What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?
What is CSPM?
CSPM (cloud security posture management) is a tool for visualizing, prioritizing, and remediating security findings across your cloud infrastructure. A CSPM continuously ingests and correlates security data from various services to offer advanced insights on your overall security posture score, threats, vulnerabilities, and more. CSPM offers remediation workflows, alignment to standard frameworks, and views on security over time.
How does CSPM work?
There are four key phases of a CSPM tool's workflow, although each happens continuously and concurrently.
Discovery
The CSPM tool discovers all your cloud assets, cloud services, and connections, so that it can accurately monitor security across the cloud environment.
Evaluation
CSPM tools check against compliance standards and set controls to identify which inventory items and their cloud configurations are compliant.
Prioritization
The CSPM tool scores and prioritizes security findings across various security areas, such as threats, vulnerabilities, and sensitive data.
Remediation
The CSPM tool creates guidance and automations for the remediation of identified security issues.
What are the key benefits of cloud security posture management?
Cloud security posture management solutions provide a security overview of your organization’s entire cloud computing environment, along with actionable recommendations. CSPM tools are designed for enhancing cloud security, visualizing your security posture, and vulnerability management.
Here are some of the key benefits of cloud security posture management solutions.
Unified cloud infrastructure security overviews
Cloud security posture management offers views of security posture across your entire cloud infrastructure. By collecting and prioritizing security findings across multiple sources, a CSPM tool gives you centralized visibility of security.
Typically, teams rely on point-based solutions that only give a view of the security posture of a particular area. For example, a security tool may examine network traffic or resource requests. With these point-based tools, it can be challenging to determine which security findings are more critical for the organization.
With a view of security across your entire cloud architecture, security teams gain a greater perspective of what is important to prioritize in terms of security efforts.
Continuous monitoring
Cloud security posture management offers continuous environment monitoring. Due to always-on environment monitoring, you can expect alerts and updates in real-time, as well as an assurance of the current state of systems. Continuous monitoring offers automated threat detection.
Continuous monitoring provides users with the right information at the right time, helping security teams to prioritize where to focus their efforts.
Automated remediation pathways
In many cases, cloud security posture management solutions offer automated remediation pathways. For example, if there is a critical vulnerability on a specific resource, there may be tooltips or workflows to shut down, quarantine, or change the configuration of the given resource. This attack path analysis helps guide the user.
By providing automated remediation pathways, security teams can work faster and more efficiently by completing remediation tasks quickly.
Increased compliance and auditing capabilities
Cloud security posture management solutions can often be configured to align with industry security policies, standards, and regulatory compliance frameworks. These include NIST Special Publication 800-53, PCI DSS, and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices (FSBP).
When these security policies are enabled, the CSPM tool automatically surfaces compliance violations across cloud resources and controls. This enhanced visibility helps you remediate your cloud environment and maintain regulatory compliance, which is important during audits or standards assessments.
What are the key features of a CSPM tool?
The key capabilities of CSPM solutions vary, depending on the cloud provider or vendor. However, these are the core features of most CSPM solutions.
Security area overviews
Cloud security posture management provides overviews of various security areas covering your cloud infrastructure. These areas are displayed on widgets or dashboards and are often reconfigurable, so you can determine what takes top priority within your cloud environment.
Areas covered can include the top threats, top risks, cloud security controls coverage, compliance with security standards, and an overall security score out of 100 percent. You may also be able to view cloud assets by number of findings, regional differences, the most common threats, threat findings over time, and software vulnerabilities within your environment.
Prioritization of key remediation areas
Within most of the security areas in a CSPM tool, you will see security findings identified by severity. For example, you may see findings rated as Critical, High, Medium, and Low, with drill-down overviews. Where threat detection surfaces a Critical finding, these are highlighted. Sensitive data vulnerabilities may also be highlighted.
This automatic prioritization makes it easier to determine where to concentrate remediation efforts.
Investigation and remediation capabilities
Within each specific area, you will see individual findings such as a security alert for a particular cloud resource. By selecting that individual finding, you are often able to review any necessary steps to take for remediation, initiate an automatic workflow, or view a history of the finding.
The investigation capabilities may cover multiple services to give you an overview of how, where, and why a security event or cloud misconfiguration has occurred.
