Cloud security posture management

Cloud-based systems are continually evolving and changing as companies move away from on-premises to the cloud. This move makes it difficult for any IT department to know if your data, assets, and resources are as fully protected as they used to be. Even a small misconfiguration of a new feature can increase the attack surface available for cybercriminals to exploit.

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a relatively new class of tools designed to improve your cloud security management. It assesses your systems and automatically alerts security staff in your IT department when a vulnerability is found. CSPM uses tools and services in your cloud environment to monitor and prioritize security enhancements and features.

CSPM uses a combination of tools and services:

• Zero Trust-based access control: Considers the active threat level during access control decisions.

• Real-time risk scoring: To provide visibility into top risks.

• Threat and vulnerability management (TVM): Establishes a holistic view of the organization's attack surface and risk and integrates it into operations and engineering decision-making.

• Discover risks: To understand the data exposure of enterprise intellectual property, on sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services.

• Technical policy: Apply guardrails to audit and enforce the organization's standards and policies to technical systems.

• Threat modeling systems and architectures: Used alongside other specific applications.

The main goal for a cloud security team working on posture management is to continuously report on and improve the organization's security posture by focusing on disrupting a potential attacker's return on investment (ROI).

The function of CSPM in your organization might be spread across multiple teams, or there may be a dedicated team. CSPM can be useful to many teams in your organization:

• Threat intelligence team

• Information technology

• Compliance and risk management teams

• Business leaders and SMEs

• Security architecture and operations

• Audit team

Use CSPM to improve your cloud security management by assessing the environment, and automatically alerting security staff for vulnerabilities.