Humans remain the weakest link in the security chain, with human error accounting for 74 percent to 95 percent of security incidents. That holds true in the cloud as well.
A recent study by the Cloud Security Alliance found that 75 percent of cloud security breaches are the result of misconfigurations — in other words, human error. Gartner estimates that 99 percent of cloud security issues are the customer’s fault, with the vast majority due to misconfigurations.
Misconfigurations often create serious vulnerabilities that attackers actively exploit. Common issues include overly permissive access policies, open storage buckets and disabled monitoring. Often, the cause is something as simple as an unchecked box or unchanged default setting. However, the consequences can be severe.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions can help organizations identify and remediate cloud misconfigurations and compliance risks across multi-cloud environments. They provide a continuous, real-time view of a cloud environment’s security, reducing the attack surface and ensuring that the cloud infrastructure is securely configured and optimized.
Providing Visibility into Cloud Security
It’s easy to understand why cloud misconfigurations remain a pervasive problem. The sheer number of services, settings and interdependencies in modern cloud environments can be overwhelming, making it difficult to secure every component. A lack of clear policies and procedures for managing and auditing cloud settings can lead to a slow accumulation of misconfigurations. Additionally, many IT teams lack end-to-end visibility into large, dynamic multi-cloud infrastructures.
CSPM tools provide that visibility. Operating in a continuous, automated workflow, they inventory all cloud assets and services across the environment and assess the security configurations of all discovered assets. Configurations are compared against established benchmarks, such as CIS controls or internal security policies.
Security findings are scored and prioritized based on their severity and potential business impact. Advanced platforms use contextual analysis to identify high-risk assets and potential attack paths. Automation can fix simple issues without human intervention, while guided workflows give teams step-by-step instructions to remediate more complex problems.
Benefits of CSPM
CSPM provides a single dashboard for monitoring the security of a complex multi-cloud environment, eliminating blind spots that can occur when managing multiple cloud providers manually. It also streamlines security operations by automating checks and remediation, reducing the bottlenecks traditional security processes can create in the development process.
Integration with DevOps pipelines allows for security checks to be performed earlier in the development lifecycle in infrastructure-as-code templates. This prevents misconfigurations from reaching production environments.
CSPM also helps organizations maintain compliance with various regulatory frameworks and industry standards by continuously checking configurations against them. Dashboards and reports give a complete, prioritized view of the cloud security posture and compliance status across multiple cloud environments.
Overcoming CSPM Limitations
Traditional CSPM focuses on the cloud “control plane” (configurations) and lacks visibility into the “data plane” (workloads). Alerts may not be prioritized accurately because CSPM doesn’t always know if a misconfiguration exposes sensitive data. To get a complete security picture, traditional CSPM requires integration with many other tools, which can result in a complex, multi-tool security stack.
To overcome these issues, modern CSPM often works as a component within a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). CNAPP consolidates multiple cloud security tools, including CSPM, into a single solution. It offers broader protection than standalone CSPM by also covering areas such as workload protection and identity management.
By consolidating data from infrastructure, workloads, identities and other sources, CNAPPs can correlate findings to create a more accurate risk assessment and visualize potential attack paths. A single platform eliminates the need to manage multiple point solutions and offers a comprehensive, full-stack view of the entire cloud estate, allowing security teams to see how different risks are interconnected.
How Technologent Can Help
The Technologent team can help you utilize CSPM as a part of a broader cloud security strategy. Contact us to discuss how CSPM tools can help reduce the risk of cyberattacks due to cloud misconfigurations.
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