What is cloud security posture management (CSPM)?

Cloud systems offer speed, scalability, and flexibility. However, with the growing complexity of cloud systems and the rise of AI, exposed attack surfaces and other security risks have increased. Consequently, cloud native security is quickly moving beyond traditional defenses.

CSPM, as part of a comprehensive, unified CNNAP, is critical to helping security engineer, cloud architect, DevOps, compliance, and other teams secure not only AI models and platforms but also the underlying cloud infrastructure, data and application layers. Modern CSPM capabilities are essential to your organization’s ability to reduce a wide range of security risks because they continuously scan cloud environments and identify, prioritize, and remediate cyberthreats as they emerge.

This includes misconfigurations—one of the leading causes of cloud breaches. CSPM examines how configurations and permissions interact across environments and exposes potential risks such as misconfigured storage accounts or overly permissive roles. It then acts to help ensure that the configuration controls follow your organization’s established policies and best practices, including for configurations required by cloud service providers (CSPs).

Your organization can also use CSPM capabilities to comply with evolving industry and regulatory standards. These standards include those set by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Meeting these requirements often involves maintaining specific configurations and documenting how controls are applied. CSPM simplifies this process by mapping your environment to established standards, detecting and dealing with issues as they arise, and providing reporting that supports audits.

You can also rely on CSPM to help reduce operational risks that can lead to system failures, financial losses, and damaged reputation. By strengthening your organization’s visibility into its full cloud security posture and proactively addressing vulnerabilities, CSPM can thwart issues before they become incidents.

CSPM tooling capabilities are designed to help you manage your cloud security posture in a structured and scalable way. Look for a CSPM offering that provides the following interconnected capabilities:
 

• Cloud asset discovery: CSPM can help security teams inventory their cloud environments, including services, configurations, and relationships that may not be immediately obvious. By maintaining an up-to-date view of cloud assets, CSPM reduces blind spots and offers a clearer picture of the overall security posture.
• Configuration assessment: Once resources are identified, CSPM assesses their configurations against defined security policies, best practices, and compliance and CSP requirements. This includes evaluating access controls, network settings, and other security-related parameters.
• Compliance monitoring and reporting: CSPM maps configurations to regulatory frameworks, helping teams understand how their environment aligns with requirements such as for data protection, access control, and logging. These capabilities deliver ongoing assessments, audit‑ready reporting, and visibility into trends over time.
• Risk scoring: CSPM prioritizes issues so teams can better focus their efforts. Risk assessments typically consider factors such as configuration severity, exposure, identity permissions, and potential impact. Modern CSPM tools also look for highly active threats and other factors that are used to contextualize risks and analyze attack paths. Dashboards provide visibility into these issues, making it easier to track and manage them.
• Remediation: CSPM supports remediation by immediately making corrections with minimal human involvement. In other cases, they describe threats and their potential impact, recommend changes aligned with security policies, and provide context to help teams decide what remediation steps to take.
• Built-in AI and automation: Modern CSPM increasingly features AI-assisted capabilities that help teams analyze patterns, reduce noise, and prioritize actions. These capabilities support the decision-making process while keeping humans in control of how issues are addressed. They also automatically feed insights into security, DevOps, and governance workflows. This connected approach helps ensure that CSPM findings lead to coordinated action instead of remaining siloed.

Rather than trying to deploy a CSPM solution all at once, take a structured, step-by-step approach that builds maturity gradually. Here are the key steps to follow:
 

1. Assess your cloud environment. The initial assessment provides visibility into your current posture and establishes a foundation for all the work to follow. It involves identifying your assets, understanding where critical data resides, and identify areas of potential risk, including existing configurations.
2. Define your security policies. Establish security baselines that reflect your organization’s risk tolerance and align with compliance requirements. By serving as a reference point for identifying deviations, baselines can help ensure that your CSPM accurately and consistently evaluates and enforces security practices across environments.
3. Deploy your CSPM and connect it with existing security tools and workflows. Initial deployment typically involves configuring scans and setting up alerts. Make sure your CSPM can operate with your SIEM, identity management, and other security systems. This helps reduce complexity in diverse cloud environments by centralizing monitoring and streamlining workflows.
4. Automate remediation. Configure automated workflows to address common misconfigurations, such as open storage buckets or unencrypted data, and other threats to security. Automation reduces manual effort, speeds up response times, and minimizes the risk of human error during remediation.
5. Monitor continuously. Cloud environments change rapidly, so it’s essential to monitor threats on an ongoing basis to maintain compliance and security. Regular assessments and real-time alerts help teams track changes and detect new threats quickly.

Proactively protect all your cloud apps, infrastructure, and other resources with Defender for Cloud—an all-in-one, AI-powered solution designed to help your organization quickly anticipate and adapt to changes in your cloud environments. It features built-in CSPM tools that combine posture management with detection and response to secure cloud and AI applications from code to runtime.