Organisations of all sizes are increasingly adopting cloud environments with the world going mostly digital today.
However, this shift has also created opportunities for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructures, potentially leading to cyberattacks, data theft and the exposure of sensitive information.
This is why enterprises are integrating Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) into their systems to protect cloud infrastructures.
In fact, Gartner found that CSPM can reduce cloud-based security issues by 80%.
This article tells you everything you need to know about the best cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, what it is, why is it important and how it works.
What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?
In simple terms, cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a system used in cloud computing platforms to detect risks and perform remedial actions. It spots vulnerabilities in cloud environments and conducts uninterrupted monitoring along with providing automated visibility to security teams in enterprises.
Essentially, it provides automated visibility into cloud resources, finds vulnerabilities, and enforces security policies to ensure compliance and reduce the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.
These processes are applicable across a variety of cloud infrastructures including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (Saas), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).
CSPM also plays a critical role in securing complex cloud environments. It integrates with DevOps practices and tools, automates security checks and carries out security policies throughout the development and deployment pipeline.
This proactive approach helps organisations identify and address vulnerabilities early on, reducing the risk of breaches.
Why is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Important?
CSPM is crucial for enterprises using cloud infrastructure as the security system aims to prevent cyberattacks like data theft and data leaks. It continuously monitors cloud environments, identifies vulnerabilities in the system and prevents malicious activities before threat actors can exploit the cloud architecture.
It also helps organisations mitigate risk and compliance violations by identifying and fixing misconfigurations in public cloud environments.
According to Microsoft, CSPM is one of its cloud’s main pillars functioning as a defender. CSPM provides detailed visibility into the security state of an organisation’s assets and workloads and provides hardening guidance to help them efficiently and effectively improve their security posture.
Top Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools
Orca
Orca’s CSPM solution steps away from the conventional tools slightly. It focuses on consolidating cloud workload, configuration, identity and entitlement security, container security, sensitive data discovery, and detection. Orca response is all in one platform across the entire SDLC.
The company provides a unified approach which provides a comprehensive view of the risks. This helps the organisation recognise when unrelated issues can create dangerous attack paths. Through the insights provided by Orca’s platform, it can prioritise risks effectively, reducing alert fatigue and ensuring that security teams stay focused on what matters most.
Orca continuously tracks misconfigurations across multi-cloud estates. This ensures controls are set securely and comply with best practices and industry and regulatory standards.
Wazuh
Wazuh is a posture management tool that specialises in evaluating, enhancing, and maintaining an organisation’s cloud security infrastructure. It helps secure workloads in cloud environments by identifying security risks and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
Some of its capabilities include gathering actionable information to easily detect security risks and events and automating responses to tackle the threats in an organisation’s cloud environments.
Prowler
Prowler is a comprehensive open-source platform that scans cloud infrastructure for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. It runs checks against various security standards and best practices, such as CIS, NIST, and PCI-DSS.
The platform aims to deliver cloud security with open-source flexibility, enabling organisations to secure cloud environments in a way that’s best for the business or service. EM360Tech reported that Prowler is designed for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
Prowler can conduct security assessments, audits, incident response, compliance, continuous monitoring, hardening, and forensics readiness. It’s multi-region by default and runs on any AWS partition (Commercial, GovCloud, China, Top Secret).
Prisma Cloud
Prisma Cloud developed by Palo Alto Networks is a CSPM tool that continuously monitors cloud environments, identifies misconfigurations, and enforces security policies. It is known for minimising risk by actively spotting vulnerabilities, automating remediation, and providing detailed visibility across multi-cloud environments.
Prisma Cloud's advanced threat detection capabilities, combined with its user-friendly interface, make it a valuable asset for organisations seeking to secure their cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender CSPM is a strong cloud security solution that helps organizations identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in their cloud environments. It offers advanced features like attack path analysis, cloud security explorer, and advanced threat hunting to proactively detect and respond to threats.
The platform continuously monitors cloud resources, enforces security policies, and provides actionable insights. This way, Microsoft Defender CSPM helps enterprises maintain a strong security posture and protect their sensitive data.
By default, when developers enable Defender for Cloud on an Azure subscription, the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) compliance standard is turned on. It provides recommendations. Defender for Cloud provides an aggregated secure score based on some of the MCSB recommendations. The higher the score, the lower the identified risk level.
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security
CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is a comprehensive CSPM solution that provides top protection for cloud environments. This CSPM is known for its advanced threat detection and response capabilities.
The tool offers continuous monitoring, vulnerability assessment, and compliance enforcement. It also leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and mitigate threats in real-time, ensuring a strong security posture across multi-cloud environments.
Additionally, integrating CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security with other CrowdStrike Falcon modules, it could provide a unified security platform for holistic protection.
Lacework
Lacework's CSPM solution presents a comprehensive method for cloud security. It provides deeper visibility into cloud environments, allowing organisations to track resource configurations, identify misconfigurations, and detect vulnerabilities.
The CSPM tool also leverages advanced machine learning algorithms which helps it to automatically detect and respond to threats, reducing the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.
Lacework's CSPM tool offers a flexible and scalable solution that can be easily integrated into existing security workflows, making it a strong contender against other systems for enterprises requiring a high level of security and compliance.
Check Point CloudGuard
Check Point CloudGuard provides more context to enforce stronger security measures to both prevent and remedy cyberattcks. It’s known for its code-to-cloud approach across the application lifecycle.
Essentially, it enabled organisations to identify and assess risks throughout the entire application lifecycle, from code development to deployment. The CSPM tool also leverages advanced threat detection and response capabilities, proactively identifying and mitigating threats, such as misconfigurations, unauthorized access, and malicious activity.
The company’s code-to-cloud approach helps minimise the risk of cyberattacks and ensures a secure cloud environment.
Aikido Security
Aikido Security is a “no-nonsense” developer-first software security platform prioritising simplicity and efficiency. It follows the method of code to CI to cloud which allows it to integrate an organisation’s development workflows. This approach helps developers build and deploy secure applications without sacrificing speed.
The platform is also known for its intelligent vulnerability prioritisation where it recalculates vulnerability severity based on the specific context of an organisation’s cloud environment. This reduces alert fatigue and focuses on the most critical risks.
It also offers features like infrastructure as code scanning, container scanning, and secret detection, providing comprehensive protection for your cloud infrastructure.
Wiz CSPM
Wiz CSPM is one of the top-performing cloud security solutions out there. Wiz has a unified cloud security framework that offers a real-time contextual CSPN security solution that continuously identifies and remediates misconfigurations from development time to tun time. It functions across hybrid clouds such as AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, and VMware vSphere.
EM360Tech reported that the solution enables inventory management, configuration assessment, vulnerability scanning, compliance reporting, and threat detection. Through these, Wiz helps organizations gain visibility into their cloud infrastructure, identify and address risks, and ensure compliance with industry standards, reducing cyber threats.
