Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and remediates risk by automating visibility, uninterrupted monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows to search for misconfigurations across diverse cloud environments/infrastructure, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Security posture is a reference to the cybersecurity strength of an organization, which includes an assessment of its ability to detect and respond to security threats.
The main purpose of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is to automatically identify and remediate security risks and misconfigurations across an organization's entire cloud infrastructure, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments. It provides continuous monitoring to ensure compliance with industry standards and prevent data breaches.
A CSPM tool works by connecting to cloud provider APIs to gain agentless visibility of all cloud assets and their configurations. It then continuously scans these assets against security benchmarks (like CIS) and compliance regulations (like HIPAA, GDPR) to detect misconfigurations, which it then reports and helps remediate.
CSPM focuses on securing the entire cloud environment and infrastructure by identifying configuration weaknesses. In contrast, a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) focuses on protecting the specific, individual workloads (like virtual machines or containers) that run within that environment.
Yes, CSPM is essential for multi-cloud environments. It solves the critical challenges of security blind spots and operational complexity by unifying visibility and normalizing security policies across different cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP into a single management console.