What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a security discipline that helps organizations continuously understand and reduce risk in cloud environments by identifying misconfigurations and evaluating them in context. Rather than treating every configuration issue as equally critical, CSPM focuses on determining which issues could realistically lead to security incidents based on how cloud resources are connected, exposed, and used.
CSPM platforms assess configurations across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments, analyzing cloud resources alongside factors such as internet exposure, identity permissions, workloads, and sensitive data. By correlating these signals, CSPM enables security teams to prioritize real risk instead of responding to large volumes of low-impact alerts.
CSPM is essential in modern cloud environments because infrastructure is highly dynamic and distributed. Under the shared responsibility model, cloud providers secure the underlying platform, while organizations are responsible for securing their configurations, access controls, and data. CSPM provides continuous visibility into this responsibility, helping teams detect misconfigurations early, understand their potential impact, and remediate them before they can be exploited.
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Why is CSPM important?
CSPM is important because cloud risk is no longer created by isolated misconfigurations, but by how configuration issues combine across highly dynamic environments. As organizations adopt multi-cloud architectures, expand identity usage, and deploy cloud-native services at scale, understanding which risks actually matter becomes increasingly difficult without continuous, contextual analysis.
CSPM addresses several core challenges that make traditional security approaches ineffective in the cloud:
1. Limited visibility in complex, multi-cloud environments
Modern cloud environments change constantly. Resources are created, modified, and decommissioned across multiple cloud providers, often outside the visibility of centralized security teams. Without continuous discovery, organizations lose track of assets, permissions, and exposure points.
CSPM provides a unified view of cloud resources and configurations across environments, helping teams maintain visibility into what exists, how it is configured, and where risk may be accumulating.
2. Risk context and prioritization
Most cloud environments contain thousands of configuration issues at any given time, but only a small subset can realistically lead to a security incident. Traditional tools surface findings without sufficient context, forcing teams to manually determine what matters.
CSPM enables risk-based prioritization by evaluating misconfigurations in context, including factors such as internet exposure, identity permissions, sensitive data, and potential attack paths. This allows security teams to focus on the issues most likely to impact the business, rather than chasing low-risk alerts.
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 friction between security and cloud teams
Security controls that slow development ultimately fail to scale. When issues are discovered late or communicated without context, remediation becomes a bottleneck and security teams are overwhelmed.
CSPM reduces operational friction by integrating into cloud and development workflows, clarifying ownership, and providing actionable remediation guidance. By helping teams understand which issues matter and why, CSPM supports faster remediation without compromising agility.
What are the benefits of CSPM?
CSPM delivers value by helping security and cloud teams focus on the risks that matter most and resolve them efficiently in fast-changing cloud environments. Rather than improving security through more alerts or stricter controls, CSPM improves outcomes by increasing clarity, prioritization, and speed.
1.Clear visibility into cloud risk, not just cloud assets
CSPM provides continuous visibility into cloud resources and their configurations across environments. More importantly, it helps teams understand how those resources relate to one another, where they are exposed, and how risk accumulates across services, identities, and data.
This clarity allows organizations to move beyond basic asset inventories and toward a shared understanding of where meaningful risk exists in the cloud.
2. Reduced risk through contextual prioritization
One of CSPM’s most significant benefits is its ability to reduce cloud risk by narrowing focus to high-impact issues. Instead of treating every misconfiguration as equally urgent, CSPM evaluates risk in context to surface the small number of issues most likely to lead to a security incident.
By concentrating effort on real attack paths and exposed assets, security teams can meaningfully reduce risk without being overwhelmed by noise.
3. Continuous compliance without slowing delivery
CSPM helps organizations maintain compliance with industry and regulatory standards while avoiding manual audits and reactive fire drills. Continuous posture assessment makes it easier to detect drift early, understand the scope of violations, and demonstrate compliance over time.
Because compliance is monitored continuously, teams can maintain governance without introducing friction into development or deployment workflows.
4. Faster remediation and improved operational efficiency
CSPM improves operational efficiency by making security issues easier to understand and faster to resolve. Clear prioritization, ownership visibility, and actionable remediation guidance reduce the time security and cloud teams spend triaging alerts and coordinating fixes.
As a result, teams spend less time reacting to low-risk findings and more time addressing the issues that materially improve security posture.
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How do CSPM tools work?
CSPM tools secure cloud environments by continuously translating cloud configuration data into an understanding of real risk. Rather than operating as a periodic scan or a static checklist, modern CSPM functions as an always-on system that keeps pace with how cloud environments actually change.
At a high level, CSPM works by maintaining visibility across the environment, evaluating risk in context, and helping teams remediate the issues that matter most.
1. Discovery and visibility
CSPM starts with continuous discovery of cloud resources across environments. By integrating directly with cloud provider APIs and native services such as AWS Config, Azure Policy, and GCP Cloud Asset Inventory, CSPM maintains an up-to-date inventory of infrastructure, services, identities, and configurations.
Because cloud resources are created and modified constantly, this discovery process runs continuously. New assets are evaluated as soon as they appear, ensuring that posture and risk assessments reflect the current state of the environment rather than an outdated snapshot.
This persistent visibility forms the foundation for everything CSPM does next.
