CSPM vs. CWPP: Should You Use One or Both?

What is CSPM?

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is your frontline defense for spotting and eliminating security risks in the cloud. This solution gives you real-time visibility across multi-cloud environments and helps you spot misconfigurations, enforce security policies, and automatically remediate infrastructure-level issues. However, while CSPM can automatically fix misconfigurations and enforce security policies, it doesn’t patch application-level vulnerabilities.

What sets CSPM apart from older tools is its ability to provide flexible, dynamic protection that keeps up with ever-changing cloud infrastructures rather than relying on occasional assessments.

CSPM key features

CSPM provides visibility into cloud configuration management by continuously scanning your environment for misconfigurations, policy violations, and compliance issues. This proactive approach helps organizations prevent security incidents before they occur by identifying security gaps that attackers could exploit.

CSPM solutions offer:

• Deep risk assessments: This solution analyzes vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures together, focusing on their combined impact to prioritize truly critical risks. While basic CSPM tools might focus only on individual misconfigurations or compliance violations, more advanced solutions evaluate how multiple issues interact to create attack paths rather than treating each issue in isolation.

• A holistic view: CSPM looks at the entire cloud environment—including infrastructure, networks, multi-cloud setups, and exposed resources—to reveal a complete security picture. More advanced solutions map connections across cloud providers to uncover complex issues, while simpler tools focus on specific aspects and lack cross-service context.

• Actionable insights: These tools provide actionable insights to prioritize risks based on criticality and offer clear guidance for efficient remediation. Effective CSPM solutions also display context-rich findings with specific instructions to reduce alert fatigue and increase productivity.

• Continuous improvement: CSPM delivers regular cloud configuration assessments for proactive security management. Instead of point-in-time scans, the best solutions frequently monitor cloud configurations and policies. That way, organizations can fix misconfigurations early by focusing on security posture rather than active threat detection in workloads.

• Compliance assessments: Regular assessments map cloud security findings to relevant regulations, which simplifies compliance reporting and auditing. CSPM solutions also automatically align security controls with regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR to streamline audit preparation.

Taking this modern approach to CSPM allows you to turn the chaos of cloud security alerts into a clear, actionable plan for managing risks so you can focus on the most critical vulnerabilities, understand potential threats in context, and tackle risks before they become bigger problems. This proactive strategy also gives you the tools and insights you need to efficiently secure your cloud environment, protect your business, and have greater peace of mind as you grow in the cloud. Continuously assesses workloads against compliance frameworks for adherence and reporting.

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What is CWPP?

A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) is your all-in-one solution for keeping cloud workloads secure. It provides continuous monitoring and real-time threat detection for virtual machines, containers, databases, and applications. This powerful tool also helps you safeguard the applications and processes running in your cloud infrastructure rather than broadly monitoring cloud configurations or infrastructure posture. 

CWPPs monitor workload behavior, network traffic between workloads, and system activities to detect and respond to threats in real time so you can focus on growing your business with peace of mind. They also secure running workloads in your cloud environment and monitor application behavior.

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CWPP key features

CWPP platforms provide several essential security capabilities:

• Runtime protection: These tools deliver real-time threat detection and protection to keep your workloads safe around the clock. They also actively monitor workload behavior as it happens and instantly detect and stop malicious activities before they can cause harm. Unlike static tools that only catch vulnerabilities before deployment, runtime protection defends against live threats, including zero-day exploits and advanced attacks that slip past traditional defenses.

• Real-time threat detection and response: CWPPs detect and stop threats like malware and privilege escalation in real time. Using cutting-edge behavioral analysis and machine learning, these tools learn normal workload behavior and quickly spot anomalies that signal potential threats. When they detect an issue, automated responses kick in to isolate affected workloads, shut down suspicious processes, or alert your security team to take recommended actions.

• Agentless scanning: Some CWPP solutions offer agentless scanning to simplify management and reduce operational headaches. This method uses API integrations and snapshot analysis to check workload security without installing software on every instance. While not all CWPP platforms provide this (especially those that focus on detailed workload monitoring), agentless solutions can reduce performance issues and work in environments where agents aren’t an option. More advanced CWPP solutions often include both agent-based and agentless options to more flexibly meet your security needs.

• Vulnerability management: With CWPP, you can focus on what matters most by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk and impact for quicker fixes. A risk-based approach helps security teams zero in on the biggest threats to reduce the overwhelm of a flood of endless findings.

• CI/CD integrations: These integrations make it easy to incorporate security into the software development process. By adding security checks directly into build pipelines and deployment workflows, organizations can catch vulnerabilities before their workloads hit production.

• Compliance assessments: CWPP solutions support compliance efforts by monitoring workload behaviors and configurations for alignment with regulatory framework and reporting requirements. Unlike CSPM tools, which focus on overall cloud infrastructure compliance, CWPP tools zero in on workload-level configurations and runtime behaviors and align them with frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2. This approach focuses on the workloads themselves—such as operating systems, applications, and container setups—rather than the broader cloud environment. The result is a more straightforward way to prepare for audits and meet workload-specific compliance needs.

