CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management)
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) is a category of cloud security tools that automatically detect and remediate misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments.
What is CSPM?
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) is a category of security tools that automatically monitor cloud environments for misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks.
Why is CSPM Needed?
The most common causes of cloud incidents are configuration errors:
- Publicly accessible S3 buckets
- Open security groups
- Lack of data encryption at rest
- Excessive IAM permissions
- Disabled logging and monitoring
CSPM automatically detects and helps remediate these issues.
Main CSPM Functions
1. Misconfiguration Detection
- Scanning cloud resources
- Comparison with best practices (CIS Benchmarks)
- Risk prioritization
- Remediation recommendations
2. Regulatory Compliance
- Mapping to frameworks (PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2)
- Automated compliance reports
- Remediation progress tracking
- Audit evidence
3. Multi-cloud Visibility
- Unified view of AWS, Azure, GCP
- Resource inventory
- Resource relationship mapping
- Shadow IT detection
4. Automatic Remediation
- Auto-fix for simple issues
- Remediation playbooks
- IaC integration (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Configuration drift prevention
Typical Detected Problems
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Storage | Public buckets, lack of encryption |
| Compute | Open ports, missing patches |
| IAM | Excessive permissions, missing MFA |
| Network | Permissive security groups, missing VPC flow logs |
| Logging | Disabled CloudTrail, lack of log retention |
CSPM vs Other Cloud Solutions
- CSPM - configuration and compliance
- CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection) - workload protection
- CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) - SaaS access control
- CNAPP - combination of CSPM + CWPP + more
Popular CSPM Solutions
- Wiz
- Orca Security
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud
- AWS Security Hub
- Lacework
CSPM Implementation
- Cloud Integration - connecting with AWS/Azure/GCP accounts
- Baseline Scan - initial state assessment
- Prioritization - focusing on critical issues
- Remediation - fixing errors
- Continuous Monitoring - alerting on new issues
- Governance - policies preventing regression
How does CSPM support continuous cloud compliance?
CSPM evaluates the configuration with the same rules every time the environment changes, so the history of its results can serve the auditor as evidence of compliance across the whole period, not just on the day of the review. How to translate PCI DSS, NIS2 and DORA requirements into rules, keep an exception register and decide when to enable automated remediation is covered in our guide Continuous cloud compliance: CSPM, PCI DSS and automated remediation.
Learn more
- DSPM — Data Security Posture Management: Cloud Data Protection
- Radware Cloud Workload Protection - Security of workloads in the cloud.