CSPM defined
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) continuously monitors and fixes security risks across cloud environments before they become breaches. CSPM identifies misconfigurations, prioritizes threats, and automates remediation across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms.
Modern enterprises rely on CSPM because cloud environments are complex and borderless. The shared responsibility model means organizations must secure their portion of the cloud infrastructure while cloud providers handle the underlying platform security.
Why is CSPM important?
CSPM addresses critical security gaps that traditional tools can't handle in dynamic cloud environments. Cloud adoption creates new attack surfaces, blind spots, and compliance challenges that require continuous monitoring and contextual risk assessment.
Organizations face four major cloud security challenges that make CSPM essential:
1. Blind spots in complex multi-cloud environments
Multi-cloud environments create dangerous blind spots where security teams lose track of resources across different providers. This is a widespread issue, as one report found 67% of organizations struggle with limited visibility into their cloud infrastructure. With resources spinning up and down constantly, it's impossible to maintain visibility manually.
CSPM eliminates these blind spots by providing a unified dashboard that tracks all cloud assets, configurations, and security risks across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers in real-time.
2. Risk context and prioritization
Traditional security tools flood teams with alerts without explaining which ones actually matter. A misconfigured S3 bucket might seem critical until you realize it contains no sensitive data and isn't publicly accessible.
Modern CSPM provides risk context by analyzing how misconfigurations connect to sensitive data, network exposure, and potential attack paths. This contextual approach reduces alert fatigue and helps teams focus on threats that could actually lead to breaches.
3. Compliance requirements
Compliance violations result in massive financial penalties. Meta paid $1.3 billion in 2023, Instagram $445 million in 2022, and OpenAI 15.58 million Euros in 2024 for regulatory failures.
CSPM automates compliance monitoring across frameworks like NIST, PCI DSS, SOC2, and CIS benchmarks. It continuously scans configurations against regulatory requirements and flags violations before they become audit failures or fines.
4. Operational efficiency
Traditional security slows down development by creating bottlenecks between security teams and developers. Security issues discovered late in the process require time-consuming back-and-forth communication and delayed deployments.
CSPM enables "shift-left" security by integrating checks into development workflows. Developers receive specific remediation guidance and context about which issues matter most, allowing them to fix problems independently without waiting for security team approval.
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What are the benefits of CSPM?
The benefits may already seem clear as we've explored CSPM solutions and their challenges. But if you're still not sold, let's outline the key benefits of posture management tools:
1. Enhanced visibility
CSPM tools provide comprehensive visibility into cloud environments, helping organizations track and monitor cloud resources, configurations, and data flows. As cloud infrastructure grows more complex, visibility becomes essential for understanding how assets are deployed, interact, and where potential vulnerabilities lie.
With a clear view of your entire cloud architecture, your organization can quickly identify misconfigurations or risky practices, preventing breaches before they occur. This enhanced visibility also helps detect shadow IT and unauthorized use of cloud services, ensuring a more secure cloud infrastructure.
2. Reduced cloud risks
One of CSPM's core advantages is its ability to identify and mitigate security risks unique to cloud environments. By continuously scanning cloud configurations and analyzing them against security benchmarks and best practices, CSPM tools reduce the risk of misconfigurations, overly permissive access policies, and unprotected data storage.
Automated alerts and real-time monitoring allow organizations to quickly address potential threats before they become breaches. By actively managing and remediating these risks, CSPM significantly lowers the chances of costly security incidents in the cloud.
3. Improved compliance posture
CSPM helps you comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc. Most teams struggle with changing frameworks manually. CSPM automates compliance audits and flags drift in real time.
Through continuous assessments, CSPM provides detailed audit trails and reports that simplify compliance audits and help you prove adherence to required standards. This proactive approach reduces the risk of fines and legal repercussions and strengthens customer trust by demonstrating a strong commitment to security.
4. Faster remediation
CSPM tools enable faster remediation through automated workflows when security issues or misconfigurations are detected. Rather than manually identifying and resolving every cloud security issue, CSPM can integrate with remediation workflows to quickly fix vulnerabilities or improper settings.
In some cases, CSPM can automatically revert cloud settings to secure configurations or alert security teams to take action immediately. This rapid response capability helps minimize the exposure window, drastically reducing the potential impact of a breach or attack.
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How do CSPM tools work?
CSPM secures cloud environments through six integrated processes that work continuously to identify, prioritize, and fix security risks:
1. Discovery and visibility
Asset discovery creates a complete inventory of every cloud resource across your environment. CSPM tools automatically catalog compute instances, databases, storage buckets, and identity configurations by pulling data from AWS Config, Azure Policy, and GCP Cloud Asset Inventory in real-time.
