Cloud platform adoption is growing at a rapid rate across the world. The flexibility, scalability, and low-costs are factors that encourage businesses to migrate their business processes to cloud platforms. However, cloud platforms also bring some risks like data breaches, malware infections, identity thefts, and compliance violations.
According to cloud security experts, cloud risks can be thwarted by employing cloud security posture management (CSPM).
What Is CSPM?
CSPM refers to a security strategy that automates the identification and remediation of risks across various cloud infrastructures like PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service). Here are some benefits of implementing CSPM.
Find Misconfigured Network Connectivity.
According to the latest cloud security report, 70% of unintended records exposure was caused by misconfigured portals and services. Many cloud users only focus on configuring inbound ports and forget that outbound ports also pose a significant risk.
Limiting outbound traffic allows you to restrict your cloud servers’ communication to applications and servers that are necessary for the normal functioning of the cloud services. Luckily, S3 misconfigurations can be identified and rectified by CSPM. It reduces the risk of data exfiltration, lateral movement, and internal scans.
Cloud security posture management also covers monitoring of HTTPS/Non-HTTPS ports. It checks for any misconfiguration and remediates them to ensure hackers do not exploit these ports for brute authentication.
Detect Liberal Account Permissions
According to cloud security experts, cloud security is directly related to the level of access to the infrastructure. In a cloud environment, human and non-human identities have a different level of access to cloud resources. The actions of the identities are determined by the permissions they have. Any identity with excessive permissions will result in abuse of permissions that will increase the cloud infrastructure risk.
CSPM focuses on assigning minimal permission to identities. In simple words, an identity only has minimal permissions required to complete its job functions. A simple cloud account may have 40,000 plus permissions across the critical cloud platforms. It isn’t easy to know who has what permissions, how they use them, and on which cloud resources.
The security tools can identify dormant identities, super identities, instances of cross-account access, over-permissioned active identities, and strange behavior. The CSPM tools monitor permissions of all identities and enforce policies of minimal permissions to reduce risks to the cloud infrastructure.
Detects Security Policy Violations
CSPM tools continuously monitor essential infrastructure elements that have a greater risk. In a cloud environment, policy violations are also known as human violations. The security tools detect any violation from the user in terms of access to cloud resources. If the user deviates from applied cloud securities policies, it will raise a flag and prevent any misuse of resources.
To prevent unauthorized access to identities, CSPM uses multi-factor authentications to ensure only the right individual accesses the cloud systems.
Automatic Remedy for Misconfigurations
Misconfigurations refer to the inaccurate setup of cloud computing assets which makes them vulnerable to malicious activity. The responsibility of cloud security is shared between the service provider and the client. It is the client’s responsibility to configure the application in the right manner and ensure role-based access to the application and data in cloud storage.
CSPM automates compliance and ensures it meets cloud standards. It continuously monitors the settings and resources and compares them to cloud-specific benchmarks. It also schedules automated audits and generates a report for review.
It prioritizes security violations by measuring the risks. It sets alert thresholds for different misconfigurations and draws IT staff’s attention to get it resolved. The alert system also ensures the high-risk alerts are attended to by the staff first.
To sum up, cloud security posture management is a critical tool that enhances the cloud infrastructure’s security. It uses automation to detect and remediate causes and reduce the dependency on manual security procedures. Management is a critical tool.
