits and helps organizations demonstrate due diligence to auditors and key stakeholders.

The benefits of CSPM

Implementing a CSPM solution provides numerous advantages for any organization operating in the cloud.

• Enhanced visibility: CSPM addresses the challenge of "blind spots" by providing a unified, real-time view of all cloud assets, configurations, and security risks across your organization's public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

• Proactive security: By focusing on misconfigurations, CSPM helps you get ahead of potential threats and prevent attacks that could be devastating. This assessment methodology within the "shift left" approach to cloud security dramatically reduces remediation costs.

• Automated remediation: The ability to automatically fix common misconfigurations and provide clear remediation guidance helps security teams respond faster and more efficiently, minimizing the time that a resource is left exposed.

• Continuous compliance: CSPM automates the process of checking against regulatory standards, making it much easier to maintain compliance, avoid fines, and produce audit-ready reports.

• Improved collaboration: By providing a single source of truth and clear remediation instructions, CSPM helps bridge the gap between security teams and development/operations teams, fostering a culture of DevSecOps.

• Cost savings: Identifying and de-provisioning unused assets or services can help your company cut unnecessary cloud spending. Additionally, preventing breaches and avoiding fines saves money in the long run.

Differences between CSPM and other cloud security solutions

The cloud security landscape is vast, and CSPM is often confused with other security solutions. While some overlap exists, each solution serves a distinct purpose. It's important to understand that in recent years, many of these individual capabilities have been consolidated into broader, more unified platforms known as cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP).

CSPM vs. cloud workload protection platform (CWPP)

The most common point of confusion is between CSPM and CWPP. The key distinction lies in their respective focus: CSPM is concerned with the security of the control plane, which includes cloud infrastructure settings and configurations, while CWPP protects the data plane, or the specific workloads running within that infrastructure.

A CSPM tool ensures that cloud assets such as virtual machines, storage buckets, and databases are securely configured and comply with established policies. CWPP, on the other hand, focuses on the workloads themselves, such as containers and serverless functions, as well as the applications and processes running inside virtual machines, providing capabilities such as vulnerability management, malware detection, and runtime protection. For instance, a CSPM would alert you if a virtual machine's port is improperly left open to the public internet, while a CWPP would scan that virtual machine for malware or unpatched software.

These solutions are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, as a comprehensive strategy requires both securing the cloud's foundation and protecting the workloads running on it.

CSPM vs. cloud access security broker (CASB)

CASBs act as security checkpoints that sit between a cloud service provider and its customers. They primarily focus on filtering network traffic to and from cloud services and SaaS applications to enforce policies and detect threats. While CASB does this, CSPM takes a step further by establishing and continuously monitoring against a policy that outlines the desired infrastructure state. A CASB filters traffic; a CSPM ensures the entire cloud environment's configuration is secure.

CSPM vs. cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)

While CSPM solutions often include some level of IAM analysis, CIEM solutions are specifically designed to address the complexity of managing entitlements and permissions in the cloud. CIEM's primary goal is to enforce the principle of least privilege by identifying and managing risks associated with excessive or unused permissions. CIEM is a critical, specialized tool that works with (or perhaps also as part of) CSPM to prevent privilege escalation attacks.

CSPM vs. cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP)

CNAPP is a platform that unifies multiple cloud security technologies into a single solution. This platform consolidates CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, API security, and other capabilities to help protect cloud-native applications throughout the entire development and production lifecycle. The evolution from standalone solutions to CNAPP seeks to solve the challenge of using multiple siloed tools for cloud security.

Fluid Attacks: a comprehensive approach to CSPM and beyond

At Fluid Attacks, we understand that a strong security posture requires more than just a single tool. It requires a comprehensive approach. Our solution for cloud security posture management, which is continuously optimized, is designed to achieve secure configurations in your cloud environment and secure the building of cloud-based infrastructures and applications.

Our tool seamlessly integrates with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform to find misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities. Fluid Attacks' CSPM covers the detection of security issues in your infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, container images, and runtime environments, as well as misconfigurations of cloud services.

Our CSPM tool is part of our Continuous Hacking plans, available in both our Essential and Advanced tiers. We also offer a 21-day free trial of automated security testing, which includes our CSPM along with SAST, SCA, and DAST.

The findings from our CSPM tool are delivered through our intuitive vulnerability management platform, which offers you detailed and timely reports of all findings. Our platform provides a clear overview of your security posture and offers analytics to help you prioritize vulnerability remediation efforts.

Fluid Attacks' CSPM tool is compatible with your DevSecOps implementation, as it can be used at various stages of the software development lifecycle. This and our other automated tools are always supported by the work of our expert pentesters to help you continuously protect your cloud-based assets.

Conclusion

Cloud security posture management is a critical and indispensable component of a modern security strategy. By providing continuous, automated monitoring and proactive risk management, CSPM addresses the most significant threat to cloud security: misconfigurations. It allows organizations to manage their complex cloud environments at scale, ensure continuous compliance, and significantly reduce the likelihood of data breaches and other security incidents.

While CSPM is an important first step, combining it with complementary solutions ensures a much broader and deeper approach to cloud security. Ultimately, investing in CSPM not only safeguards your cloud infrastructure but also helps uphold the integrity and reliability of your entire organization.