Co-founder and CTO at OpsCompass with 15 years of experience building products and companies.
The evolution of the cloud was a paradigm shift in how organizations store, manage, and scale their data and applications. The rapid shift to 100% distributed teams in response to the pandemic proliferated cloud security risks for organizations, creating new vectors for malicious actors to infiltrate. This increase in data, applications, and user activity across multi-cloud environments means that organizations have much more to keep track of than ever before. This is where cloud security posture management, or CSPM, tools help mitigate risk by providing visibility into the state of your cloud configurations, showing you how your resources are changing, and identifying your biggest risks. In this article, I’ll cover how CSPM has evolved, the state today, and where it’s headed in the future.
Evolution Of CSPM
Cloud computing marked a massive shift not just in the way organizations could deliver data-driven application experiences, but in the way organizations could create business value with technology. The cloud untethered companies from physical, limited space, allowing for on-demand access, frictionless scaling, and lower fixed costs. Yet the early days of cloud computing were virtually machine-oriented, meaning fewer assets needed to be monitored, and security — if it ever was a focus in the early days — was approached from the on-premise perspective, meaning it wasn’t altogether effective.
But cloud usage and adoption haven’t just blown up, the entire profile of that usage has become more complex as well, with organizations migrating more and more data and applications to the cloud, adopting cloud-native and micro-services-based approaches, and supporting multiple public cloud platforms. Today’s cloud services offer an ever-evolving menu of capabilities and features. While the clouds themselves have been innovating, so too have the customers, with DevOps teams automating infrastructure and deployments and even injecting security into this developer-oriented process.
But with growing scale and complexity comes the potential for misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, and non-compliance. This is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of DevOps and “as-code” means that much of an organization’s “cloud state” information is stored in infrastructure-as-code templates that live in repositories or even directly on build servers.
Today, CSPM tools can leverage all that rich, diverse information served up by the cloud providers via APIs to get high-fidelity definitions of the resources, and then turn it into near real-time, in-depth insights into your cloud security posture. In fact, as these cloud APIs have gotten better, CSPM tools have become more innovative and have the capability to gain deeper insights into the more modern cloud-native services. Capabilities that used to require servers, OSes, and agent-based security solutions can now be leveraged as a cloud service. This means that a sufficiently modern CSPM can often fill in much of the gap in compliance and security.
Where CSPM Is Headed
While CSPM as an approach isn’t necessarily new, it is tackling highly dynamic customer cloud requirements and the cloud’s own ever-evolving capabilities in order to keep up with expanding data footprints and make multi-cloud security a reality for organizations of all sizes.
I talk to so many clients who are wondering about the future of CSPM and how they can get a handle on what they have today but also, and maybe more importantly, how they can be proactive and support their business’s cloud strategy going forward. Here’s how I see the future of CSPM shaping up:
Greater Insights Into Customers: CSPM tools are only as powerful as the information they have access to, which means that CSPM solutions will need to continue to evolve as cloud APIs evolve in order to provide a comprehensive look at the entire cloud presence. But leveraging all that data, too, means greater insight and ability to find misconfigurations, errors, and other high-risk issues. So much of the configuration state of a cloud workload ends up being manifested in configuration definition. This means that CSPMs will increasingly be able to identify new types of problems and protect workloads in new and important ways. Gartner has actually created an emerging category of tools called Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), which is an evolution of CSPM.
CSPM As Organizational Tool: No longer can security just be the responsibility of a dedicated security team. Today, teams across an organization have to think proactively about security and compliance issues, so it’s important to have visibility and control from the development pipeline to the runtime environment in the cloud. CSPM solves that problem by providing a single source of truth across multiple clouds, projects, and teams. With centralized visibility and intelligence of a CSPM, organizations can drastically reduce the time it takes to detect threats and other risks at scale. As DevOps teams understand the wealth of insights and information they can gain about their cloud posture, they’re pushing CSPM vendors to provide richer information, more integrations, and deeper functionality, creating a virtuous innovation cycle.
Increased Scope Of Protection: If CSPM tools are able to provide deep insights into multi-cloud inventory, compliance, and risk, why would CSPM tools stop there? They’re already shifting to the left to bring value to DevOps teams. CSPM tools have the potential to evolve beyond the hyperscale public cloud infrastructure platforms and monitor adjacent platforms and tools, such as certain developer tools, SaaS applications, and more. Since CSPM tools provide data and ultimately value that’s central to cloud and DevOps adoption, we should expect to see them becoming more of a foundational component of cloud-enabled organizations.
The bottom line is that an organization’s ever-expanding cloud environment will expose them to serious risks and non-compliance issues if there’s no robust CSPM strategy in place. Most successful companies in the cloud are the ones not just adopting agile methodologies but really leveraging cloud-native tools, automation, and well-architected guidelines that power modern enterprise cloud and DevOps.