It’s no longer enough to provide a great cloud product or service—customers expect a fully mature security program backing your offerings as well. That’s where the Cloud Security Maturity Model (CSMM) comes in. Offering a structured framework, the CSMM assesses and advances an organization’s cloud security posture by identifying the critical capabilities, processes, and technologies required at each stage of maturity. The five phases of the CSMM will help you gauge your organization’s maturity level and update your cloud security posture to stave off risks and threats. Let’s get right into it.
1. Gain full visibility
Achieving cloud security maturity starts by scanning your environment to fully understand what you need to protect: This includes your infrastructure, assets, configurations, capabilities, and identities.
Cloud visibility is crucial because cloud data is spread across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and on-prem environments. While this diversity enables agility, scalability, and innovation, it also introduces security risks by creating blind spots, making security monitoring, enforcement, and incident response increasingly difficult.
A 2024 IBM report states that 40% of breaches are due to visibility gaps in data that's stored across multiple environments. Each year, these breaches cost organizations an average of over $5 million and take 283 days to identify and contain. Visibility gaps also result in a 27% rise in IP thefts.
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With such high stakes, it’s critical to invest in tools and techniques that provide a clear overview of cloud infrastructure, align with a best-fit cloud security strategy for your organization, and plug common visibility gaps that can undermine your security posture.
Here’s a quick look at the most common culprits:
| Visibility gap | Description |
|---|---|
| Shadow IT and unknown assets | Shadow IT refers to cloud resources, SaaS applications, and infrastructure that businesses deploy without security oversight, while unknown assets are abandoned workloads, storage buckets, and abandoned accounts that aren’t being monitored. |
| Over-permissioned identities and unused credentials | Default access settings, poor management of legitimate identities’ privileges, and active-but-unused credentials pose major security risks. |
| Misconfigurations and drift across multi-cloud environments | Exposed storage buckets, public databases, or overly permissive network rules can turn your cloud infrastructure into a target for threat actors on the prowl for attack vectors. Configuration drifts also introduce hidden risks not covered in the initial security framework. |
How can you achieve full visibility?
Build a comprehensive cloud asset inventory: Take stock of your cloud workloads, storage, identities, and configurations across multiple environments and service providers. Look beyond compute instances to include serverless functions, databases, and networking components.
Implement real-time posture management: Automate your security architecture to maintain continuous visibility into old and new resources, identities and configuration changes, and policy enforcement. By flagging risky deployments in your cloud environment immediately after they occur, automated tools help you enforce security protocols before threats emerge.
Use agentless scanning and continuous monitoring: Agentless scanning is the most cost-effective way to get broad coverage. Better yet? Agentless scans don’t disrupt operations. While agentless scanning offers broad coverage and ease of deployment, it’s best used alongside cloud-native logging and APIs for complete context and auditability.
Outcome: Full visibility establishes a single source of truth for your security posture. With a clear view of your infrastructure and zero blind spots, you can monitor your assets in real time, moderate access privileges, and detect threats before they escalate into attacks.
Platforms like Wiz enable agentless, API-driven scanning across AWS, Azure, and GCP—eliminating the need for agents while offering a complete inventory and full visibility of workloads, identities, and misconfigurations. Beyond inventory, Wiz automatically maps relationships between resources, identities, and configurations—surfacing toxic combinations and lateral movement paths that traditional tools often miss.
2. Remediate critical risks
Gaining visibility helps you identify vulnerabilities that expose your assets to attackers and other threats, but the next step is deciding how to deal with the risks you find.
It’s not practical to chase down every vulnerability in your infrastructure. A smarter strategy is to leverage vulnerability prioritization, which helps you rank risks based on severity, potential impact, exploitability, and business context.
Key risks that require immediate remediation
Overexposed identities and toxic permission combinations: Excessive permissions, role sprawl, and unintended privilege escalation paths create persistent risks with broad attack surfaces that bypass access control, allowing attackers to move laterally and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Publicly exposed storage, databases, and compute resources: Non-sensitive cloud storage with public read access may not trigger alarm bells, but misconfigured cloud storage buckets and internet-facing virtual machines with weak encryptions increase the risk of data breaches and malicious access to your network.
Unpatched vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations: Risk-sensitive CVEs such as outdated software, insecure default settings, and drift in security configurations are major attack vectors that threat actors can exploit.
Unprotected credentials, secrets, and API keys: Hardcoded credentials, exposed secrets, poorly secured API keys, and other cloud assets used for secure data access or exchange are key targets for attackers looking to access sensitive systems and escalate privileges undetected.
