What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) helps organizations identify and remediate misconfigurations, security gaps and compliance risks across cloud environments. As cloud adoption accelerates, CSPM has become essential for enabling security teams to continuously monitor and assess cloud configurations for potential violations. CSPM provides automated detection, remediation and centralized visibility into cloud resources, reducing risk exposure and supporting ongoing compliance.

CSPM vs KSPM vs SSPM: What’s the difference?

Although CSPM, Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) share a similar goal of identifying, detecting and fixing misconfigurations, they focus on different layers of the cloud ecosystem.

CSPM: Secures Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments by evaluating configurations across cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. In multi-cloud deployments, CSPM normalizes and prioritizes risks across different providers to ensure consistent protection.

KSPM: Protects Kubernetes environments by scanning clusters for insecure configurations and policy violations — whether self-managed or cloud-hosted. It is essential for securing containerized workloads where Kubernetes is the primary orchestration platform.

SSPM: Monitors Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce and Google Workspace. By using API integrations to detect configuration drift and permissions risks, SSPM reduces data exposure across distributed SaaS ecosystems and complements Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs).

How CSPM works

CSPM solutions integrate with cloud provider APIs to discover cloud assets, evaluate their configurations and automatically alert or resolve issues in real time. Here’s how it works in more detail.

Discovery and visibility

CSPM begins by discovering and mapping all cloud assets — including compute instances, user identities, storage buckets and network configurations — across environments such as AWS, Azure and GCP. It creates a live inventory that visualizes relationships between assets through dashboards, giving security teams comprehensive, real-time visibility into their multi-cloud infrastructures. CSPM also uncovers “unknown” or shadow resources that often become targets for cyber attacks.

Risk assessment and prioritization

Once assets are discovered, CSPM solutions analyze their configurations against industry benchmarks and internal policies to identify misconfigurations. They apply contextual risk analysis, considering exposure level, data sensitivity and business impact to prioritize remediation. For example, a publicly accessible, unencrypted customer database poses far more risk than a non-production server. This approach helps security teams focus on high-impact issues first.

Automated remediation

After identifying security risks, CSPM solutions remediate issues through guided or automated workflows. Guided remediation walks administrators through each fix, while automated remediation directly enforces secure configurations, such as closing open ports or restricting access permissions.

CSPM solutions integrate seamlessly with DevOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipelines to support the “shift-left” security approach, catching misconfigurations before deployment. For instance, if an S3 bucket is accidentally made public, a CSPM solution can trigger an alert and automatically apply the correct permissions, reducing response time and manual intervention.

Compliance and reporting

CSPM solutions continuously monitor cloud configurations to ensure they meet regulatory compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA and ISO 27001. They provide centralized dashboards, audit trails and reporting tools that make it more convenient to streamline compliance audits. Security teams can use CSPM solutions to get a better understanding of their organizations’ security postures and identify areas that need attention.

Continuous monitoring and integration

Cloud environments change constantly, with frequent adjustments made to resources, settings and configurations. CSPM solutions provide continuous monitoring to detect unauthorized changes and integrate with DevSecOps and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms to provide a holistic, automated layer of defense. Instead of performing one-time scans, CSPM solutions deliver ongoing visibility and protection that adapt as cloud environments evolve.

Why CSPM is important

Since cloud environments are highly dynamic, even small configurations can introduce serious security risks. Cloud infrastructure presents a variety of challenges for security teams, including blind spots across different cloud providers, frequent resource changes and manual security checks that can’t keep up with cloud automation. As infrastructure changes and scales, CSPM ensures that security teams maintain control over all cloud assets and configurations through automated detection and remediation of misconfigurations, along with built-in compliance monitoring. By automatically finding and resolving configuration risks before cybercriminals can exploit them, CSPM helps organizations have full visibility and strong security postures, even as cloud environments change over time.

Benefits of CSPM

CSPM solutions strengthen organizations’ cloud security postures through continuous visibility, automation and compliance enforcement. Here are some of CSPM’s main benefits:

Improved visibility: CSPM solutions provide a unified view of multi-cloud assets and configurations, helping organizations detect shadow IT and forgotten resources.
Risk reduction: By continuously monitoring, CSPM solutions lead to fewer misconfigurations and enable faster detection and remediation.
Enhanced compliance posture: Organizations use CSPM solutions to perform automated checks against industry standards and regulatory frameworks, simplifying the auditing experience.
Operational efficiency and developer enablement: CSPM solutions embed security earlier in the development lifecycle, reducing bottlenecks between teams and allowing developers to build securely from the beginning.
Scalability for dynamic cloud environments: In fast-changing environments, CSPM solutions adapt as infrastructure evolves, working seamlessly across multiple cloud providers and hybrid environments.

How Keeper complements CSPM tools

While CSPM focuses on securing cloud infrastructure configurations, it does not manage secrets, credentials or privileged accounts. KeeperPAM® extends CSPM by unifying Privileged Access Management (PAM) and secrets management in a single platform to secure credentials used within cloud workloads. By integrating Keeper with CSPM, organizations can:

Enforce Just-in-Time (JIT) access
Automatically rotate credentials
Secure privileged access to cloud resources

This combination delivers comprehensive protection, addressing both configuration risks (via CSPM) and access risks (via KeeperPAM), for a stronger, end-to-end cloud security posture.