Top 8 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto NetworksMicrosoft Defender for CloudOrca SecurityCheck Point CloudGuard Posture ManagementSkyhigh SecurityLaceworkWizC3M Cloud Control
Popular Comparisons The first aspect that is important is the fact that Prisma Cloud is cloud-agnostic. It's actually available for the five top cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud. The second aspect is the fact that we can write our own rules to try to detect misconfigurations in those environments.
Popular Comparisons The main feature is the security posture assessment through the security score. I find that to be very helpful because it gives us guidance on what needs to be secured and recommendations on how to secure the workloads that have been onboarded.
Popular Comparisons The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use.
Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool.
Popular Comparisons It saves time because I can look across the organization. Instead of checking 50 different accounts atomically and spending 15 minutes investigating each, I can spend 15 minutes exploring all 50 accounts. It allows me to quickly look across the org for similar problems when one comes up. That's a huge time saver.
Popular Comparisons Skyhigh performs well, and we can choose from virtual and hardware plans. We can deploy the ISO on as many virtual machines as possible and easily set up high availability on the web proxy. The location doesn't matter. The user at a site will always access the web proxy for that location. It's suitable for an organization distributed across multiple regions.
Popular Comparisons For the most part, out-of-the-box, it tells you right away about the things you need to work on. I like the fact that it prioritizes alerts based on severity, so that you can focus your efforts on anything that would be critical/high first, moderate second, and work your way down, trying to continue to improve your security posture.
Popular Comparisons The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster.
Popular Comparisons We haven't had an issue with stability so far.
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Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
January 2023

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Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Topics
How does cloud security posture management work?Why do you need a CSPM?Who needs CSPM?Which policy or security violations can a CSPM help uncover?What is CSPM and CWPP?What is the difference between SSPM and CSPM?CSPM Tools BenefitsCSPM Tools Features
How does cloud security posture management work?
There are three ways cloud security posture management works to offer protection:
1. Visibility: Enterprise CSPMs provide visibility into your cloud assets and configurations to discover misconfigurations, changes in policy or metadata, and more. They also help your organization manage all of these policies through the use of a centralized console.
2. Manages and remediates: A CSPM eliminates security risks and accelerates the delivery process by comparing cloud application configurations to industry and organizational benchmarks so that violations can be identified and remediated. A CSPM also reduces human error that could increase your risk of costly breaches.
3. Identifies new potential threats: CSPMs proactively detect threats across the application development lifecycle by monitoring your cloud environments for inappropriate access and anomalies that may indicate malicious activity.
Why do you need a CSPM?
A CSPM is necessary for discovering and automatically remediating threats, misconfigurations, misuse, and compliance violations in public clouds. Because misconfigurations in the cloud are one of the most common causes of data breaches, CSPM tools come forth as the clear solution to bringing organizations peace of mind.
Who needs CSPM?
CSPMs are typically used by organizations that have adopted a cloud-first strategy and want to extend their cloud best practices to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. However, a CSPM is recommended for all enterprises, big or small. CSPMs are beneficial for all organizations because traditional security doesn’t work in the cloud since there is no perimeter to protect, manual processes cannot occur with the necessary scale or speed, and the lack of centralization makes visibility extremely difficult to achieve.
Which policy or security violations can a CSPM help uncover?
By leveraging the potential of a CSPM, organizations can uncover:
- Data storage exposed to public
- Lack of encryption
- Permission errors
- Misconfigurations
- Missing multi-factor authentication
- Infrequent encryption key rotation
What is CSPM and CWPP?
A CWPP, otherwise known as a cloud workload protection platform, is an agent-based solution that helps address the unique requirements of server workload protection. A CWPP offers network segmentation, traffic visibility, and firewalling, anti-malware scanning and system integrity management, and application control, along with log management, monitoring, and much more. Some of the major benefits of a CWPP are that it scales easily, provides threat and data protection across the board, and leverages user workflows by synthesizing them into an ongoing continuum. The main differences between CSPM and CWPP are that CSPMs work to prevent software configuration vulnerabilities, while CWPPs perform security functions across a plethora of environments. In addition, while a CSPM is primarily used to identify vulnerable cloud configuration settings, CWPPs manage cloud vulnerabilities.
What is the difference between SSPM and CSPM?
While both CSPMs and SSPMs (SaaS security posture management solutions) evaluate security posture, CSPMs focus on cloud services [like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other Cloud Service Provider (CSP) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments], and SSPMs focus on SaaS applications. CSPMs analyze entire cloud deployments at multiple levels of the computing stack and can scan IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, containers, and serverless code. CSPM tools also have some capabilities that SSPM tools do not have, such as incident response and vulnerability detection.
CSPM Tools Benefits
CSPM tools offer several benefits, including:
- Unified visibility: CSPMs work to stop accidental vulnerabilities by providing unified visibility across multi-cloud environments. This eliminates the need to check multiple consoles and normalize data from multiple vendors.
- Detects hidden threats: Through its continuous scans of the entire infrastructure, CSPM uncovers hidden threats, enabling faster detection, which results in shorter time to remediation.
- Single console: With a CSPM, all security group policies across accounts, regions, projects, and virtual networks can be managed through a single console.
- Reduced number of alerts: CSPMs reduce the number of alerts because they focus on the areas attackers are most likely to exploit; vulnerabilities are prioritized based on the environment; and vulnerable code is prevented from reaching production.
- Data risk assessment: With a CSPM, you can easily spot potential data risks that could be caused by human error, such as vulnerabilities caused by developers attempting to launch a new application or virtual machines that could leave the organization’s network exposed. If a CSPM solution is in place, data risks in cloud environments can be proactively identified and mitigated.
- Account permissions: CSPMs continuously monitor account privileges. If a user accesses a resource that is not permitted in their department or job role, then it will be flagged instantly and prevented.
- Enforced governance: Having a CSPM can help enforce governance everywhere and alleviate pressure for security and dev teams.
- Compliance: A CSPM can evaluate your cloud security posture against common compliance frameworks and flag potential vulnerabilities. It also provides on-demand and audit-ready reports that span multiple data sources.
- Automatic remediation of misconfigurations: A CSPM sends reports and provides recommended solutions to fix a detected misconfiguration. In some instances, they automatically remedy the misconfiguration, which ensures that any potential vulnerability is immediately patched and the risk of exploitation is removed.
CSPM Tools Features
When selecting a CSPM solution, look for one with the following features:
- Follows a central policy system
- Interactive dashboard
- Easy to use
- User-friendly interface
- Straightforward setup
- Risk identification
- Incident response
- Improved efficiency and collaboration
- Enables users to refuse any critical operations based on the roles assigned to them
- Users can view the inventory of the servers across multiple accounts
- Automatic cloud advancement tools to update users' data
- Scans and checks data regularly to ensure that your system remains secured
- Regular backups and updates
- Integrated data security and entitlement controls
- Integration with third-party systems
- Seamless integration with DevOps pipeline stages
- Tools to track activities in real time
- Limited manual intervention to solve issues at the earliest
- Ability to produce configurable, detailed reporting
- Granular controls
- Ability to assess cloud service provider settings and asset configurations accurately
Buyer's Guide
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
January 2023

Find out what your peers are saying about Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Orca Security and others in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). Updated: January 2023.
672,785 professionals have used our research since 2012.