What is CSPM?

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) refers to the set of processes, tools, and technologies used to manage and monitor the security posture of cloud-based infrastructure and applications.

CSPM plays an essential role in identifying and addressing security risks and compliance issues in cloud environments. This includes assessing security controls, configurations, and compliance with security policies and regulations. CSPM tools continuously monitor the cloud environment for security events and anomalies, generating alerts and notifications when security risks or policy violations are detected.

CSPM tools also provide recommendations and remediation guidance to help organizations address security issues and reduce risk in their cloud environments. This includes ensuring that cloud environments comply with industry standards and regulations, such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. Additionally, CSPM tools provide reporting and analytics capabilities to help organizations track their security posture over time and identify trends and patterns in security incidents and compliance issues.

In multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, where the complexity of the infrastructure and the different cloud providers used can pose significant security challenges, CSPM becomes critical. It helps organizations to reduce the risk of data breaches, protect sensitive information, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Open Source CSPM

The What is the Modern Data Stack post covers what the modern data stack is, and how we can build an infrastructure data lake. With an infrastructure data lake in place, you can build your own customizable CSPM with just standard SQL queries and views that you can monitor and visualize with your go-to BI tools and avoid the yet-another-dashboard fatigue and learning new proprietary query languages. Check out our full guide on how to use CloudQuery, pre-built queries, views and Grafana dashboards to build an open-source CSPM (opens in a new tab).