• Workload security: CWPP solutions address runtime security challenges in modern cloud environments by focusing on protecting workloads rather than general cloud infrastructure. While these tools can protect various workload types—from virtual machines to containers and serverless functions—their approach addresses each compute resource type’s unique runtime security requirements. (While this specialization helps organizations secure their modern cloud architectures, it’s worth noting that CWPPs don’t provide broad cloud security flexibility.)

CSPM vs. CWPP: How do they compare?

CSPM and CWPPs are both key parts of a solid cloud security strategy, but they tackle different areas of cloud security. Below is a comparison of each solution’s features and key use cases:

Here’s a breakdown of the notable differences between CSPM and CWPP:

1. Primary focus areas

CSPM focuses on cloud infrastructure security to make sure everything sets up correctly and stays compliant. It also maintains your cloud’s “control plane”—how resources organize, connect, and configure. 

However, a CWPP protects the workloads in your cloud. It takes care of the “data plane”—things like applications, virtual machines, containers, and databases that handle your data.

2. Protection approach

CSPM works proactively by spotting and fixing misconfigurations before attackers exploit them. It helps security teams create a strong, secure foundation helping them set up cloud resources the right way. While it’s primarily preventative in nature, CSPM tools also include reactive capabilities when identifying security issues more broadly across cloud infrastructure configurations and policies.

On the other hand, a CWPP focuses specifically on workload security by employing both preventative and detective controls. It actively monitors workloads for suspicious behavior and responds to threats in real time. Both tools offer preventative and reactive elements, but CWPPs apply these capabilities specifically to running workloads.

3. Deployment models and integration

Since CSPM typically operates through API-based integrations with cloud service providers, it requires minimal changes to your environment. It’s also generally easier to implement and provides broad coverage quickly.

Deploying a CWPP typically involves additional considerations due to its workload-centric nature. Since these solutions need deeper access to monitor workload behavior and runtime activities, they often require more complex implementation decisions. Options range from agent-based solutions that provide deep visibility to agentless approaches that minimize operational impact. Agent deployment in particular requires careful planning regarding performance impact, update management, and compatibility with different workload types. Additionally, CWPP solutions often need more detailed configuration to properly monitor application behaviors and establish baseline activity patterns.

4. Response to security events

CSPM tools’ main goal is to find and address security vulnerabilities before attackers can take advantage of them. When they detect misconfigurations, they can generate alerts or trigger automated workflows to correct the issues.

On the other hand, CWPP tools provide active threat response capabilities within workloads, including blocking malicious activities in real time, isolating compromised workloads, and providing detailed information to support incident investigation and response.

5. Data and telemetry sources

CSPM gathers data mainly through cloud provider APIs by analyzing resource configurations, policy settings, and permission structures. It then uses this data to protect the broader cloud environment.

However, CWPPs collect data from a broader range of sources, including network traffic, system logs, application behavior, and file integrity details. By pulling in this wide range of information, they provide thorough threat detection throughout the entire workload lifecycle.

Best practices for implementing CSPM

You can implement CSPM effectively with these key practices:

Establish clear security baselines

Implement provider-specific guidelines like AWS CIS Benchmarks, Azure Security Benchmark, or GCP CIS Controls to address your platform’s unique security capabilities and requirements. You can also leverage comprehensive frameworks like NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework for overall security strategy, CSA’s Cloud Controls Matrix for cloud-specific controls, and ISO 27001/27017 for information security management in cloud services.

For organizations that operate in multi-cloud environments, prioritize implementing a unified security model that harmonizes controls across providers and maps equivalent security settings between AWS, Azure, and GCP to maintain consistent security posture across platforms. This can help you standardize your cloud protection, regardless of which service hosts your resources, while still using each provider’s native security capabilities.

Implement continuous monitoring and remediation

Deploy real-time monitoring with continuous API-based scanning across all cloud accounts to detect configuration drift and security violations as they occur. Just be sure to focus on high-impact misconfigurations like publicly accessible storage buckets (S3, Blob Storage), exposed databases (RDS, Cosmos DB), overly permissive security groups, and unencrypted sensitive data, which frequently lead to breaches and data exposure. 

Additionally, implement automated remediation workflows that can immediately respond to critical issues by automatically closing public access to storage resources, revoking excessive identity and access management permissions, enabling encryption for sensitive data, and enforcing compliant network configurations without human intervention. 

For even more protection, connect your CSPM to threat intelligence feeds. This helps you link configuration issues to new threats so you can focus on fixing the most urgent vulnerabilities faster and cut down the risk window from days to just minutes.

Prioritize findings based on risk

Take a risk-based approach to remediation by implementing contextual risk scoring that evaluates multiple vulnerability exposure dimensions. To do this, prioritize issues based on advanced risk metrics like attack path complexity (how easily attackers can exploit vulnerabilities through connected resources) and potential blast radius (the scope of resources that attackers could compromise through a single entry point).

