Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Discover how CSPM tools continuously evaluate cloud configurations against security benchmarks and alert on drift from secure baselines.
Why Cloud Posture Management Matters
Cloud environments grow rapidly, often spanning hundreds of accounts, thousands of resources, and millions of configuration options. Manual security review cannot keep pace. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) addresses this by continuously and automatically evaluating cloud resource configurations against security best practices and compliance benchmarks. CSPM catches misconfigurations — public S3 buckets, open security groups, unencrypted databases — before attackers discover and exploit them.
What CSPM Tools Evaluate
CSPM tools assess configurations across the entire cloud estate. Common checks include: network (security groups with 0.0.0.0/0 inbound on sensitive ports, unrestricted egress), storage (public buckets, unencrypted objects), identity (root account usage, MFA not enforced, overly permissive roles), compute (instances accessible from the internet, unpatched AMIs), logging (CloudTrail disabled, missing VPC Flow Logs), and encryption (databases without encryption at rest).
All lessons in this course
- Shared Responsibility Model: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
- Cloud Storage Security and Data Exposure Risks
- Cloud Identity: IAM Roles and Service Accounts
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)