Without proper cloud security measures, your organization can face data breaches and data leakage. If you’re in the medical or finance sector, you need to be more vigilant since those sectors are affected the most.
Cloud Security Posture Management or CSPM is a great way to secure your cloud. But it does more than just securing your cloud environment. In this article, learn about the use cases.
Visibility Across Cloud Environment
If you’re just migrating to the cloud or building a new hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure from scratch, then you need to have complete visibility across the environment. For those who invest in multiple applications and need to integrate them into one, visibility is paramount.
Remember that you’re going to have all of the clouds separately. Configuring them individually is a daunting task. To automate the integration and configuration part, you must adopt Cloud Security Posture Management.
In most cases, the default tools that cloud service providers offer aren’t enough to manage multiple clouds. So your cloud visibility will be less. Cloud visibility is a detailed view of the activities you do on the cloud. With proper visibility, you can detect potential threats and inefficient performances.
To get the most out of your cloud environment, you should have high cloud visibility. CSPM will be a valuable addition to your cloud infrastructure management tools.
Manage Misconfiguration and Remediation
Misconfiguration is one of the common reasons for breaches and data leaks. Businesses incur trillions of dollars in losses as a result of it. Not only financial, but companies incur credibility loss too.
The four main reasons for misconfiguration are:
- Cloud is inherently programmed.
- When there’s an addition of new services and technologies into the existing cloud.
- There’s a fundamental mismatch between cloud infrastructure settings and the data center environment.
- Complex cloud infrastructure.
CSPM tools constantly monitor the cloud environment and spot the gaps between the current security posture and the stated security policy that the regulators demand. Thus, it ensures you stay compliant with the regulator’s requirements.
If you’re in a data-sensitive industry like healthcare, insurance, finance, or law, staying compliant becomes even more critical.
CSPM also facilitates remediation. With this feature, you can set the actions that should be taken for policy violations. The tool will then automatically act according to the defined actions when there’s a violation. This automation is better than alert systems, which raises alerts when there’s a violation.
To Detect Threat
Your cloud infrastructure is likely going to have several public endpoints. These will be handling the incoming requests from unknown ports. Therefore, your system is always at the risk of being compromised.
To improve security, you have to detect the potential threats at the earliest. CSPM tools first discover Identity and Data across the cloud infrastructure and classify them into their respective data types. Machine learning is used for classification.
An audit process follows classification, which continuously maps permission and access to the data programmed in the IAM configuration. Finally, the system uses behavioral control to prevent attempted hacks.
You’ll receive the alerts when there are breach attempts and what steps the CSPM tool took. For better results, you should prioritize alerts so you can focus on the biggest threats first.
You’re also going to receive a lot of built-in alerts. You can use them directly or configure them to your requirements.
DevOps Process Integration
If you want to reduce friction across multi-cloud providers, CSPM can help you do that. There are cloud-native posture management tools that are agent-independent. These offer centralized visibility and complete control over your cloud.
Both the security teams and DevOps team share a single piece of data. So you can ensure both the teams are aligned with the operation. The security team can prohibit the compromised files and assets from entering the application lifecycle.
For best results, it’s better to integrate CSPM with SIEM or Security Information and Event Management. It’ll streamline the visibility and alert admins about misconfiguration and events that violate policy.
Finally, by integrating CSPM with DevOps tools you’re currently using, you can avail faster remediation and response. When selecting a CSPM tool, check that it accepts all CI/CD integrations.
In the past, the role of CSPM was limited to reporting security flaws and policy violation events. Then, they were referred to as Cloud Infrastructure Security Posture Assessment or CISPA.
But CSPM tools of today are much more than that. They allow you to protect your cloud environment primarily. Secondarily, help you save time when it comes to managing configuration and staying compliant. Given that misconfiguring is one of the main reasons for data leaks, you should get the best options available.