With the stakes so high, the most important investment you can make is in your cybersecurity. And it’s why you may have heard the term Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) more often lately.
If you haven’t, CSPM refers to a class of automated security tools that continuously monitor for issues, automate visibility, and detect issues, remediating configuration risk across your cloud environment. These tools can also perform incident responses and compliance monitoring across multicloud environments, allowing for continuous security improvements across your cloud network.
For organizations operating in public clouds, CSPM should be a baseline, and you may even already be practicing it without realizing it. If you’re unsure, achieving CSPM doesn’t have to be difficult.
Common cloud posture gaps
Effective CSPM results in a cloud network free of misconfigurations, and the quickest way to improve your CSPM is to check your network for common posture gaps that increase cybersecurity risk.
Here are the most common misconfigurations to look out for:
Over-privileged Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.
Missing or misconfigured security controls, including failure to enable or properly configure multi-factor authentication (MFA), logging, and monitoring services.
Unrestricted access to network services, e.g. leaving ports open to the public internet for services (databases, SSH, NTP, DNS, RDP, etc.) creates a significant attack surface.
Insecure interfaces/APIs – application endpoints that lack adequate security measures like authentication, encryption, or asset management.
Inadequate storage configurations that leave cloud storage buckets (like S3 buckets) publicly accessible without authorization.
Failure to regularly patch and update compute resources for known vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
Legal and regulatory compliance issues like unencrypted data or visibility gaps.
How to improve your cloud security posture
Once you’ve fixed common cloud posture gaps across your cloud network, these are the tools and approaches you can incorporate to achieve effective CSPM.
Private networking: Use private network tools, like NaaS and cloud direct connects, for cloud connectivity whenever possible. By using direct private connectivity rather than public methods, you limit attack vectors and breaches while improving reliability and making your costs easier to predict.
Network segmentation: Use non-overlapping network addressing—and implement route filtering and access lists—to limit access and contain the blast radius of a potential breach.
DDoS protection services: Protect your network and critical services from Denial of Service attacks, which can disrupt your entire operations.
Physical and logical redundancy: Protect against network downtime by designing the network for resilience. This includes using multiple clouds, multiple regions within clouds, and diverse connectivity to cloud on-ramps.
Visibility tools: Flow, SNMP, Streaming Telemetry, and log monitoring can identify problems before they impact the business.
How cloud security posture management fits into your security strategy
CSPM works best alongside other secure tools and approaches like:
CSPP and CIEM: CSPM monitors the “wrapper” (configuration), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) protect the “contents” (malware/exploits), and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) manages complex identity permissions.
Shift-left security: Scanning Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates before deployment catches errors before they ever reach the public cloud.
Zero trust: Use CSPM to continuously verify your infrastructure hasn’t drifted into an insecure state, contributing to a zero trust network.
Network security: CSPM works to validate the configuration of your network resources, so they’re configured to meet policies in line with best practices.
When combined, your network levels up to a fully compliant and highly secure architecture with minimal downtime and risk.
Conclusion
Ignoring cloud posture makes your entire business vulnerable, but improving it doesn’t have to be difficult. CSPM is essentially an insurance policy for your digital transformation, and a small investment can potentially save millions.
