6 Key Features to Look for in a CSPM Solution

Cloud Security Posture Management is a vast category of tools that help companies strengthen the security of their cloud environment. There are plenty of these tools available on the market these days. This guide reviews the key features to look for in a CSPM solution. It will help you choose the tool that will fit your needs best.

Key features in a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution

Cloud Security Posture Management tool must provide full visibility and control over your cloud solutions (SaaS, Iaas, and PaaS). Here are the features that you will need to look for in CSPM.

Continuous Monitoring and Compliance

Lack of visibility is one of the key problems of cloud environments. It impedes efficient control and timely intervention. The visibility is impossible to achieve without continuous monitoring. That’s why this is the feature you will need in your CSPM.

Make sure that the tool monitors as many events as possible across all the cloud platforms that you have. These include misconfigurations, system access, data access, attacks, and compliance.

Some professionals forget to look for compliance monitoring when choosing the CSPM. They are later forced either to find a third-party solution to specifically cover this gap or opt for another CSPM tool.

Automated Policy Enforcement and Remediation

One of the key problems with managing multi-cloud environments is the growing talent and skill gap. The cloud solutions are rapidly changing. The number of environments used by one organization is growing. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for IT security teams to keep up with all these changes.

Teams lack professionals, and professionals lack the necessary skills. And with the growing number of threats, departments don’t have enough time and resources to monitor and respond to every threat.

That’s why policies, their automated enforcement, and threat remediation is critical for your business. Modern CSPM will have all these features in its security arsenal.

The policies will enable your system to respond automatically to regular threats (e.g., dangerous sharing) and prevent users from errors or criminal activities. Remediation will enable the system to initiate an algorithm that will minimize the impact of a cyber incident.

Furthermore, this functionality will provide time for your team to investigate, analyze, and plan for the future.

Centralized Dashboard and Reporting

In multi-cloud environments, one of the key problems is that controls are scattered across multiple platforms. As a result, your IT security team has to configure each platform in accordance with your security policies separately.

First of all, it inevitably causes mistakes and takes up too much time. Second, various cloud platforms have different security functionality, and some might just not have the controls you need.

CSPM fixes these problems by providing a centralized dashboard. Now you can configure all your platforms in one place and make sure that the rules are coherent across many clouds.

Furthermore, reporting can give you a bird’s eye look at security trends across your organization and provide you with otherwise undiscovered insights.

Threat Intelligence and Vulnerability Management

The abundance of data that comes from multiple cloud environments can be overwhelming for human perception and hard to analyze. The threat intelligence features of CSPMs can help your IT security team to tackle this challenge.

Threat intelligence will analyze all the event logs coming from multiple cloud environments and categorize them by their severity and urgency. Then this processed data is presented to your IT security team to respond. It helps with arranging your work tasks, decreasing your workload, and assigning your team time more efficiently.

Vulnerability management provides necessary controls to handle the vulnerabilities timely and accordingly.

Scalability and Performance

Scalability is an important feature of any cloud solution, including CSPM. First, many businesses are constantly growing. Second, many companies try out new cloud environments that emerge on the market on a regular basis. CSPM should be easily scalable in terms of the number of users and new integrations.

Performance is another important thing to keep an eye on. If the growth of users causes CSPM to stop functioning properly, it’s not a good solution for your business.

User-Friendly Interface and Ease of Use

Last but not least, the CSPM should have an intuitively understandable interface. The main task of this tool is to decrease the workload of your IT security team. If they waste too much time looking for necessary data or important control, the CSPM fails to save time and resources.

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