CSPM solutions provide risk visibility and assessment of cloud security posture, including resources such as virtual machines, containers, storage, and network configurations. CSPM solutions also assess cloud configurations against best practices and security standards, such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark, as well as identifying security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
By using CSPM, organizations can identify and remediate security issues before they are exploited by malicious actors, shift left by integrating security into DevOps processes, improve compliance with security standards and regulations, and reduce the risk of security incidents and data breaches in the cloud.
Challenges with legacy CSPM tools
Legacy CSPM tools often present a number of challenges compared with modern CSPM solutions, due to limitations in their design and lack of modern capabilities. Some common challenges with legacy CSPM tools include:
Incomplete coverage: Legacy CSPM tools may only provide limited visibility and coverage of cloud resources and configurations as well as lacking consistency across cloud services, which can lead to blind spots and gaps in security posture management.
Limited scalability: Legacy CSPM tools may not be able to scale to meet the needs of modern cloud environments, which can limit their effectiveness in managing large and complex cloud environments.
Inefficient workflows and absent automation: Legacy CSPM tools may have inefficient workflows and user interfaces that rely on manual effort. They may not provide actionable insights, as well as lacking automation capabilities such as automated remediation or integration with DevOps tools, pipelines, and processes.
High false positive rates: Legacy CSPM tools may produce a high volume of false positive alerts and notifications, resulting in high levels of operator interaction and alert fatigue, decreasing the effectiveness of the tool.
Incompatibility with modern cloud technologies CSPM tools need to stay up-to-date with developments in cloud services as well as product updates. Legacy tools may lack awareness of modern cloud technologies, and therefore be unable to interact with them efficiently.
To overcome these challenges, organizations may need to adopt more modern CSPM tools that offer more comprehensive coverage, scalability, automation, and advanced workflows to ensure effective management of their cloud security posture.
How modern CSPM tools bridge that gap
Modern CSPM tools have overcome the limitations of legacy tooling listed above, by adopting additional technologies to provide a holistic view of increasingly complex cloud technologies and environments.
Deep risk assessment: New CSPM tools offer more comprehensive risk assessment capabilities and improved risk intelligence. Using advanced analytics, machine learning, and other techniques to perform deep risk assessment of cloud environments provides a more thorough assessment of cloud security risks. These tools are able to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats, where previously multiple tools would be required to achieve a similar outcome.
Agentless Deployment: Where legacy solutions required the manual installation of agents, as well as manual configuration, contemporary CSPM tools are often agentless. This approach simplifies deployment and reduces the overhead associated with achieving comprehensive cloud visibility.
Graph-based context: Today’s CSPM tools use graph-based context to provide more comprehensive visualizations of cloud resources and interfaces. This results in more accurate risk assessment and threat detection, as well as single pane of glass visibility.
High fidelity alerting: Intelligent CSPM tools produce fewer false positives and more accurate alerts, reducing the risk of alert fatigue and enabling security teams to prioritize alert response based on severity.
Modern CSPM tools enable organizations to improve cloud security posture by proactively managing cloud security risks, reducing the likelihood of breaches.
Key requirements of modern CSPM
Modern CSPM solutions are designed for effective management of complex cloud deployments. As an organization looking for a CSPM solution, it is important to evaluate those satisfying the following requirements:
Configuration evaluation at every layer: A modern CSPM solution is able to evaluate the configuration of every layer of your cloud infrastructure, from networks and storage through to compute and application layers. A quality solution should provide visibility into misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues across all layers, as well as being able to assess cloud provider security posture. It should then offer recommendations for improvements in response to real-time detection.
Contextual risk assessment and high-fidelity alerting: A CSPM solution designed for modern cloud deployments should provide a contextual risk assessment of cloud infrastructure, taking into account your organization's security policies and compliance requirements. The solution should be able to prioritize risks and provide high-fidelity alerting for critical issues, permitting efficient prioritization for immediate attention. It should offer the ability to exclude empty resource locations, as well as cloud resources managed by third parties, to reduce alert fatigue.
Continuous governance: A Cloud Security Posture Management solution should provide continuous governance of your cloud infrastructure, including security posture monitoring and compliance enforcement. The solution should provide real-time visibility into changes to your cloud services infrastructure, ideally via a graph-based context, with any non-compliant changes triggering alerts. It should also provide automated remediation workflows to return your digital assets back into compliance.
IaC scanning: An effective CSPM solution should provide Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanning capabilities to ensure that your cloud infrastructure is provisioned securely from the outset. The solution should be able to scan IaC templates for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues prior to deployment. It should also provide guidance on the remediation of any issues identified before deployment.
Go Beyond CSPM with Wiz
Modern CSPM is an essential aspect of cloud security, as organizations increasingly rely on cloud services for their critical business operations. CSPM tools help organizations identify misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security risks across their cloud infrastructure.
Wiz’s agentless CSPM solution uses a graph-based context for effective targeting of network and identity misconfigurations, and automatically assesses over 1,400 rules across runtimes and infrastructure as code, as well as allowing custom rule configuration to maximize detection and remediation of misconfigurations.
Wiz CSPM goes beyond legacy solutions to offer effective network and identity exposure detection, attack path analysis, and prioritization using Wiz Security Graph to provide context. Contact us to see how a modern CSPM solution can enhance your cloud security posture.
