What Is Cloud Security Posture Management?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) continuously checks cloud accounts and services for misconfigurations and risky permissions, such as public storage, overly broad IAM roles or disabled logging, and compares them against security benchmarks and compliance frameworks.
Also known as:
How CSPM Works
A CSPM tool connects to cloud provider APIs with read access, builds an inventory of resources and their settings, and evaluates them against a library of rules. Rules are often mapped to benchmarks and frameworks so the same findings can support security work and audits.
Common Issues CSPM Finds
- Public exposure. Storage buckets, databases or services reachable from the internet.
- Excessive permissions. IAM roles and keys with far more access than they need.
- Missing protections. Disabled encryption, logging or multi-factor authentication.
- Network gaps. Security groups and firewall rules that allow broad inbound access.
- Drift. Resources that no longer match the intended configuration.
Why Cloud Misconfiguration Is So Common
Cloud environments change constantly, many teams can create resources and a single setting can expose sensitive data. Scheduled scans quickly fall behind, and findings are often hard to fix because no one knows which team or repository created the resource.
CSPM and Infrastructure as Code
When infrastructure is defined in Terraform, CloudFormation or Kubernetes manifests, the best place to fix a misconfiguration is in that code, so the fix does not get overwritten by the next deployment. Linking cloud findings back to their source repository is what makes that possible.
How Nullify Approaches Cloud Security
Nullify continuously audits AWS, GCP, Azure and Kubernetes, running audits when the environment changes rather than on a schedule. Hundreds of configuration rules are mapped to CIS, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and SOC 2, each finding is traced back to the repository that created the resource with owners from CODEOWNERS, and findings are scored on exploitability and reachability rather than raw severity. Deep asset-graph coverage applies to AWS and GCP; Azure is audit-level. See how Nullify Cloud Security works.
Key Takeaways
- CSPM continuously checks cloud configuration against security rules and benchmarks.
- Public exposure and excessive permissions are the most common findings.
- Scheduled scans fall behind fast-changing cloud environments.
- Fix misconfigurations in infrastructure as code so they stay fixed.
Read More About Cloud Security Posture Management
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See Nullify in Action
Nullify audits your cloud on every change and traces each finding to the repo that created it.