In 2019 Gartner published their report which recommended that security leaders invest in cloud security and posture management tools. CSPM tools aim to identify and remediate the risks of misconfiguration, mismanagement, and mistakes.
Over the past year, more Enterprises have started to focus on cloud security and understand that they need a dynamic cloud security solution but are unaware of what tool to look for in a tool.
Within the cloud security space, there are Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs), and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools. While these tools offer an overlapping set of capabilities to each other, they do not provide all the capabilities required to perform the job of the other.
A CASB is placed between the customer and the cloud service provider to enforce security, compliance, and governance policies for cloud applications. It focuses on SaaS security and gives visibility and control over the use of SaaS applications such as Office 365, Salesforce, etc.
A CWPP solution is primarily used to secure server workloads in public cloud IaaS environments. A CWPP commonly offers workload configuration and vulnerability management, network segmentation, workload behaviour monitoring, visibility, system integrity monitoring and container security risk mitigation.
A CSPM tool was earlier referred to as a Cloud Infrastructure Security Posture Assessment (CISPA) tool when its capabilities were limited to reporting as against the current ability of a security management automation tool that addresses misconfiguration issues.
With the increasing use of cloud services and the growing cloud security concerns, vulnerabilities must be reduced. By 2022 Gartner has predicted that most of the cloud security failures will be the result of an organisation’s mistake, i.e., a misconfiguration in the cloud.
A single misconfiguration has the power to expose several thousands of systems and sensitive data to the public internet.
Most of the cloud security breaches that we read about in 2019 had one thing in common “misconfiguration”. Some of the easiest misconfigurations exposed several hundred million personal data and records.
A misconfiguration occurs when computing assets are set up incorrectly, often leaving them vulnerable to malicious activity.