What is CSPM?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is the process of securing multi-cloud environments with enhanced visibility, risk and misconfiguration identification, posture assessment, and compliance protocols. CSPM tools continuously monitor cloud infrastructure, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), for gaps in security policy enforcement.
Gartner describes the core of CSPM as a solution that "applies common frameworks, regulatory requirements and enterprise policies to proactively and reactively discover and assess risk/trust of cloud services configuration and security settings."
CSPM solutions are important because modern enterprises need to manage, operate, and protect complex and perimeterless multi-cloud IT infrastructures where misconfigurations, poor visibility, compliance challenges, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities are common.
Did you know that less than 60 seconds after a virtual machine is exposed to the internet, an unknown IP attempts to access the instance?
Wiz Research Team
The CSPM Buyer's Guide [RFP Template Included]
Navigating the alphabet soup of cloud security tools is challenging – CSPM? CNAPP? CDR? We've simplified your decision-making process and laid all the criteria for a modern CSPM solution.
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Why CSPM is important
Most modern businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud infrastructures, embarking on digital transformation journeys, and leveraging agile methodologies that prioritize operational efficiency.
However, without a CSPM solution, a misconfiguration resulting from default settings, rapid deployment, complexity, and visibility issues can quickly lead to a data breach. The following are the five primary reasons why organizations need CSPM.
1. Lack of visibility
Enterprises often struggle to maintain visibility across multi-cloud environments and compute types like serverless, virtual machines, and containers. Poor visibility can have serious consequences like data breaches, compliance failures, incorrect performance measurements, and IT budget leaks.
Weak spots, hidden vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations are unlikely to be identified if organizations don’t have comprehensive topographic coverage of their IT environment.
A lack of visibility will cause other challenges in an enterprise’s IT environment to snowball. It can also severely hinder the digital efforts of organizations. Modern businesses need to be able to scale their cloud infrastructure and operations ad hoc, and poor visibility can be a major handicap.
2. Lack of context and prioritization
Several cloud security solutions, including older iterations of CSPM tools, can identify misconfigurations in cloud environments. However, a lot of misconfiguration identification can lack context, which is essential in perimeterless environments.
Organizations need robust CSPM to provide them with context around identified misconfigurations so they can prioritize or focus on the misconfigurations that pose a risk to their environment. CSPM can help organizations prioritize cloud misconfigurations and challenges so they become easier to address.
Alert fatigue, which occurs when enterprises receive a barrage of alerts about context-less cloud misconfigurations, can slow down security teams. CSPM can help organizations reduce alert fatigue and only address legitimate cloud concerns.
3. Compliance challenges
Manual compliance processes of the past cannot keep up with rapidly scaling cloud architectures. Businesses require continuous compliance to avoid legal penalties caused by a breach in regulatory frameworks including NIST CFS/SP/800-171/800-53, PCI DSS, SOC2, HiTrust, and CIS benchmarks for cloud vendors such asAWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba.
The breach of these regulations can have severe repercussions. Meta was fined $1.3 billion for compliance failures in 2023, Instagram was fined $445 million in 2022, and Amazon was fined $887 million in 2021. Multinational giants may be able to overcome such penalties but most other businesses wouldn’t be able to survive.
Businesses may also need to implement and assess their compliance posture for customized regulatory frameworks. These could be a combination of existing frameworks, duplicates, or unique policies framed by the organization. CSPM tools provide capabilities to do this along with automated mechanisms to assess an enterprise’s entire compliance posture and identify regulatory red flags.
4. Operational efficiency
Businesses are employing agile methodologies and pipelines like DevOps and CI/CD to make the most of their cloud infrastructure. The nature of traditional security tools can sometimes contradict the approaches of developers in agile IT environments. Traditional identification and remediation of security risks can be slow and may struggle to keep up in a high-octane dev environment.
CSPM can help organizations bridge the gap between operational velocity and robust cybersecurity by baking in security earlier on in the development lifecycle (aka 'shift left'). If your security team can give developers the context, prioritization, and specific remediation guidance they need to fix issues on their own, you get to have your cake and eat it too (shipping code fast and securely!).
