Why Is CSPM Important?
Cloud services and cloud-based apps offer huge productivity and flexibility advantages, but because they’re open to the internet and readily available to anyone, they also bring a greater risk of cybersecurity threats, including data breaches. Despite security awareness training, vulnerabilities remain and security issues arise, endangering sensitive data. IT security and business leaders constantly work to address:
- Data breaches resulting from misconfigurations of cloud infrastructure, which can expose enormous amounts of sensitive data, leading to legal liability and financial losses.
- Continuous compliance for cloud apps and workloads, which is impossible to achieve using traditional on-premises security tools and processes.
- Cloud governance challenges (visibility, permissions, policy enforcement, lack of knowledge about cloud security controls), which grow alongside cloud adoption.
Data breaches get the most attention and cause the most damage. And according to Verizon’s 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, misconfigurations are still among the top three leading causes of data breaches (responsible for more than 20% of them in the 2023 report), while web applications sit in the top three attack vectors across all industries.
An effective CSPM provides automated visibility, alerting, and enforcement to protect sensitive data and infrastructure from the inherent risks of the cloud.
Benefits of Cloud Security Posture Management
CSPM tools offers several key benefits that help organizations reduce costs, strengthen security, and minimize risk exposure in cloud environments:
- Proactively detect and address risks before attackers can exploit them with real-time visibility and automatic identification of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and security gaps
- Ensure compliance with best practices and regulations with continuous monitoring of configurations relative to industry standards and benchmarks
- Conduct automated remediation and policy enforcement, slashing the time and cost of manually resolving security issues across cloud resources
- Integrate CSPM processes with DevOps workflows to embed security throughout software development as part of a DevSecOps approach