Additionally, deploy solutions that visualize attack paths through your cloud environment and quantify specific misconfigurations’ potential business impact. Doing so allows security teams to focus their remediation efforts on the critical nodes in attack chains—such as over-privileged service accounts that connect to sensitive data stores—rather than addressing isolated issues. 

Manageable, prioritized steps based on comprehensive risk context can significantly reduce your organization’s overall risk exposure while optimizing security resources.

Foster cross-team collaboration

Create shared responsibility models between security, cloud, and application teams by implementing practical collaboration tools. For example, you can integrate CSPM findings into existing workflows through Jira tickets, Slack alerts, and executive dashboards to make security visible to all stakeholders. 

You can also develop targeted training programs that help each team understand how to interpret and address the CSPM findings that are relevant to their role. Encouraging this kind of collaboration can help your organization integrate security into existing processes instead of treating it as a separate task, which will make it easier to fix issues more quickly and improve your overall security.

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Best practices for implementing a CWPP

To get the most out of your CWPP implementation, follow these best practices:

Adopt a workload-centric security approach

Shift away from traditional network-based security and focus instead on securing your workloads, no matter where they are or how you deploy them. Different types of workloads—like containers, serverless functions, and virtual machines—come with their own unique security challenges that require tailored solutions, like the following: 

• Containers need protection from issues like escape vulnerabilities, privilege escalation, and misconfigurations.

• Serverless environments have to defend against runtime vulnerabilities and code injection, all without slowing things down.

• Virtual machines need safeguards to block external attacks and lateral movement, plus monitoring for memory and processes.

Tools like Wiz’s CWPP solution make this process easier by providing unified protection and visibility across all workloads. That way, you can keep your environment secure without sacrificing performance.

Integrate security into DevOps workflows

Embed specific CWPP controls throughout your CI/CD pipelines to catch vulnerabilities early in the development process. To do this, implement container image scanning, infrastructure as code template validation, and automated runtime checks to catch vulnerabilities before production deployment.

You can also choose CWPP solutions that offer developer-friendly integrations like Jenkins plug-ins, GitHub Actions, and robust APIs, which allow security teams to collaborate directly with developers in their existing tools and workflows.

With this approach, vulnerable workloads can’t reach production, but your teams can also maintain development velocity with timely security feedback within familiar developer environments. This will ultimately break down the silos between security and development teams.

Leverage automation for scalability

Use automated discovery, assessment, and remediation workflows to keep up with cloud environments’ scale and fast-paced nature. To do this, you can institute specific automation capabilities like auto-remediation of common workload misconfigurations, automated vulnerability patching for non-disruptive updates, and dynamic policy enforcement that adapts based on real-time workload behavior patterns.

In addition to this, consider integrating your CWPP tool with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms to coordinate security responses across multiple tools and streamline incident management. You can also leverage AI and machine learning capabilities within modern CWPP solutions to proactively identify potential threats based on behavioral anomalies before they turn into full attacks.

This automated strategy helps teams reduce their manual security work and maintain consistent protection across rapidly changing cloud infrastructure.

Balance security with performance

Opt for CWPP solutions that protect your workloads without slowing them down.

Doing so involves tracking key metrics like CPU/memory overhead and runtime protection latency to ensure that security measures don’t impact user experience. Also consider implementing hybrid deployment strategies—this involves using agent-based protection for critical workloads that require deep visibility while deploying agentless scanning across broader environments for efficiency.

For large-scale deployments with thousands of workloads, look for CWPP solutions with distributed architecture, efficient resource utilization, and workload-aware deployment options that can automatically adjust protection levels based on workload criticality and resource constraints.

A balanced approach like this maintains comprehensive security without compromising application performance, even in dynamic, large-scale cloud environments.

Consolidate CSPM and CWPP with Wiz’s unified cloud security platform

CSPM and CWPPs both deliver critical security capabilities—CSPM secures cloud infrastructure configurations while CWPPs focus on protecting running workloads. However, organizations often find themselves managing these solutions separately, which creates unnecessary complexity and blind spots in their security posture.

That’s where Wiz’s cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) comes in. It provides a clear, connected view of your entire cloud environment, which makes security more effective and efficient. It also consolidates CSPM and CWPP capabilities—along with other essential tools like cloud infrastructure entitlement management and data security posture management—within a single, unified interface.

With Wiz’s CNAPP, you gain these critical advantages:

• Comprehensive risk assessment: Wiz bridges infrastructure security and workload protection by correlating misconfigurations with runtime threats for more accurate prioritization based on real business impact.

• Streamlined security operations: With Wiz’s unified platform, you can replace disjointed point solutions to eliminate alert fatigue, reduce tool sprawl, and improve operational efficiency.

• Proactive threat prevention: Wiz’s advanced analytics combine insights from both infrastructure and workloads to identify potential attack paths before attackers can exploit them.

Schedule a demo today to see how Wiz can boost your cloud security while keeping management simple.

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