Why is Cloud Security Posture Management Important?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) helps organizations guarantee the protection of modern and complex hybrid computing environments through security compliance and vulnerability management technologies. Due to the complexity of modern cloud computing environments, it is a challenge to not only map out but consistently visualize all the components of such an environment.
It is common to find organizations erroneously assume their cloud hosting providers will take complete responsibility for the security of their computing environments, which tends to contribute to security breaches and the existence of vulnerabilities. As a result of cloud misconfigurations, cloud breaches are quite common today. CSPM solutions automatically and constantly scan for misconfigurations that may lead to data leaks and security breaches.
What are Cloud Security Posture Management Tools?
CSPM tools allow organizations to pinpoint and repair risks via automated security compliance monitoring and assessments. These tools monitor cloud applications, containers, infrastructure, and services to discover and rectify not only misconfigurations but also erroneously enforced policies. CSPM tools automatically repair issues when triggered by administrator-set rules such as in the event of anomalies or misconfigurations.
Even though many tools today offer automated identity, network, and infrastructure management among others while having some artificial intelligence (AI) functionality, CSPM tools are the only ones to provide around-the-clock monitoring and visibility of security posture paired with automated detection and remediation of issues across heterogeneous computing environments.
Also read: What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?
Top CSPM Tools
| Tool | DLP | Data Governance | HIPAA Compliance |
| CloudGuard (Dome 9) |  |
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| Lacework | |
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| Fugue |  |
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| Threat Stack | |
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| Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution | |
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| BMC Helix Cloud Security | |
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CloudGuard Posture Management (Dome9)
As part of the CloudGuard Cloud Native Security Platform, CloudGuard Posture Management is an API-based agentless software as a service (SaaS) cloud compliance and orchestration platform that automates governance across multi-cloud assets and services. These services include misconfiguration detection, security posture assessment, and visualization as well as enforcing security best practices and compliance frameworks.
Key Differentiators
- Posture management. Users can enforce gold standard policies across projects, accounts, virtual networks, and regions with CloudGuard Posture Management. Users can visualize security posture as well as pinpoint, prioritize, and auto-remediate events.
- Compliance and governance. CloudGuard Posture Management automatically ensures users conform to regulatory requirements and security best practices. Through comprehensive reporting, users are updated on security and compliance posture.
- Privileged identity protection. Privileged identity protection allows users to deny access to critical actions based on identity access management (IAM) roles and users. CloudGuard Posture Management constantly analyses and audits IAM users and roles for irregular activity.
Con: Configuration can be complex, and the learning curve for new users is steep.
Pricing: The software offers a free trial period. For more pricing information, you may contact the Check Point Technologies sales team.
Lacework
Lacework is a data-driven cloud security platform that allows users to innovate quickly and safely by automating cloud security at scale. Lacework collects, examines, and correlates an organization’s data across its Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and GCP environments with precision and simplifies it to a few notable security events. Through automated intrusion detection, security visibility, one-click investigation, and simplified cloud compliance, Lacework stands out against its competitors.
Key Differentiators
- Ongoing activity monitoring. Lacework keeps organizations atop of all activity on all their cloud platform resources by detecting instances such as new activity in a region, noting changes to policies, roles, and accounts, and alerting users of such activities.
- Identification of configuration issues. Lacework finds IAM vulnerabilities, checks for logging best practices, monitors critical account activity like unauthorized API calls, and confirms secure network configurations to guarantee users are free of configuration issues.
- Continuous configuration tracking. With Lacework, users can maintain compliance and protection with a re-audit every day. Regardless of authorization status, Lacework monitors account activity for irregular activity.
Con: The UI could be more intuitive.
Pricing: For a pricing quote, contact Lacework.
Fugue
Fugue is a cloud security and compliance platform that uses a unified policy engine, powered by the Open Policy Agent (OPA), to secure the entire development lifecycle. Fugue instills confidence in cloud security in security and cloud engineering teams, allowing them to improve their efficiency. With Fugue, users can run pre-deployment security checks for CloudFormation, AWS, Kubernetes manifests, and dockerfiles to receive actionable remediation feedback through developer-friendly tools.
Key Differentiators
- Unified policy engine. Using Fugue’s open-source policy engine, organizations have the power to consistently apply compliance and security across the software development lifecycle.
- Resource data engine. Fugue’s resource data engine offers users deep visualization and reporting capabilities by continuously taking snapshots of the customer cloud environments to capture complete cloud resource configurations, relationships, attributes, and drift.
