Cloud Security Posture Management: The Answer to Security in a Multicloud World.

Metsi Multicloud Automation Architect Basharat Mohammed shares why Cloud Security Posture Management is an excellent solution for managing security, mitigating risk and ensuring compliance in the modern multicloud era.

Traditional approaches to cyber security do not work in a cloud-first world. In fact, according to research firm Gartner,“Nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes.”

In the same 2019 research paper that coined the term Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), they advise that “Security and risk management leaders should invest in cloud security posture management processes and tools to proactively and reactively identify and remediate these risks.”

CSPM is a new category of security products, tools and practices that enable security automation and increased compliance in a cloud-first world. CSPM tools use intelligence and automation to examine cloud environments against established best practices and recognised security threats. When risks are identified, cloud consumers are automatically alerted and, with more advanced tools, risks are automatically remediated.

Why are traditional measures insufficient in the cloud?

The complexity of modern cloud environments is an enemy of security. In modern cloud environments, there are myriad interlocking components and processes that operate simultaneously and need to be carefully managed: microservices, containers, Kubernetes, serverless functions, the list is almost endless. This is compounded by the fact that there is no security perimeter defining a network’s boundary; data and applications can be accessed from any device and physical location, at any time, and from anywhere.

With information, applications and data being so widely distributed, manual processes are not efficient and adaptable enough to keep up. They lack the visibility and speed required to counteract rapidly evolving threats, and as new technologies continue to be rolled out at an accelerated rate, the skills required to stay up to pace are also under pressure or diminishing. As any security administrator will tell you, manually managing cloud security and compliance is a nightmare that becomes more daunting every day.

Wake up from the nightmare with CSPM

The CSPM approach provides a unified view of the threat landscape across multi-cloud environments, providing greater visibility and simplifying the complexity of managing multiple configurations. Intelligence-driven automation allows for the continuous monitoring of risk, prevention of unforeseen threats, faster detection of breaches as they occur and automatic response to these breaches (both intentional and unintentional). This automatic detection and response is the main differentiator of CSPM tools.

Crucially, CSPM tools strengthen an organisation’s Security Operations Centre by accurately predicting where risks may appear next, thus reducing alert fatigue. When integrated into the software development lifecycle through the practice of DevSecOps, CSPM provides an automated way of assessing the security posture of existing resources, allowing developers to produce secure code quickly and at scale, secure in the knowledge that they are protected against downstream risk, and are compliant with organisational policy and industry best practices. It brings closer alignment between security and development teams, and organisations are enabled to thrive because of it.