Steps to effectively remediate cloud risks
Implement risk-based prioritization: Using cloud service provider frameworks or open-source frameworks such as CVSS and EPSS, security teams should rank risks according to their obligations under the shared responsibility model, the lifecycle of their cloud resources, and the potential size of the attack surface.
Focus on attack path analysis: Combine MITRE ATT&CK with tools that visualize relationships between identities, resources, and vulnerabilities—like graph-based attack path analysis—so you can see how a single misconfiguration or over-permissioned identity could lead to a breach.
Automate remediation for misconfigurations and excessive permissions: The scale and complexity of cloud risks and vulnerabilities mean organizations must move from manual remediation to automated control. Automation will enforce least privilege around the clock, revoke unnecessary access, and fix misconfigurations at scale without downtime.
Outcome: Prioritized risk remediation establishes a mature security posture without any “safety-threatening” risks for attackers to exploit.
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3. Democratize security
Democratized cloud security means that securing cloud assets is everyone’s responsibility, from engineers to developers and InfoSec teams. It empowers teams to take ownership of securing their applications and infrastructure without depending entirely on security teams.
Having a single, centralized security team may seem good for command and control, but it creates bottlenecks in security operations. Developers have to wait for security reviews, delaying deployments. Security teams may have to patch vulnerable products before penetration testing, further adding to the delay. You can eliminate these bottlenecks by democratizing security.
Key challenges preventing democratization
Security teams lack cloud context and struggle to enforce controls at scale. Cloud-native environments are dynamic, with constantly changing configurations and workloads. Security teams often lack the visibility and automated solutions required for consistent security policies.
Developers prioritize speed and may unintentionally create security risks. Developers may bypass security best practices when pressured to ship features quickly, leaving applications exposed.
Security policies are often manual, fragmented, or hard to enforce across teams. Without automation and clear guidelines, security remains inconsistent, leading to gaps in protection.
Steps to democratize security
Provide self-service security insights: Developers need direct access to security findings within their workflows—via CLI tools, IDE integrations, or IaC scan results. For example, Wiz integrates into CI/CD pipelines and developer environments to surface risks early and provide actionable remediation guidance.
Implement guardrails instead of gates: Organizations can automate controls and policy enforcement to ensure security compliance without slowing down developers.
Shift security left: When you embed security checks into CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), and cloud-native workflows, you ensure vulnerabilities are identified and remediated at the source before reaching production.
Outcome: Democratizing security creates a culture of shared responsibility where security is not just a contract between customers and services but also between developers, engineers, and security teams.
4. Build securely by design
A critical stage of the maturity journey is the shift to building securely by design. In other words, it’s impossible to fully mature without establishing security as part of your product development instead of integrating it later as an add-on feature.
Common gaps in secure-by-design practices
Inconsistent secure-by-default configurations: Cloud products become vulnerable when security configurations across different layers fail to complement each other. For example, enforcing strong security at the bucket level while allowing weak object-level control undermines the overall security of the product.
Security added after deployment, leading to expensive fixes: Patching cloud resources post-deployment requires significant time and effort, often causing delays and unexpected costs.
Lack of standardized security policies across teams: Inconsistent implementation of security policies across different teams creates gaps that attackers can exploit.
Steps to secure cloud environments by design
Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning to prevent misconfigurations before deployment. IaC scanning analyzes templates (such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM) to pinpoint misconfigurations before they become security risks in a live environment.
Apply least-privilege access by default across cloud environments. Least-privilege access minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and abuse of privileges within cloud systems.
Automate security policy enforcement with security as code (SaC). Automation reduces manual errors in policy enforcement and scales security across infrastructure, ensuring that every deployment aligns with organizational security standards.
Outcome: Building securely by design establishes a mature pipeline for launching products that can survive in the wild without emergency patches or post-deployment add-ons.
5. Detect and arrest intrusions
The Cloud Security Maturity Model can’t predict or stop every attack, but it can help your organization build stronger defenses to detect, contain, and neutralize threats before they cause harm.
By continuously monitoring your environment, you gain the visibility needed to spot suspicious activity early and respond effectively. With mature threat detection, you can prioritize risks based on their potential impact, ensuring that your security teams focus on what matters most.
Key challenges in threat detection
High volume of cloud security alerts: Security teams received an average of 108 CVEs daily in 2024; such high volumes make it difficult to distinguish real threats from false positives.
Difficulty correlating signals across cloud providers: Disparate security logs from multi-cloud and hybrid environments obscure visibility into cloud threats.