- IAC Security. Fugue helps users secure their CloudFormation and Terraform IAC at every stage of development and deployment through the Regula policy engine.
Con: Pre-built reports may be confusing for a new user.
Pricing: Fugue has four plans: Developer, IAC Security, Cloud Runtime Security, and Enterprise. The Developer plan is free and is limited to a single user, whereas the rest allow an unlimited number of users. IAC Security starts at $500 a month for 1,000 resources, and Cloud Runtime Security starts at $1,250 a month for 2,500 resources. Lastly, the Enterprise plan is a custom pricing plan for enterprises.
Threat Stack
The Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform bridges the gap between development, security, and operations, thereby improving overall organizational efficiency for users by offering full-stack observability. This observability cuts across the cloud management console, container, host, orchestration, and serverless layers. Through Treat Stack, organizations can efficiently discern known risks at scale and speedily detect anomalies through their computing environments.
Key Differentiators
- CloudTrail monitoring. Threat Stack CSPM notifies users of changes made such as instances spun up in unused regions through ingesting data from AWS CloudTrail.
- IAM policy. Threat Stack’s approach to IAM policies involves monitoring your AWS accounts to ensure users are adhering to the policies, including root access or password standards.
- EC2 inventory. Users enjoy visibility that allows them to view an inventory of the servers and instances across multiple AWS accounts. They also get to see key information like ID, IP, region, type, and others.
- Configuration auditing. Threat Stack aggregates findings from multiple AWS profiles for users by scanning configurations across core AWS services.
Cons: The user interface may feel clunky and overwhelming. Additionally, configuring custom rules may be tedious and cumbersome.
Pricing: Threat Stack offers three plans, Cloud Security Platform, Oversight, and Insight, whose details can be obtained by contacting the vendor.
Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution
Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud Security Solution is a security services platform that targets cloud builders. It delivers a deep and vast unified cloud security solution that enables users to easily secure cloud infrastructure. The powerful security allows users to leverage the benefits and efficiencies of the cloud to their businesses. Trend Micro Hybrid supports not only all the major cloud platforms but also solutions that integrate directly into users’ DevOps processes and toolchains.
Key Differentiators
- Flexible and simple cloud migration. Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud provides simple and flexible cloud security throughout the processes of migration and expansion through automating discovery and protection of cloud environments as it protects the network layer.
- Application security for modern applications. Trend Micro Cloud One offers application security that is up to scratch with modern development technologies and practices to provide instant protection, timely detection, and guarantee your cloud services attain security best practices.
Cons: Trend Micro Hybrid Cloud may be cumbersome to configure. It may also lead to high CPU usage when large workloads are involved.
Pricing: Users may opt for either an annual subscription or a pay-as-you-go approach. For more information on the annual subscription billing and pricing, contact Trend Micro. For the pricing of the 7 pay-as-you-go offerings from Trend Micro. The software also offers a 30-day free trial period.
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Without coding as a requirement, BMC Helix Cloud Security automates cloud configuration security checks and remediation, allowing services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), to have a secure and consistent configuration with an audit trail. BMC Helix Cloud Security improves governance and reduces risk by embedding compliance and security testing into service delivery as well as cloud operations.
Key Differentiators
- Automated cloud configuration. BMC Helix Cloud Security automates cloud security posture management for users using Center for Internet Security (CIS) policies for cloud assets.
- Automated remediation. The software simplifies the remediation process for users by offering self-driving remediation, automated remediation via an intuitive UI, and custom remediation support.
- Ready-to-use policies. Polices such as CIS, GDPR, and PCI are ready to use in BMC Helix Cloud Security. BMC Helix also offers support for custom policies.
Con: It may be costlier than its alternatives.
Pricing: BMC Helix Cloud Security provides an annual subscription model that includes the product plus support and maintenance. The model is based on cloud assets. Specific pricing information is available upon request from the vendor.
Choosing CSPM Tools
Selecting the best CSPM tool is dependent on your particular needs compared to the tool that best covers these pain points. If you narrow down your consideration to a few tools with similar features, a distinguishing factor will be pricing.
Most of the featured tools require you to reach out to the vendor for custom pricing information. However, a number of them offer free trials or demos, which offer an opportunity to test the tools and simplify your choice based on hands-on functionality, performance, user experience, or simple preference.
Read next: What You Need to Know About Cloud Automation: Tools, Benefits, and Use Cases
The post Top Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools 2021 appeared first on Enterprise Networking Planet.
