Does your company need a cloud security posture management tool?

What is cloud security posture management?

A subset of IT security technologies known as “cloud security posture management” (CSPM) is focused on addressing compliance issues and cloud misconfiguration. Looking for lapses in the application of security policies, CSPM continuously monitors cloud infrastructure. It is a group of security technologies that help automate security and offer compliance assurance in cloud environments, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) (PaaS).

Cloud security in general gives your organization the surety that your data is being protected and you are working in a safer environment so that your organization doesn’t need to worry about security issues.

But do you actually need CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) tool for securing your cloud?

Due to the pandemic, cloud computing has been adopted more quickly than before, forcing everyone and everything to operate remotely. While the advantages of using the cloud are well known, the fundamental idea of how to protect it can imply different things to different organizations.

If you are starting out in the cloud maybe you are a series A or series B startup and you have a very small crane then you probably don’t need a CSPM tool. Instead, you can focus on using infrastructure as code (IaC) templates to manage your code, and if your developers are security conscious and you have already implemented some sort of security from the very beginning of the engineering group then you will be able to manage your cloud by simply using your cloud-native tools.

As a startup, it’s important to understand the need for these kinds of tools as most of the time you invest in these kinds of tools. But they start giving you lots of alerts and then you get burned out by this. You spent most of your time addressing these alerts and after investigating these security alerts you find out it was just a false positive. So as a startup you right now don’t have a team to focus on this kind of issue and you can’t waste your time solving these alerts rather your main focus should be developing your product and implementing a required level of security.

But if you have an organization where hundreds of your employees use AWS or Azure and you are moving your system to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud systems and generating multi-card foodprints then you can employ a cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool. And as you go for a multi-cloud system then probably it will be more helpful to have a CSPM tool because most likely you have a development team who knows one cloud system perfectly and if they try to apply that same concept to another cloud system that won’t give them great results so in these cases it’s better to have such tools.

How to choose the right CSPM tool for your organization?

For Startups:

As a startup that started to adopt cloud services and has a growing team continuously you can think of adopting open-source CSPM tools rather than investing in a full-fledged CSPM tool.

Some open-source CSPM tools are:

1. Security Monkey:

Use: Scans for cloud misconfiguration.

Link: https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey

2. CloudMapper:

Use: Cloud Network Visualisation & Configuration Scanning

Link: https://github.com/duo-labs/cloudmapper

3. ConsoleMe:

Use: Least Privileged Access Provisioning

Link: https://github.com/Netflix/consoleme

4. Git-Secrets:

Use: Credential Scanning

Link: https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets

For Organizations:

When as an organization you first think of implementing a CSPM tool in your system you most probably google it to find out the vendors and you will find hundreds of vendors selling these cloud security tools but the biggest problem is how to choose which security tool suits best for your cloud management system.

So for that first get an understanding of you many clouds accounts your company is using in what cloud projects they are linked to identify their identities and also get a sense of which third-party tools your developers are using in these cloud projects. After having proper clarity of this then you can easily compare your requirements with these cloud security tools and accordingly choose the best tool which suits your organization’s needs and expectations.

For example, As an enterprise who have sensitive credentials over the cloud and valuable data which needs to be protected, then you can opt for such tools which are more focused in these areas like the cloud security tools by wiz.io, orca security, and Palo alto networks Prisma cloud are more focused on this field.

Some CSPM tools are:

1. Prisma cloud: You can use this tool to control public cloud environments, hosts, containers, and other platforms and you can also integrate your third-party systems.
2. Wiz.io: You can use this tool to perform a scan at every layer of your cloud environment without providing complete visibility into every technology running in your cloud.
3. Orca security: It prioritizes a broad range of cloud security risks and access management (IAM) risks.
4. CloudGuard Management: You can opt for it when you have assets across multi-cloud. You can initiate policies for multiple accounts, projects, and regions with this tool.