Attackers moving laterally through compromised identities and workloads: Lateral movements in a network allow attackers to escalate privileges and expand their access undetected.
Steps to detect and contain threats
Implement cloud-native threat detection for real-time attack visibility: Cloud-native security tools give full visibility into cloud activity and contextualize and prioritize risks for immediate remediation.
Use behavioral analytics and AI-driven anomaly detection to spot malicious activity: The MITRE ATT&CK framework and behavioral cloud IOCs can help businesses distinguish normal from malicious cloud behavior, helping security teams detect and respond to activities that can lead to breaches.
Automate incident response workflows to contain threats before damage occurs: Automated response mechanisms, such as quarantining compromised workloads or revoking suspicious permissions, provide real-time defense against intrusions and malicious behaviors.
Outcome: Tried-and-true threat detection measures establish a responsive cloud security system that not only detects and responds to threats but does so seamlessly—without disrupting operations.
Assessing your cloud security maturity
Now that you’re familiar with the five phases of the Cloud Security Maturity Model, it’s time to evaluate where your organization stands.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) provides a solid guide to help. It measures your capabilities across six key functions—Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, and Govern—helping you understand your current state and map out a path forward.
From this assessment, your organization will fall into one of four security maturity tiers:
Next, let's walk through each tier.
| Maturity level | Description |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 (Partial) |
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| Tier 2 (Risk-informed) |
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| Tier 3 (Repeatable) |
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| Tier 4 (Adaptive) |
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Progression through these tiers is not linear. It depends on your industry, compliance requirements, and risk appetite. That said, you can assess your current cloud security maturity using NIST’s quick-start guides and worksheets.
Addressing common roadblocks to cloud security maturity
Many organizations struggle to progress due to:
Lack of visibility: Visibility is the foundation of cloud security, but the vast number of cloud resources and their dynamic connections and ownership makes it hard to monitor assets and enforce security policies.
Skill gaps: The World Economic Forum reports that two out of three organizations lack essential expertise to meet security demands.
Fragmented security tools: Having multiple security tools that meet different needs can lead to discrepancies in how you enforce your security policies, making it challenging to maintain a unified security approach.
So what can you do to improve your security posture? The answer depends on your maturity level (tier).
Tier 1: Establish basic security foundations
Key actions:
Conduct a comprehensive security assessment to identify risks and gaps.
Implement basic security hygiene (e.g., MFA, least-privilege access, logging).
Improve cloud visibility by deploying security monitoring tools.
Start security awareness training for employees and developers.
Develop an incident response plan to ensure basic preparedness.
Tier 2: Strengthen your security posture and democratize security
Key actions:
Establish centralized security policies and enforce them consistently.
Integrate security into DevOps and engineering workflows (shift left).
Implement role-based access control (RBAC) and enforce least privilege.
Automate cloud security monitoring and vulnerability management.
Conduct regular security training tailored to developers, security, and IT teams.
Tier 3: Automate and standardize security operations
Key actions:
Adopt security as code (SaC) to automate policy enforcement.
Expand threat detection and response with real-time monitoring and AI-driven analytics.
Conduct continuous compliance monitoring to maintain regulatory compliance.
Improve incident response automation to contain threats faster.
Regularly assess and refine security policies to adapt to evolving threats.
Tier 4: Achieve continuous security optimization
Key actions:
Implement zero-trust security architecture across all cloud environments.
Develop proactive threat-hunting capabilities using AI and behavioral analytics.
Automate real-time risk assessment and policy adjustments.
Leverage security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) to streamline incident response.
Regularly test security resilience through red teaming and attack simulations.
How Wiz accelerates cloud security maturity
Achieving cloud security maturity isn’t just about checking boxes—it’s about building resilience that evolves with your environment. Wiz helps you get there faster by delivering the breadth of visibility, depth of context, and automation needed at every stage of the maturity journey.
Whether you're just starting to inventory your cloud assets or optimizing incident response with behavioral analytics, Wiz’s integrated CNAPP meets you where you are. With agentless scanning, real-time risk prioritization, and powerful code-to-cloud context, Wiz removes the guesswork from cloud security and empowers every team—from developers to security engineers—to act on what matters most.
As you progress through the maturity tiers, Wiz serves as your foundation, eliminating blind spots, enforcing least privilege, and enabling continuous compliance across frameworks like NIST CSF, ISO 27001, and more.
Want to accelerate your journey up the maturity curve? Schedule a demo to see how Wiz can help you secure everything you build and run in the cloud.
