Understanding The Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

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What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?

A serverless solution, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) protects primarily against vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations. While cloud providers offer some basic risk assessment and configuration, CSPM delivers both more advanced controls and multi-cloud capabilities. Additionally, the technology helps solve challenges related to the dynamic nature of multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI) and visibility due to cloud sprawl.

CSPM discovers new assets and then assesses their risks and security settings. It provides consistent policy enforcement based on your organization’s security policies, security frameworks (such as NIST), and regulatory compliance requirements.

Pros and Cons

Below showcases the benefits and challenges of implementing only Cloud Security Posture Management.

Pros (Benefits)

Here are the benefits of implementing only Cloud Security Posture Management.

• CSPM Enables you to continually prevent, detect, and respond to infrastructure risks, such as excessive access permissions, misconfigurations, exposed APIs, and weak authentication.
• Provides more granular controls than built-in provider tools while automating various tasks and helping you to enforce policies consistently.

Cons (Challenges)

Here are the main challenges of implementing only CSPM.

• CSPM doesn’t proactively stop attacks or exfiltration—which means it won’t protect you from threats like malware and ransomware.
• Doesn’t detect lateral movement once a threat is in your environment— especially from frontend to backend and other connected systems.

Bottom Line

CSPM is a requirement for protecting your multi-cloud against human mistakes, oversights, and missed updates and for allowing you to take immediate action. But it’s not sufficient as a standalone tool. You need to do a lot more than patching, managing configurations, and addressing vulnerabilities. CSPM only tells you the risks based on your configurations— it doesn’t tell you what’s actually happening in your network, nor does it provide any active defense.

Adopt End-to-End, Cloud Native Security With Valtix

Valtix solves the complexities of multi-cloud security with a network security platform delivered as a service. Agile, scalable, comprehensive, and robust, this platform supports multi-cloud environments with specific capabilities for AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.

Valtix delivers:

• Layered, proactive defense through advanced security controls (including firewall, WAF, DLP, and IDS/IPS)
• Fast and simple deployment in minutes without additional infrastructure
• Continuous, dynamic, real-time visibility into all your cloud apps and infrastructure
• A single, dynamic policy framework for consistent, automatic policy enforcement across multi-cloud
• A flexible, open platform that integrates threat intelligence feeds and third-party solutions such as SIEM and SOAR