Cloud technology is increasingly becoming the IT backbone of most companies around the globe. According to a report, as of 2021, 50% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. However, as your company grows, the cloud infrastructure will become increasingly complex, difficult to manage, and keep data secure.
CSPM tools are the answer to a company’s cloud security risk woes and management. Data is one of the critical assets of any organization. Unfortunately, cloud misconfigurations, remote working culture, abuse of privilege overloaded accounts, and increased sophistication of cyber attacks could lead to data loss and compromise your organization’s credibility.
Thus, CSPM is a critical solution that can be used to configure, maintain and safeguard your cloud environment.
What are CSPM Solutions?
CSPM is a solution used by organizations to identify cloud misconfiguration issues, identify other system vulnerabilities, continuously monitor the on-goings in the system, detect deviations, generate alerts, and take corrective action as required.
In a traditional on-premise case, several perimeter security measures are in place to safeguard the system from outside threats. But with companies moving applications and data to the cloud, and users gaining access to the cloud from anywhere, stringent security measures are required to see how the system is being accessed and what is going on in the system once a user accesses it.
CSPM tools overcome these challenges posed by the traditional security policies by providing a centralized and cohesive view of the system. It also facilitates better communication between your DevOps, security, and audit teams.
What Compliance Standards Organizations Need to Follow?
As a business, you need to follow specific security protocols, rules, and regulations to stay compliant and ensure data safety.
For example, HIPAA is a federal law that requires organizations to protect a patient’s sensitive health information. One cannot disclose these details without a patient’s consent or knowledge. Similarly, you have SOC 2, a compliance standard developed by the AICPA which details how organizations should manage customer data.
Your organization could use a popular cybersecurity framework like NIST to protect data. NIST CSF is a set of best practices organizations use to manage cybersecurity risks and threats.
How Does CSPM Help Meet Compliance Enforcement Needs?
Built-In Frameworks
CSPM tools come equipped with the commonly used formal rules and regulations, laws, and internal governance security standards. For example, look for a CSPM provider that has built-in frameworks for security standards such as HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, NIST CSF, and ISO 27001, among others.
These frameworks ensure you can apply a consistent level of governance across your organization-wide cloud environment.
Customized Security Frameworks
When it comes to security, the needs of one company can significantly vary from that of other companies. As a result, you might have additional internal security policies to adhere to. CSPM solutions are available that allow you to create frameworks and customize them according to your company’s unique security requirements.
Continuous Monitoring
Crafting a governance framework is the first step in protecting your cloud environment. The second step is ensuring your environment is compliant with the defined framework. Manual monitoring is not a feasible solution for managing complex cloud infrastructures.
With CSPM, you get improved visibility over your system. You can monitor at all times what is going on in your system.
Risk Identification
If your system deviates from the established security baseline or runs into compliance issues, the CSPM tools will generate alerts and send them to appropriate teams. With the environment being monitored and deviations detected at the earliest, you can mitigate risks before they become severe threats and achieve compliance.
Automated or Manual Corrections
Depending on the CSPM solution, you can create automated corrections for configuration issues and ensure the system does not drift from the compliance standard set. With alert generation, you could let the concerned teams know their manual intervention is required.
Improved Performance and Security
Using CSPM, you can perform administrative tasks for your cloud environment from a centralized dashboard. With automated and continuous monitoring, you can know how individual entities behave in the system and if they conform to the set security guidelines.
It provides security risk scores, maps suspicious user activity, and provides actionable recommendations.
Meeting compliance standards is essential for all businesses as they provide a framework for best protecting the most valuable asset of any business – data. CSPM tools come with built-in frameworks covering federal regulations, laws, and internal security protocols. You can also create frameworks suited to your organization’s security goals.
