Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a technology solution that provides deep, contextualized risk detection and scoring to organizations with extensive cloud deployments. Each cloud service layer comes with a unique set of security concerns, all of which contribute to your organization’s cloud security posture:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Customizable computing infrastructure delivered over the internet, enabling organizations to instantly provision computing resources on demand.
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Complete software development and deployment tools delivered over the cloud, with everything you need to build and run cloud-native applications.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Scalable software systems delivered from cloud servers, providing a stable user interface for users wherever they are located.
CSPM solutions primarily operate on the IaaS layer, keeping newly provisioned cloud resources secure and compliant while ensuring visibility and control over cloud data flows. Other solutions exist for PaaS and SaaS, complementing one another to establish a robust foundation for cloud security.
What Problems does Cloud Security Posture Management Solve?
Cloud infrastructure has a different security risk profile than on-premises hardware:
- Under the AWS shared responsibility model, cloud service providers guarantee the security of hardware and infrastructure, as well as computing, storage, database, and networking software. Customers must secure the assets, applications, and data that is hosted on the cloud.
- Cloud infrastructure is designed for scalability and flexibility, making it easy for people to create and host new applications without requiring security oversight throughout the process.
- When assets, applications, and data are exposed to the public internet, it’s much harder to maintain visibility and control over who accesses them.
CSPM technology provides organizations with the tools they need to identify and manage risk in cloud environments. It gives security teams the ability to run automated security assessments and compliance reporting tasks.
This ensures that the new cloud assets are discovered and identified early. With CSPM, your security team has the opportunity to detect and remediate cloud security misconfigurations before attackers can exploit them.
Cloud Misconfigurations Explained:
Misconfigurations happen very frequently, and often by accident. In fact, cloud security misconfigurations are responsible for nearly one-quarter of all cloud security incidents.
That’s because most people interact with public cloud infrastructure through APIs. The engineers responsible for programming those APIs need to plan ahead for every contingency and use case scenario. Any minor oversight can translate into a security vulnerability.
Here are some examples of common cloud security misconfigurations:
- Unrestricted outgoing access may allow threat actors to exfiltrate data from cloud-hosted applications.
- Exposed or unsecured access keys could grant access to sensitive cloud assets to unauthorized users.
- Exposed databases or storage buckets can lead to data breaches if threat actors discover assets hosted publicly without additional authentication controls.
- Insufficient network segmentation allows cybercriminals to freely move between cloud assets, since the network implicitly trusts anyone already inside.
- Improperly configured ports can result in critical assets and data being available to the public when they should not be, increasing the chance of a breach.
- Excessive account permissions can lead to data breaches when privileged accounts are compromised by threat actors, increasing insider risk.
- Inadequate or disabled event logging makes it very difficult to investigate security events and conduct incident response effectively.
- Missing or unclear security alerts can leave security professionals in the dark about potential risks and even active security incidents.
Visibility is Vital to Cloud Security
Lack of visibility is one of the most common causes behind cloud security misconfigurations. When security teams can’t get a clear picture of how cloud resources are interacting with one another, maintaining a consistent cloud security posture is nearly impossible.
This is important for large enterprises and small-to-mid-sized organizations alike. Cloud technology offers scalability and flexibility to organizations of all sizes, but visibility is not guaranteed. Security teams need to know when the organization provisions new cloud assets, and be equipped to respond.
CSPM provides visibility into public cloud infrastructure, allowing security leaders to keep an eye on cloud resource usage throughout the organization. This helps prevent cloud misconfigurations and enables cost-saving cloud usage optimization.
Automation Enhances Cloud Security Workflows
Cloud infrastructure makes it easy for developers and software engineers to provision new environments on an as-needed basis. As a result, every business unit in the organization will find new use cases for the cloud. This leads to a significant proliferation of cloud-hosted resources and workflows.
Managing this constantly growing collection of cloud applications manually is remarkably difficult. Most security teams are stretched thin as it is — keeping up with a constant influx of security vulnerabilities and potential misconfigurations is too much to ask for.
Automated CSPM solutions help security professionals achieve cloud-scale workflows. Some of the things CSPM enables security teams to achieve with automation include:
Continuous monitoring and compliance. Identify and resolve activities that violate internal security policies. Deploy continuous monitoring designed to meet specific requirements stipulated in PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and FedRAMP compliance frameworks.
- Incident response management. Review how threats are detected, isolated, and remediated through a centralized interface. Gain visibility into how incident response playbooks impact your security posture.
- Operational monitoring. Observe whether new assets comply with security policies and regulations. Identify and report on operations that lead to increased security risks.
- Risk identification. Categorize risks according to their severity and prioritize remediation of the most critical risks first. Understand your organization’s security vulnerabilities and receive recommendations on how to resolve them.
- Asset mapping and inventory. Gain visibility into assets your organization hosts on the cloud and how they are configured. Pinpoint misconfigurations early on and address them completely.
Maintain the Integrity of your Cloud Infrastructure with Novawatch
Novawatch uses Check Point CloudGuard to automate cloud security posture management and enforce security best practices across complex cloud environments. We deliver best-in-class cloud compliance and security posture management as a service, protecting cloud-hosted workflows from misconfiguration risks and continuously monitoring for new cloud assets and workloads.
Turn cloud security compliance into a pain-free exercise with Novawatch as your managed service partner. Discover cloud-hosted assets and automate remediation across your entire tech stack with our help. Speak to a cloud security expert to learn more.