Real-time mapping: Continuous scanning ensures that newly created resources are automatically added to the inventory, creating a full, up-to-date map of all resources and security configurations.
End-to-end visibility: CSPM tools give a complete view of the cloud environment, allowing security teams to see how different services are connected and configured. This visibility helps detect misconfigurations, open ports, or unused services that might go unnoticed.
2. Risk assessment and prioritization
A CSPM risk assessment evaluates each asset's security posture against established policies and industry best practices. Modern CSPM doesn't treat all misconfigurations equally—it analyzes three critical factors:
Exposure level: Can attackers reach this resource from the internet?
Data sensitivity: Does it contain PII, financial data, or business-critical information?
Potential impact: What damage could occur if this resource were compromised?
An unencrypted S3 bucket containing customer data and accessible from the internet receives critical priority, while a misconfigured internal development server gets lower priority.
One example of implementing an improved risk assessment and prioritization plan is when Colgate-Palmolive adopted Wiz for multi-cloud security. Alex Shuchman, CISO, emphasized how his team needed alerts and insights to proactively identify and prioritize risk. Shuchman said:
Wiz has helped build credibility for risk remediation, because it has such a low level of false positives. I don’t think we’ve ever had a false positive for a critical or high-risk. That’s not true for other CSPM solutions, even though they have access to the same data.
Alex Shuchman, CISO, Colgate-Palmolive
3. Remediation
CSPM transforms identified risks into actionable fixes through three approaches:
Guided remediation provides step-by-step instructions for security teams, such as tightening IAM permissions or enabling encryption on storage buckets.
Automated remediation fixes common issues instantly – closing open security groups, enforcing encryption standards, or removing overly permissive access policies without human intervention.
DevOps integration catches misconfigurations in infrastructure-as-code templates before deployment, preventing security issues from reaching production environments.
With Wiz, developers have the solutions they need to understand and address issues promptly. We can remediate issues within three days.
Andy Yap, Senior Cyber Security Engineer, OFX
4. Compliance and reporting
Compliance audits: CSPM tools help organizations maintain compliance by regularly checking cloud configurations against regulatory standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, or internal security policies. Most will automatically identify areas where the environment is non-compliant, reducing the burden on manual audits.
Customizable compliance policies: Organizations can tailor policies to specific regulatory requirements or industry standards. This allows for flexibility depending on regional or business-specific compliance needs.
Automated reporting: Security tools generate detailed reports that show compliance levels and the steps taken to address violations. CSPM dashboards provide a snapshot of the security posture, compliance status, and risk mitigation efforts.
Audit trail: Many tools also provide an audit trail, documenting security changes and remediation actions for future reference, and are useful for compliance or incident investigations.
5. Continuous monitoring
Real-time threat detection: Continuous monitoring ensures that new issues or misconfigurations are immediately detected once all critical issues have been addressed. This includes monitoring for unauthorized changes, newly introduced vulnerabilities, or deviations from established security baselines.
Alerting and notifications: When an issue is detected, the tool sends real-time alerts to security teams, ensuring that threats are addressed promptly. Alerts are prioritized based on the severity of the issue and potential risk to critical assets.
Wiz came into the picture to allow us to feel secure and confident in how fast we’re moving, even as our cybersecurity challenges keep changing.
Melody Hildebrandt, CISO, Fox
6. Integration with broader security stack
Unified security management: Cloud security tools often integrate with broader security solutions, such as cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP), to provide a unified approach to securing your entire cloud ecosystem. Your security team gains a more holistic view by combining security information from multiple tools (e.g., workload protection, identity management, and vulnerability scanning).
Identity-centric security: Most CSPMs integrate with cloud identity and access management (IAM) solutions to manage and reduce identity risks, such as over-permissioning or identity sprawl. This is particularly important as misconfigured identities are a leading cause of breaches, with research showing that over 90% of organizations grant excessive administrative privileges in their cloud environments.
Automation across tools: These solutions integrate with other cloud security tools (e.g., DevSecOps pipelines, SIEM systems) to ensure automated detection and remediation across the entire cloud environment. For example, a detected misconfiguration can trigger automated actions in other security systems to minimize exposure.
Comprehensive cloud protection: When integrated into a broader CNAPP framework, the tool covers not only cloud infrastructure but also workloads, containers, and serverless functions. This allows you to secure cloud-native applications at every layer.
These steps showcase how a well-designed CSPM can provide continuous visibility, risk assessment, automated remediation, and compliance management. When integrated with a broader security stack, these tools contribute to a unified, automated, and proactive security approach for cloud environments.
