Roughly 84% of organizations contract with two or more public cloud providers. This means that security staffers must run faster than ever trying to manage increasingly complex cloud security environments. This appears to be the only way they can stay ahead of risks posed by one of the top causes of breaches: misconfigurations.
Complexity can frustrate in-house security teams. At the same time, it provides a business opportunity for channel professionals who can help organizations strengthen their security postures.
MSPs do this by adopting cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools. These tools help find and remediate risk by automating certain security tasks that have become distracting and/or costly. This can especially impact businesses that may be short on security resources and ability.
What Makes CSPM Tools Essential
CSPM tools are designed to provide deep visibility, continuous monitoring, and detection and remediation of misconfigurations across increasingly diverse cloud environments.
While the fundamental capabilities of a CSPM tool are useful in single-cloud environments, they are essential in multicloud settings. They can handle much broader roles, such as:
- Provide Deep Visibility: CSPM continuously takes inventory of all cloud environments, letting the user know what’s running without needing an agent.
- Support Cloud Compliance: It performs continuous security checks of the configuration of cloud resources based on security standards and regulatory compliance frameworks, such as CIS, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.
- Automatically Identify Misconfigurations and Compliance Violations: It assesses everything in the cloud inventory and checks whether each component is implemented properly.
- Control Access to Company Resources: CSPMs integrated with cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities determine who has access to what and how they received it. This allows businesses to easily apply policies and configuration best practices, as well as immediately assess the impact of a potential compromise.
Maximizing Security and Efficiency with CSPMs
Raphaël Peyret
CSPMs help organizations running cloud tools understand how their environments are configured, as well as how they can reconfigure their security architectures in a way that’s most productive and efficient for their business. CSPMs’ automation and translation functions help close security gaps, reducing risk and supporting security teams with cloud responsibilities.
That’s not to say the security skills shortage issue will be solved easily. High-level practitioners have always been in demand. And since cloud itself is only about two decades old, proficiency in multicloud environments is lagging security as a whole.
MSPs can play a valuable role for their customers — if they can train specialists and provide security expertise, as well as across cloud and compliance functions.
Channel providers adopting CSPM models deliver value in other ways. For example, by taking over the triage, policy setting, and remediation functions currently handled by in-house app and DevOps teams, MSPs may serve more of a consultative role in customer engagements, which can result in increased deal sizes and higher margins.
MSPs can do more than deliver commoditized solutions like endpoint protection–They can provide valuable service areas where skills gaps are most pronounced. By leveraging CSPMs’ feedback loops, MSPs enhance learning on how to continually improve the security they are offering. Furthermore, the automated tracking capability ensures that the cloud environments MSPs are managing are secure by documenting configuration performance.
Balancing Efficiency and Security in the Cloud
As organizations move more functions to the cloud, they open themselves up to new possibilities for enhancing efficiency and digital transformation. But they also take on increased levels of complexity and risk.
A research report showed that more than half of all security decisionmakers believe security risks are higher in the cloud than on premise. The same report ranked cloud misconfigurations as the third most prevalent cloud-related security incident they had experienced.
CSPM can be the first brick to protecting companies’ cloud environments. To seize business growth and defray potential cloud risks, organizations need to harness all the tools and resources at their disposal. Enlisting the help of an MSP deploying CSPM as part of their arsenal is a good first step.
Raphaël Peyret is vice president of product and cloud security at Bitdefender.
Image: iStock
