Cloud Security Posture Management

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies misconfigurations that could lead to security issues across multiple cloud environments and infrastructures. CSPM is used for conducting risk assessments, monitoring for compliance-related issues, incident response initiatives, and applying best practices across many different environments.

What are the Benefits of CSPM?

CSPM tools have access to all of the components in your environment allowing the solution to effectively scan your resources for issues such as misconfigurations or compliance-related issues. With this level of access, many benefits can be observed with the use of the CSPM tool including continuous monitoring of misconfiguration and automatically remediating discovered issues.

Policy Violations and Misconfigurations

CSPM tools can detect policy violations across multiple different cloud environments providing businesses a visual representation of their risk for federated cloud environments. You can effectively assess the risks to your company’s data by continuously monitoring your cloud environments for misconfigurations that will lead to security compromises. The misconfigurations are compared to well-known benchmarks such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

Compliance and Best Practices

CSPM tools accurately approach the issue of compliance by comparing your infrastructure configurations against known benchmarks and best practices. This is important for the organizations that must meet the stringent regulations put forth by the General Data Protect Regulation (GDPR) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Automation

CSPM tools offer the option to automatically remediate discovered misconfigurations or security issues. Businesses can opt to have reports delivered on a scheduled time or alert necessary teams of discovered issues; however, the option to automatically remediate discovered issues is provided so that the risk is immediately mitigated by the CSPM tool.

How CSPM Solutions Work

CSPM solutions are designed to analyze, detect, and either alert or auto-remediate discovered issues in cloud configurations. By understanding how these solutions work, users can determine where the solution may fit into their own infrastructure.

CSPM solutions bring a large variety of benefits to the businesses that integrate them into their environments. The CSPM tool provides an intimate view of the company’s resources in the cloud and all of the configurations. These configurations include application configuration and possibly workload information; however, the level of information presented to the end-user is determined by the tool and the configuration of the tool. As new applications and infrastructure deployments occur, this information is discovered and analyzed by the CSPM tool, and the risk level is determined based on best practices. The asset being assessed is compared to known benchmarks and best practices and provided a risk score. This makes the tool a good investment for any organization.

As discussed, automation can play a part in the deployment and management of these solutions. The option to auto-remediate discovered issues is available for teams to implement; however, it is recommended to only auto-remediate issues that you know will not cause disruption. Organizations wanting to implement a “shift-left” approach will find these solutions an important part of their arsenal.

Why CSPM Solutions are Important?

CSPM solutions can automate the corrective configuration of misconfigured devices and assets in cloud environments. More importantly, CSPM solutions allow organizations to take a proactive approach to security by discovering the issues before the bad guys do. For reference, a misconfiguration in a cloud environment means any gaps or errors that leave the environment exposed to threats. This alone makes CSPM solutions important for organizations.

CSPM can be used to identify shadow IT, or assets created without permission or awareness from the proper personnel. CSPM can verify the hardening of systems before the asset is pushed to a production environment. More importantly, CSPM can be used to help the organization save money by identifying unused or underutilized resources and drastically reducing the risk to an organization.

Best Practices for CSPM

As with any tool or solution, best practices need to be followed to ensure that the system is secure and useful to the organization.

Certainty of Compliance Requirements

CSPM solutions offer businesses the opportunity to benchmark their environment against a large number of compliance and regulatory requirements. However, these reports may generate unnecessary false positives in your environment and will cause lengthy delays in report generations. For example, CIS has cloud-specific benchmarks that are very useful for cloud-based environments but, many CSPM solutions offer the ability to benchmark assets against other benchmarks that may or may not be related to the analyzed environment.

Prioritize Violations and Misconfiguration

CSPM solutions can generate a lot of alerts that will overwhelm even the most seasoned security teams. This will result in alert fatigue and can cause more harm than it helps. It is important for security teams to be able to place a level of risk on the alerts so that they can prioritize the higher-level issues. Many CSPM solutions offer this out of the box with different severity levels for each alert.

Implement Alerting

CSPM solutions are useful and provide important metrics and data for all technical teams; however, all of this data is useless if it is not delivered to the appropriate teams. Integrating CSPM with your notification system is paramount for success. I suggest even alerting on the automated events until you reach a level of comfort with these events.

Incorporate Automation

As discussed, CSPM solutions offer automatic remediation of discovered issues such as misconfigurations. Incorporating automation when possible will help remove the human element and ensure that your environment remains in the desired state of compliance against the determined benchmarks.

CSPM Vendors

Many security companies have begun moving into the cloud security space and are offering CSPM solutions. This is by no means an exhaustive list of vendors and more vendors are offering CSPM tools almost every week.

Trend Micro

Trend Micro Cloud One is Trend’s all-in-one solution that includes their CSPM solution called Cloud Conformity. Cloud Conformity provides businesses with visibility into all of their cloud environments and has benchmarks from the ISO 27000 series to CIS benchmarks. Trend’s CSPM provides options for automation and has a large knowledge base that businesses can use to understand how to mitigate any discovered issues and risks.

Check Point

Check Point CloudGuard is a solution that provides businesses with protection against threats and comes with Check Point’s High Fidelity Posture Management (HFPM) for CSPM capabilities. The CSPM solution from Check Point provides benchmark checks against the most common frameworks and automation for DevSecOps teams.

Lacework

Lacework provides a CSPM for consumers that provides all of the discussed benefits and states that their platform provides insight and visibility to meet security requirements even with mergers and acquisitions. Lacework collects data on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes configurations and provides configuration data on various workloads throughout the business’s cloud environments.