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Modern vs. legacy CSPM
The evolution from legacy to modern CSPM reflects a shift from reactive, compliance-focused cloud security to a proactive, real-time, risk-based approach. The worrisome part? Many vendors still offer legacy CSPM tools focused only on compliance snapshots.
As cloud environments have grown complex and vital to business, CSPM has had to evolve.
The table below expands on the specific feature differences between modern and legacy CSPM tools:
| Features | Modern CSPM | Legacy CSPM |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance standards and custom frameworks | Yes | Yes |
| Near-real-time configuration evaluation | Yes | Yes |
| Agentless cloud workload scanning | Yes | No |
| Contextual cloud risk assessment | Yes | No |
| Offline workload scanning | Yes | No |
| Agentless and contextual vulnerability detection | Yes | No – requires an agent |
| Agentless and contextual secure use of secrets | Yes | No – requires an agent and cannot identify lateral movement |
| Agentless and contextual malware detection | Yes | No – requires an agent installed on the workload and manual correlation |
| Data security posture management | Yes | No |
| Kubernetes security posture management | Yes | No |
| Effective network analysis | Yes | No |
| Attack path analysis | Yes | No |
| Effective identity analysis | Yes | No |
| Multi-hop lateral movement | Yes | No |
| CI/CD scanning | Yes | No |
| Comprehensive RBAC support | Yes | No |
CSPM vs. other security solutions
Cloud security has become an alphabet soup of acronyms. It can be tough to remember what each stands for and how they differ. CSPM is one piece of a broader cloud security stack. Here’s how it compares to and complements other tools.
| Comparison | Explanation |
|---|---|
| CSPM vs. CASB |
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| CSPM vs. CWPP |
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| CSPM vs. Cloud security |
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| CSPM vs. CNAPP |
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| CSPM vs. CIEM |
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| CSPM vs. DSPM |
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| CSPM vs. SIEM |
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What analyst firms say about CSPM
Gartner
Gartner's key strategic planning assumptions and market directions include the following:
Consolidation of CWPP and CSPM: In 2025, 60% of enterprises are expected to consolidate their cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and CSPM capabilities to a single vendor, up from 25% in 2022. This trend reflects the need for integrated solutions that provide comprehensive security and compliance management.
Integrated CNAPP offerings: In 2025, 75% of new CSPM purchases will be part of an integrated CNAPP offering. CNAPPs provide a unified set of security capabilities, including CSPM, to protect cloud-native applications throughout their lifecycle.
Increased CSPM offerings: By 2027, 80% of vendors will include CSPM in cloud security platforms, compared to 50% in 2022. This signifies a clear necessity within the market for a unified solution that incorporates CSPM.
Enhanced attention to misconfigurations: By 2026, Gartner expects about 60% of companies will see cloud misconfiguration as a security priority (compared to 25% back in 2021).
Forrester
Forrester's stance on CSPM emphasizes its critical role in enhancing cloud security by detecting and responding to real-time configuration drifts and potential threats. They highlight CSPM as a dynamically evolving segment within the cloud workload security (CWS) space, essential for managing the security of compute, storage, and network resources across cloud environments.
Forrester Principal Analysts Tracy Woo and Lee Sustar also mention AI’s role in the cloud as a key trend. They say, “Cloud strategies are evolving as a result to address new concerns in governance, risk, and security, and face challenges in procurement and vendor management.” That’s why finding a unified cloud security platform that can meet today’s needs but proactively meet evolving threats will be critical for a strong CSPM.
KuppingerCole
Cloud services are dynamic and a traditional static approach to security is not effective.
Mike Small, Senior Analyst, KuppingerCole
KuppingerCole's view of CSPM emphasizes the importance of continuous monitoring and automation to manage cloud security risks effectively. They highlight CSPM's role in providing visibility into cloud service configurations, identifying vulnerabilities, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and organizational policies. In their Leadership Compass for CSPM, KuppingerCole identified the leading vendors based on the strength of their products, market presence, and innovation.
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Wiz's approach to CSPM
It can be overwhelming to navigate the cloud security solutions market and make the optimal choice. CSPM can provide numerous advantages, but you may be confused about whether it will suit your particular needs and use cases.
The Wiz CSPM solution offers real-time scanning to detect misconfigurations as soon as they occur. It identifies the event that triggered the misconfiguration and enables you to immediately trigger an automated remediation flow (such as automatically adjusting access control settings to restrict public access).
Ready to take control of your cloud security posture? Book a demo to see how Wiz combines deep context, automation, and full-stack visibility to help your team fix real risks faster.
Get the free The Definitive CSPM Buyer’s Guide [RFP Template Included] for more about CSPM.
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