5. Challenges with complex multi-cloud architectures
Cloud infrastructure offers simplified granular scalability. Increased scalability is a powerful attribute, but it also introduces complexities. New cloud applications, resources, and assets can be procured very easily, and quickly expand an enterprise’s cloud architecture.
CSPM tools can help organizations identify misconfigurations in rapidly scaling multi-cloud architectures with automated mechanisms. Manual management of scaling and distributed enterprise architectures is unrealistic and susceptible to security mishaps. CSPM can mitigate those challenges and enable companies to fully leverage their cloud platforms.
KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for CSPM
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How CSPM tools work: key capabilities
CSPM is a robust cloud security solution that can provide companies with many advantages. But how does it do so?
The following are four key capabilities of CSPM that make it an invaluable modern security solution.
1. Configuration Evaluation at Every Layer
CSPM allows enterprises to identify and remediate misconfigurations beyond just the cloud layer. CSPM enables configuration evaluation at a cloud, application, and host layer.
This is a more holistic approach that secures every layer of a cloud environment and provides Kubernetes support. It can reduce risk, improve compliance, and enable operational efficiency more effectively than cloud solutions that address only surface layers.
2. Continuous cloud compliance monitoring and governance
Cloud infrastructure can be a powerful dynamic platform for enterprises, but they require continuous compliance monitoring and governance. New cloud provinces can be added to IT environments with a single mouse click, which means that there’s always the possibility of unknown compliance risks. Periodic compliance monitoring and governance can’t cover these varying risks and frameworks. CSPM provides continuous monitoring and governance.
3. Agentless workload scanning and vulnerability detection
CSPM provides agentless workload scanning and vulnerability detection capabilities that can identify misconfigurations in OS, applications, and libraries across compute types. This negates the limitations of agent-based scanning.
Agent-based scanning of IT environments can be resource-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to missing security blind spots. Agentless workload scanning can help enterprises surveil their environments effectively, efficiently, and economically.
4. Contextual risk assessment
CSPM does more than just identify misconfigurations in cloud environments. It correlates misconfigurations to other risk factors such as vulnerabilities, identities, network exposures, secrets, sensitive data, and malware; and it identifies toxic combinations and their potential consequences. This helps enterprises identify attack and escalation paths, prioritize remediation efforts by risk factors, and secure their most valuable cloud-based assets.
The evolution of CSPM solutions
Legacy CSPM capabilities have helped businesses for many years by identifying cloud misconfigurations, keeping an inventory of cloud resources, monitoring those resources in real time, and evaluating cloud compliance.
However, they also feature an overwhelming volume of contextless misconfiguration alerts and a fragmented approach that isn’t compatible with modern operational processes. Modern CSPM has strengthened the foundation of legacy solutions and added new pillars for support.
Legacy CSPMs have significant feature gaps that differentiate them from modern CSPMs. The main gaps they have are:
Lack of context: Legacy CSPMs lack information surrounding a misconfiguration. They don’t take into account factors like network paths, identity exposures, sensitive data, etc.
Noise without prioritization: Legacy CSPM doesn’t have the capabilities to identify the level of criticality of an issue found. Without this information, the security team can’t prioritize the most critical risks first or reduce alert noise.
Operational inefficiency: Legacy CSPM makes security operations inefficient by requiring additional tools, often owned by a different team and requiring different processes.
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 Realtime 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 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 |
The approach of modern CSPM bridges these gaps with innovative features and actionable context. It ensures that detected vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, and compromised secrets inform and enrich attack path and identity analyses.
These modern capabilities secure cloud environments with context-based fortifications, prevent lateral movement for threat actors, fuel DevOps and CI/CD, reduce attack surfaces and blast radii, and enable data security posture management and kubernetes security posture management.
CSPM vs other cloud security solutions
CSPM is one among numerous cloud security solutions. Gartner predicts that global end-user spending on public clouds will reach approximately $600 billion in 2023. Cloud infrastructure is reigning, and cloud security solutions are in high demand. The following are comparisons of CSPM and other popular cloud security solutions.
What is the difference between CSPM and CWPP?
Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) focuses specifically on protecting workloads from cyber threats in cloud environments. CSPM looks at cloud resource misconfigurations, while CWPP looks at workloads.
What is the difference between CSPM and CASB?
Cloud access security brokers (CASB) are mechanisms to implement security policies and controls in cloud environments. CSPM focuses on identifying and remediating cloud misconfigurations.
What is the difference between CSPM and CNAPP?
Cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a unified platform that brings together traditionally disparate cloud security solutions. A modern CSPM solution is typically part of a greater unified CNAPP platform.
What is the difference between CSPM and CIEM?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) helps businesses analyze and manage cloud entitlements across their IT environments. CSPM focuses on cloud resources misconfigurations rather than identities and entitlements.
What's the difference between CSPM and SSPM?
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools are designed to ensure the security and compliance of cloud infrastructure environments, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. They continuously monitor for misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks, providing automated assessments and remediation steps to maintain secure cloud resources. On the other hand, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tools focus on securing Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. SSPM tools monitor SaaS application configurations, manage user permissions, control data access, and identify compliance issues specific to SaaS environments. Learn more ->
What's the difference between CSPM and DSPM?
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) focuses on discovering, monitoring, and securing sensitive data across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and SaaS. DSPM tools discover and classify sensitive data, monitor data access and movement, identify data security risks, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. CSPM is primarily concerned with the security and compliance of cloud infrastructure, continuously monitoring for misconfigurations and security risks within cloud environments. Learn more ->
What's the difference between CSPM and APSM?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tools concentrate on securing applications throughout the software development lifecycle. ASPM tools identify application vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, integrate with development pipelines to enforce security policies, provide insights into the security posture of applications, and remediate security issues. While CSPM is concerned with cloud infrastructure security, ASPM focuses on the security of applications, ensuring they are developed and deployed securely to minimize vulnerabilities.
What's the difference between CSPM and SIEM?
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools focus on real-time analysis of security alerts generated by applications and network hardware. SIEM tools collect and aggregate log data from multiple sources, correlate and analyze this data to identify security threats, provide real-time alerts and notifications, and facilitate incident response and forensic investigations. While CSPM deals with the security configurations and compliance of cloud infrastructure, SIEM provides comprehensive visibility into security events across an organization’s IT environment, detecting and responding to security incidents in real time.
What analyst firms say about CSPM
Gartner
Gartner's view on CSPM is integrated into their broader perspective on CNAPP. Key strategic planning assumptions and market directions include:
Consolidation of CWPP and CSPM: By 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 can provide comprehensive security and compliance management across cloud environments.
Integrated CNAPP Offerings: By 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, from development to production.
Multi-Cloud Adoption: By 2025, 80% of enterprises will adopt multiple public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, including multiple Kubernetes offerings. CSPM tools must therefore be versatile and capable of managing security across diverse cloud environments.
Vendor Consolidation: By 2026, 80% of enterprises will consolidate security tooling for the lifecycle protection of cloud-native applications to three or fewer vendors, down from an average of 10 in 2022. This consolidation aims to reduce complexity and improve the integration and effectiveness of security solutions.
Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report Gartner offers insights and recommendations for evaluating and adopting CNAPP offerings to secure your cloud workloads, architectures and applications.
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Forrester
Forrester's stance on CSPM emphasizes its critical role in enhancing cloud security by detecting and responding to configuration drifts and potential threats in real-time. 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.
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. KuppingerCole identified the leading vendors based on the strength of their products, market presence, and innovation in their CSPM Leadership Compass.
Wiz's approach to CSPM
Enterprises can find it overwhelming to navigate the cloud security solutions market and choose optimal solutions. CSPM can provide numerous advantages, but companies may be confused about whether it will suit their particular needs and use cases.
The Wiz CSPM solution offers real-time scanning to detect misconfigurations as soon as they happen, identifying the event that triggered the misconfiguration and enabling you to immediately trigger an automated remediation flow (such as automatically adjusting access control settings to restrict public access).
Schedule a demo of the product for an opportunity to chat with Wiz experts, which can help organizations make an informed decision about their cloud security posture management.
See how Wiz reduces alert fatigue by contextualizing your misconfigurations to focus on risks that actually matter.
