01Introduction
A large cloud estate changes thousands of times a day. No one can review every change by hand. CSPM automates the question 'is this configured safely?' across every account.
02What is CSPM?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a category of tools that continuously scan cloud accounts through provider APIs, compare resource configurations against security best practices and compliance benchmarks, and report or fix deviations.
It is one pillar of cloud security and a core component of CNAPP. Its data-focused sibling is DSPM.
03How CSPM works
CSPM works agentlessly through read-only cloud APIs.
- 1.
Connect
Grant read access to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Oracle Cloud accounts.
- 2.
Inventory
Enumerate every resource and its settings across regions.
- 3.
Evaluate
Check against rules drawn from CIS Benchmarks, provider best practices and frameworks such as PCI DSS.
- 4.
Report and remediate
Raise findings, track drift and, in some tools, fix automatically.
04Threats and risks
Rule-based posture tools have familiar limits.
Finding floods
Thousands of rule violations with no indication of which are reachable by an attacker.
No chaining
A rule sees one resource. Attackers use combinations.
Console fixes that drift
Remediating outside IaC gets reverted on the next deploy.
Compliance over security
Passing the benchmark isn't the same as being hard to breach.
05How Parameter helps
Parameter Cloud Security keeps the inventory and adds attacker reasoning.
Chained findings
Agents show how misconfigurations connect into paths to data, not just which rules fail.
Exploitability ranking
A public bucket full of logos ranks below an internal role that reaches your customer database.
Terraform fixes
Every fix is a pull request against your infrastructure code.
