As the cloud gains more popularity every day, companies are shifting towards the cloud infrastructure, and in such a scenario, ensuring the security of the cloud is a crucial step. As the cloud handles a large amount of sensitive information, securing the complex cloud environment is a challenging task for any cybersecurity professional. To protect the complex cloud environment from the actions of the malicious actors, Cloud Security Posture Management was introduced. It is a set of guidelines that are established to ensure a safe and secure cloud environment. Other than providing guidelines, Cloud security posture management also provides organisations with a set of tools that can be utilised by the organisation to continuously monitor, assess, and improve cloud security configurations.

As the cloud security posture management aims to secure the cloud from the actions of malicious actors, properly implementing it is a strategic imperative. The best practices for implementing cloud security posture management controls are:

Complete Visibility Across Cloud Environments

For any organisation to operate and to enhance its security, they must have a clear understanding of its critical assets. As the organisations operate in a dynamic and complex environment, this can often create blind spots that can be exploited by attackers. A cloud security posture management helps an organisation by maintaining an updated inventory listing details about their critical assets and deploying a continuous scanning method to detect shadow IT and unmanaged resources. Apart from this, cloud security posture management helps the organisation monitor the assets in real-time

Continuously Monitor for Misconfigurations

Being a dynamic environment that is used by organisations for their operations, the cloud is prone to vulnerabilities like misconfiguration. A simple misconfiguration can be exploited by an attacker to get unauthorised access to the system. To ensure complete security of the cloud environment, cloud security posture management tools and strategies that are deployed by the cloud security team aim to continuously scan for misconfigurations. Apart from this, the tools help the cloud service providers to comply with international standards such as CIS and HIPAA. It also helps organisations by providing risk prioritisation that helps to focus on the risks that pose a greater threat to the cloud environment.

Automate Compliance and Policy Enforcement

As the cloud handles a large amount of sensitive data and an unusual amount of activity takes place in such a situation, a small mistake can turn into a large disaster. In such a situation, manual checks become ineffective. Cloud security posture management helps the organisation by providing compliance with regulatory guidelines such as CIS, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. Other than this, it also helps an organisation to automate compliance while ensuring the security policies suggested by the regulatory frameworks are properly implemented.

Implement Strong Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Securing the cloud from the actions of the malicious actors plays a crucial role for any organisation. Implementing a strong authentication system is a mandatory step. Other than strong authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA) with strong password policies, passwordless authentication, and credential rotation is crucial To prevent unauthorized risk, monitoring login activity can be implemented to detect any suspicious activity.

Enable Continuous Threat Detection

CSPM helps the organisation with continuous monitoring, which further helps in detecting unusual behaviour such as abnormal API calls or traffic spikes. It leverages the power of intelligent algorithms such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, which help the organisation by detecting anomalies.

Prioritise Risk-Based Remediation

Not all vulnerabilities present in the cloud pose the same risk to the cloud environment. Cloud security posture management helps the organisation with AI-based risk prioritisation, which helps the organisation to identify and fix the critical vulnerabilities. Apart from this, it helps the organisation to safeguard its critical assets and use automated remediation in case a vulnerability is detected.

Conclusion

To secure the cloud, cloud security posture management was established. It provides an organisation with strict guidelines that help in securing the cloud environment. By implementing continuous monitoring, automation, and improvement, CSPM tries to ensure a cloud environment that is resilient to external attacks.