2. Risk assessment and prioritization
Once cloud resources are discovered, CSPM evaluates their configurations to determine where risk actually exists. Instead of treating every misconfiguration as equally urgent, modern CSPM focuses on context.
Risk assessment takes into account factors such as:
Internet exposure and network reachability
Identity permissions and privilege scope
The presence of sensitive or regulated data
Relationships between resources that could enable lateral movement
By correlating these signals, CSPM helps teams distinguish theoretical issues from those that represent real attack paths. As environments grow larger and more dynamic, automation and AI-assisted analysis increasingly support this process by refining prioritization and reducing false positives over time.
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
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3. Remediation and risk reduction
CSPM is only effective if identified risks can be addressed efficiently. Rather than surfacing findings in isolation, CSPM connects prioritized risks to clear remediation paths.
This typically includes:
Guided remediation that explains why an issue matters and how to fix it
Automated remediation for common or high-confidence misconfigurations
Integration with infrastructure-as-code and DevOps workflows to prevent issues from being introduced in the first place
By tying remediation directly to risk context, CSPM helps teams reduce exposure without creating unnecessary friction or rework.
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 monitoring and reporting
CSPM continuously evaluates cloud configurations against regulatory frameworks, industry standards, and internal policies. Instead of treating compliance as a periodic exercise, CSPM embeds it into day-to-day posture management.
This includes:
Ongoing assessment against standards such as CIS benchmarks, NIST, PCI DSS, and SOC 2
Support for custom policies that reflect organizational or regional requirements
Automated reporting and audit trails that provide visibility into posture over time
As a result, teams can maintain compliance and audit readiness without relying on manual reviews or disruptive point-in-time assessments.
5. Continuous monitoring and change detection
Because cloud environments never stand still, CSPM continuously monitors for changes that introduce new risk. This includes configuration drift, newly exposed resources, and changes to identity permissions or network access.
Rather than generating noise for every change, CSPM prioritizes alerts based on potential impact. This allows security teams to respond quickly to meaningful risk while avoiding distraction from low-risk activity.
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 the broader cloud security ecosystem
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.
Modern vs. legacy CSPM
Modern CSPM represents a fundamental shift in how cloud security posture is understood and managed. Early CSPM tools were designed primarily to support compliance reporting by identifying misconfigurations and mapping them to benchmarks. While that approach provided visibility, it struggled to keep up with the scale, speed, and interconnected nature of modern cloud environments.
As cloud infrastructure became business-critical and increasingly complex, security teams needed CSPM to evolve from a reporting tool into a system that could help prevent real-world incidents. Modern CSPM reflects this shift by focusing on risk context, prioritization, and action rather than raw findings.
How modern CSPM differs from legacy approaches
Legacy CSPM tools tend to evaluate cloud resources in isolation. They surface large volumes of findings, leaving teams to manually determine which issues matter most and how different risks relate to one another. In highly dynamic environments, this often results in alert fatigue and slow remediation.
Modern CSPM takes a more connected approach. It evaluates cloud posture in context, analyzing how misconfigurations interact with exposure, identities, workloads, and data to form potential attack paths. This allows teams to concentrate on the small number of issues that pose meaningful risk, even as environments scale.
The table below highlights the practical 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 includes a wide range of tools, each designed to address different parts of the cloud risk landscape. CSPM is a foundational capability within this ecosystem, focused on understanding and managing configuration-related risk. Other tools address adjacent concerns such as identity, workloads, data, and detection.
Understanding how CSPM fits alongside these solutions helps teams build a more effective and cohesive cloud security strategy.
| 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
Industry analysts consistently highlight CSPM as a critical capability for managing cloud risk at scale. As cloud environments grow more complex and interconnected, analysts emphasize the need for posture management that goes beyond static configuration checks and supports risk-based decision-making.
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.
Wiz's approach to CSPM
Wiz delivers CSPM with a focus on helping organizations understand and reduce real cloud risk quickly and continuously. Rather than surfacing configuration issues in isolation, Wiz correlates posture findings with cloud context such as exposure, identities, workloads, vulnerabilities, and sensitive data. This allows teams to prioritize the issues most likely to lead to a security incident.
Wiz connects to cloud environments using an agentless approach, enabling rapid deployment and broad visibility across IaaS, PaaS, and cloud native services without operational overhead. This comprehensive view forms the foundation for risk assessment that reflects the real relationships and dependencies across the environment.
Key elements of Wiz’s CSPM approach include:
Context first risk prioritization
Wiz correlates misconfigurations with factors such as public exposure, identity permissions, and data sensitivity to surface risks that matter most.Graph based analysis
Wiz maps security signals across cloud resources to show how findings connect and how attackers could move through the environment.Continuous posture visibility
Wiz continuously evaluates cloud configurations, including infrastructure as code, to detect posture changes and emerging risk in near real time.Actionable remediation guidance
Prioritized findings, clear ownership, and context rich guidance help teams remediate high impact risks efficiently.Compliance aligned with risk management
Wiz continuously assesses posture against common standards and frameworks while keeping focus on reducing real exposure, not just passing audits.
This approach helps organizations reduce alert fatigue, improve prioritization, and fix the risks that matter without slowing down cloud teams.
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