The use of cloud services has become widespread in the last few years. Features like scalability, flexible billing, and low entry cost, universal access, and elasticity have motivated the organization to move its core business processes to the cloud platform. However, there are several challenges you need to think about compliance, privacy, and security when embracing a cloud platform.
Understanding Compliance Enforcement
Businesses are required to comply with certain regulations set by the government or industry governing bodies. For example, healthcare facilities need to comply with HIPAA; US government agencies need to comply with FISMA; public retail companies need to comply with PCI and SOX.
The primary intent of compliance enforcement is to ensure the businesses do everything they need to protect consumers’ data and privacy by enforcing accountability, availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Suppose compliance risk is one of your biggest fears that is prohibiting you from migrating to the cloud. In that case, rest assured as CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) can help your organization with compliance enforcement.
What Is Cloud Security Posture Management?
Cloud Security Posture Management refers to the continuous process of improving cloud security. As per Gartner survey 2020, 95% of cloud security issues result from configuration mistakes and human error.
CSPM tools empower businesses to discover and remediate risks through monitoring, security assessments, and automated compliance monitoring. Here are some ways in which Cloud Security Posture Management helps with compliance enforcement.
Provides Greater Visibility
A cloud account can have thousands of configurations, and it is impossible to know every cloud configuration and resource associated with a specific business process. Cloud security tools give you greater visibility in the cloud infrastructure. It provides you with valuable insights into everything necessary in your cloud infrastructure. With these tools, administrators can detect misconfigurations and make necessary changes in the configuration to secure all resources.
Cloud infrastructure is extensive and too complex to manage everything manually. It is where Cloud security posture management comes into the picture. It automates the process. In simple words, cloud security tools find and correct misconfigurations automatically without any human intervention.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
With Cloud Security Posture Management, you can speed up your compliance assessments by defining configuration requirements to suit your compliance and business needs. The security tools use industry best practices like CIS benchmarks for compliance monitoring and assessments.
Monitor Operations
Cloud security tools identify how different cloud infrastructure assets comply with security regulations and policies. These tools can also recognize threats that will harm cloud security posture.
Perform Risk Identification
The CSPM tools identify and classify risks. It is the primary step in maintaining cloud security. Looking at the massive cloud infrastructure, you cannot address every risk on a priority basis. The risk identification and classification feature allow you to prioritize risks and address them in a time-bound manner to reduce an attack’s threat.
Assess and Remediate
The security tools automate the evaluation of requirements of various cloud infrastructure elements like the applications, network devices, and Operating systems. It evaluates the requirements against multiple standards specified in the configuration databases.
The tools identify any security misconfiguration quickly and prevent any configuration drift. With Cloud security posture management, administrators can prioritize and track remedial measures and exceptions. The tools demonstrate a repeatable, auditable process that focuses on the most critical issues first for compliance management.
Inform
While automating most of the tasks, Cloud security posture management tools also create and deliver comprehensive reports to IT staffers and executives for documentation. The mandatory reporting enables businesses to see how their compliance policies compare against the industry compliance standards’ requirements.
Integration of Teams
Cloud platforms allow businesses to streamline their business processes. With cloud security posture management, your IT staff gets an opportunity for organized alerts, actions, and analysis. All this helps the management know-how each department is using the cloud infrastructure.
Cloud security posture management also integrates teams. It allows teams to customize monitoring, determine the production workload, discuss the API infrastructure integrated into the process, and check end-to-end security of all public cloud infrastructure applications.
Optimal Security
When configurations are monitored and misconfigurations rectified, it is easier for administrators to resolve cloud security issues. The cloud security tools also map how the security team works, identifies unused assets, verifies the applications’ integrity, and identifies technologies. In simple words, it paints a holistic picture of the cloud infrastructure where you can see all crucial elements secured and functioning efficiently.
To sum up, CSPM helps an organization to configure its business systems securely. This security approach allows organizations to stay compliant and earn customer trust that is critical for business growth.