CSPM importance for CISOs. What security issues can be prevented\defended with CSPM?

Cloud Security is a broad domain with many different aspects, some of them human. Even the most sophisticated and secure systems can be jeopardized by human elements such as mistakes and miscalculations. Many organizations are susceptible to such dangers, especially during critical tech configurations and transfers. Especially for example, during digital transformation and cloud migration may result in misconfigurations that can leave your critical applications vulnerable and your company’s sensitive data an easy target for cyber-attacks. 

The good news is that Prevasio, and other cybersecurity providers have brought in new technologies to help improve the cybersecurity situation across multiple organizations. Today, we discuss Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and how it can help prevent not just misconfigurations in cloud systems but also protect against supply chain attacks.

Understanding Cloud Security Posture Management

First, we need to fully understand what a CSPM is before exploring how it can prevent cloud security issues. CSPM is first of all a practice for adopting security best practices as well as automated tools to harden and manage the company security strength across various cloud based services such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). 

These practices and tools can be used to determine and solve many security issues within a cloud system. Not only is CSPM critical to the growth and integrity of your cloud infrastructure, but it’s also mandatory for organizations with CIS, GDPR, PCI-DSS, NIST, HIPAA and similar compliance requirements.

How Does CSPM Work?

There are numerous cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others that provide hyper scaling cloud hosted platforms as well as various cloud compute services and solutions to organizations that previously faced many hurdles with their on-site cloud infrastructures. When you migrate your organization to these platforms, you can effectively scale up and cut down on on-site infrastructure spending. 

However, if not appropriately handled, cloud migration comes with potential security risks.  For instance, an average Lift and Shift transfer that involves a legacy application may not be adequately security hardened or reconfigured for safe use in a public cloud setup. This may result in security loopholes that expose the network and data to breaches and attacks. 

Cloud misconfiguration can happen in multiple ways. However, the most significant risk is not knowing that you are endangering your organization with such misconfigurations. That being the case, below are a few examples of cloud misconfigurations that can be identified and solved by CSPM tools such as Prevasio within your cloud infrastructure:

• Improper identity and access management: Your organization may not have the best identity and access management system in place. For instance, lack of  Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all users, unreliable password hygiene, and discriminatory user policies instead of group access, Role-based access, and everything contrary to best practices, including least privilege.

• You are unable to log in to events in your cloud due to an accidental CloudTrail error.

• Cloud storage misconfigurations: Having unprotected S3 buckets on AWS or Azure.

• CSPM can compute situations that have the most vulnerabilities within applications

• Incorrect secret management: Secret credentials are more than user passwords or pins. They include encryption keys, API keys, among others. For instance, every admin must use encryption keys on the server-side and rotate the keys every 90 days. Failure to do this can lead to credentials misconfigurations. Ideally, part of your cloud package must include and rely on solutions such as AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, and other secrets management solutions.
  

The above are a mere few examples of common misconfigurations that can be found in your cloud infrastructure, but CSPM can provide additional advanced security and multiple

performance benefits.

Benefits Of CSPM

CSPM manages your cloud infrastructure. Some of the benefits of having your cloud infrastructure secured with CSPM boils down to peace of mind, that reassurance of knowing that your organization’s critical data is safe. 

It further provides long-term visibility to your cloud networks, enables you to identify violations of policies, and allows you to remediate your misconfigurations to ensure proper compliance.  Furthermore, CSPM provides remediation to safeguard cloud assets as well as existing compliance libraries.

Technology is here to stay, and with CSPM, you can advance the cloud security posture of your organization. To summarize it all, here are what you should expect with CSPM cloud security:

• Risk assessment: CSPM tools can enable you to see your network security level in advance to gain visibility into security issues such as policy violations that expose you to risk.

• Continuous monitoring: Since CSPM tools are versatile they present an accurate view of your cloud system and can identify and instantly flag off policy violations in real-time.

• Compliance: Most compliance laws require the adoption of CIS, NIST, PCI-DSS, SOC2, HIPAA, and other standards in the cloud. With CSPM, you can stay ahead of internal governance, including ISO 27001.

• Prevention: Most CSPM allows you to identify potential vulnerabilities and provide practical recommendations to prevent possible risks presented by these vulnerabilities without additional vendor tools.

• Supply Chain Attacks: Some CSPM tools, such as Prevasio, provides you malware scanning features to your applications, data, and their dependency chain on data from external supply chains, such as git imports of external libraries and more.
  

With automation sweeping every industry by storm, CSPM is the future of all-inclusive cloud security. With cloud security posture management, you can do more than remediate configuration issues and monitor your organization’s cloud infrastructure. 

You’ll also have the capacity to establish cloud integrity from existing systems and ascertain which technologies, tools, and cloud assets are widely used. CSPM’s capacity to monitor cloud assets and cyber threats and present them in user-friendly dashboards is another benefit that you can use to explore, analyze and quickly explain to your team(s) and upper management.

Even find knowledge gaps in your team and decide which training or mentorship opportunities your security team or other teams in the organization might require.

Who Needs Cloud Security Posture Management?

At the moment, cloud security is a new domain that its need and popularity is growing by the day. CSPM is widely used by organizations looking to maximize in a safe way the most of all that hyper scaling cloud platforms can offer, such as agility, speed, and cost-cutting strategies. The downside is that the cloud also comes with certain risks, such as misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and internal\external supply chain attacks that can expose your business to cyber-attacks. 

CSPM is responsible for protecting users, applications, workloads, data, apps, and much more in an accessible and efficient manner under the Shared Responsibility Model. With CSPM tools, any organization keen on enhancing its cloud security can detect errors, meet compliance regulations, and orchestrate the best possible defenses.

Let Prevasio Solve Your Cloud Security Needs

Prevasio’s Next-Gen CSPM solution focus on the three best practices: light touch\agentless approach, super easy and user-friendly configuration, easy to read and share security findings context, for visibility to all appropriate users and stakeholders in mind. Our cloud security offerings are ideal for organizations that want to go beyond misconfiguration, legacy compliance or traditional vulnerability scanning. 

We offer an accelerated visual assessment of your cloud infrastructure, perform automated analysis of a wide range of cloud assets, identify policy errors, supply-chain threats, and vulnerabilities and position all these to your unique business goals.

What we provide are prioritized recommendations for well-orchestrated cloud security risk mitigations. To learn more about us, what we do, our cloud security offerings, and how we can help your organization prevent cloud infrastructure attacks, read all about it here.