These investigation capabilities make it easier for security teams to investigate and remediate security events faster and with more confidence.
Real-time alerting
CSPM solutions can surface new and escalating priority security risks and events in real time. Many CSPM tools offer integrated alerting features that users can configure to show or hide incoming events.
The real-time capabilities of a CSPM tool allow users to address critical security issues faster, often with automated remediation pathways.
Time series data
CSPM solutions offer an overview of your organization’s cloud security over time. Many of the security areas will offer the ability to view the data as a time series. For example, you may be able to see your security score rise and fall over a year, or the number of critical vulnerabilities across specific resources over three months.
Time series analysis is important for organizational benchmarking, reporting, and goal setting, in efforts to strengthen the security posture of the organization over time.
Integration with security tools
Cloud security posture management solutions ingest data from various sources and send their findings to other tools. Data sources include cloud native applications, as well as traditional security tools and third-party provider solutions, such as cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM).
For example, AWS Security Hub CSPM receives findings from Amazon Detective, AWS Audit Manager, AWS Security Lake, and other services. AWS Security Hub CSPM sends findings to AWS Config, AWS Health, Amazon Macie, and others.
By integrating with multiple security and monitoring tools and cloud native applications, the CSPM solution gains more visibility. Where possible, you should include as many integrations as is possible or recommended.
Customization capabilities
CSPM tools are customizable, as each organization is unique, and the customization capabilities of a CSPM tool differ between vendors. Typically, dashboards are reconfigurable, and security areas can have filters. You are typically able to set specific standards to determine compliance violations and can prioritize specific cloud environment controls.
An example of customization within AWS Security Hub CSPM is automatically elevating the severity status of findings related to essential business resources to Critical. This automation enhances cloud workload security on critical assets.
What are some CSPM best practices?
CSPM solutions require some operational best practices to be most useful to the organization.
CSPM training
CSPM tool users must be trained in the solution to use it properly to secure cloud infrastructure. CSPM user training is essential to ensuring you are correctly informed about your security posture. While CSPM solutions may work with default settings, users must know how to interpret the data, configure the system, and follow the guidance depending on business requirements.
Up-to-date cloud configuration management
As your cloud environment grows, you must keep your CSPM solution up to date with new developments.
CPSM cloud configuration management may include tasks such as:
- Automatic resource and service onboarding to identify cloud infrastructure misconfigurations
- Integration of other cloud security solutions, such as cloud infrastructure entitlement management
- Reconfiguration of dashboards for newly identified priority areas, such as container security
A CSPM solution is not a static tool; you must maintain it alongside your cloud environment.
Benchmarking and reporting
The time series data in a CSPM tool is important for security reporting to the C-Suite and other business stakeholders. When setting up a CSPM tool, you can benchmark your security internally, as well as against specific compliance standards. With these initial figures, you can start to set goals for the future and be assured your follow-up reports will be correct.
Automate responses
For security findings that are unique to your organization and tend to happen often, you can set up automated response sequences. In this way, you can save time remediating known issues. These response sequences will typically occur outside of the CSPM tool, through an integrated service. For example, Amazon EventBridge can trigger automatic responses to specific findings on AWS Security Hub CSPM.
How can AWS support you with CSPM?
AWS Security Hub is AWS’s unified cloud security solution for prioritizing critical security issues and helping you respond at scale to protect your cloud computing infrastructure. This broader security solution detects critical issues by correlating and enriching signals into actionable insights, enabling a streamlined response.
AWS Security Hub CSPM is a service within Security Hub. AWS Security Hub CSPM performs security best practice checks and ingests security findings from AWS cloud services and partners. It combines these results with findings from other cloud services and partner security tools. The service offers automated checks against your AWS resources to help identify cloud misconfigurations and evaluate your security posture.
AWS Security Hub CSPM offers security standards aligned to industry and regulatory frameworks such as AWS Foundational Security Best Practices, Center for Internet Security (CIS), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Security Hub also provides automated response workflows to streamline remediation at scale so you can reduce cloud security risks, improve your team’s productivity, and minimize potential operational disruptions. Security Hub provides more comprehensive visibility into your security posture to protect your cloud environment.
Get started with implementing a CSPM solution on AWS by creating a free account today.