CSPM tools drastically help cloud and DevOps leaders understand team performance with regard to cloud security and compliance.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Chances are, it wasn’t long ago that your organization started using cloud computing as an alternative to physical data centers. Even though the cloud is still a relatively recent innovation, it’s already shifted the way organizations function, allowing for IT to go beyond being a cost center and drive business innovation through greater agility and on-demand global reach. But, whether you’re just now migrating to the cloud or have been operating in a fully cloud-native way for a while, there’s one thing that needs to be your focus, no matter what: security. Cloud Security Posture Management, or CSPM, provides discovery and visibility into misconfigurations, threats, and other problems. CSPM tools typically are essential for getting an at-a-glance assessment into the state of an organization’s multi-cloud estate. The dynamic nature of the cloud makes it hard to secure and CSPM is the way you maintain visibility and an overall strong security posture as your cloud footprint grows in scale and complexity. In the past, cloud security programs have focused on intentional risks such as malicious insiders or web-based attacks. But in the cloud, unintentional risks such as misconfigurations and human error are the root cause for some of the most notable cloud breaches. CSPMs look for both intentional and unintentional risks across multiple clouds with a unified view into your overall posture. If you’re not yet using a CSPM service, or don’t feel you’re leveraging your current CSPM tools to their fullest, I’ve put together some of the most compelling benefits of doing so: While there are plenty of benefits to utilizing the cloud — especially with the ease at which it enables automation and scaling around the world — the challenge is to keep track of what you have and how it’s changing so you can identify potential risks. With all the different DevOps tools and ways to interact with cloud services, visibility isn’t centralized, which is a problem. CSPM tools are able to provide deep visibility into everything all at once: all assets and all configurations across all clouds, with all user attribution.
