Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

The need for cloud security posture management

Cloud services provide businesses with extraordinary value. Delivering the ability to simplify storage, analyze data faster, and streamline team communication, cloud providers help businesses operate more efficiently and maintain competitive positioning every day.

To take advantage of cloud services, however, organizations must often integrate cloud providers with their network and entrust them with sensitive data. Many security managers make the mistake of believing that large and well-known cloud service organizations are virtually immune from data breaches. In reality, these providers are as vulnerable to cyberattacks as any organization. That makes managing cloud security posture as critical as managing security programs for on-premises or internal infrastructure.

Bitsight offers a suite of solutions based on its industry-leading Security Ratings that can deliver comprehensive cybersecurity visibility into cloud infrastructure. With help from Bitsight, your security team can quickly identify and remediate security performance gaps in cloud deployments and streamline cloud security posture management.

The components of cloud security posture management

Superior cloud security posture management requires advanced tools that can accomplish three critical objectives:

Enable clear visibility into cloud infrastructure

Visibility is the starting point for superior cloud security posture management. By gaining a complete, external picture of where the risk exists in your network, you can take steps to remediate vulnerabilities quickly, while potentially identifying larger areas of concentrated risk.

Provide external verification of your attack surface

An external view of your attack surface can validate the analysis and research performed internally. Solutions that offer a cyber risk rating can help security managers trust that they have a complete view and accurate understanding of their network as they make decisions about cloud security.

Streamline reporting and benchmarking

Advanced reporting technology is essential for managing cloud security posture. With reports that summarize program improvements, you can successfully engage company decision-makers in productive cybersecurity conversations. Effective benchmarking is also important to provide context as you work to demonstrate security performance that meets or exceeds those of peers, partners, and competitors.

The Bitsight Security Ratings platform

Bitsight offers the most widely adopted Security Ratings solution in the world, changing the way that companies address cyber risk. Bitsight’s Security Ratings offer a data-driven, dynamic measurement of an organization’ s cybersecurity performance. Ratings help organizations monitor and improve cyber hygiene, and offer the external verification security teams need to improve cloud security posture management.

Bitsight Security Ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820, with larger numbers equating to stronger security posture. Ratings are issued daily and are based on objective, externally verifiable data collected from 120+ sources. This information reveals an organization’s security performance on 23 key risk vectors in four major categories: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed breaches. Calculated with a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight ratings have been proven to correlate to breach – the lower the security rating, the more likely the rated entity will succumb to a data breach.

In addition to an overall view of security posture, Bitsight Security Ratings illuminate security performance on specific risk vectors and can identify vulnerabilities in on-premises and cloud infrastructure. With Bitsight, security teams get a daily verification of their security posture in the cloud.

Bitsight solutions for cloud security posture management

In addition to Security Ratings, the Bitsight platform offers several solutions that can improve cloud security posture management.

Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics

Bitsight provides continuous visibility into digital ecosystems and increasingly complex attack surfaces. Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics uncovers risk hidden across digital assets in the cloud, different geographies and subsidiaries, and remote workforces. A centralized dashboard shows the location of all digital assets broken down by cloud provider and business unit, along with the corresponding cyber risk associated with each asset. Bitsight also uncovers instances of shadow IT and assesses them for risk so they can be brought into line with corporate security policies.

Executive Reporting with Bitsight

Bitsight Executive Reports drive more informative and productive conversations about cyber risk with company decision-makers. By making security performance more accessible and easier to understand, Bitsight helps security teams communicate risk, identify gaps, and justify investments on security programs. Security teams can leverage more than a dozen readily available reports with cyber security policy examples, or create custom reports on the fly.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

In addition to security performance within an organization, Bitsight can expose risk within cloud services and third and fourth-party vendors. Bitsight enables security teams to perform cybersecurity risk assessments on vendors, potential vendors, and the cloud services they rely on.

Choosing a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Vendor

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, maintaining a strong security posture is crucial for organizations. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors play a vital role in helping organizations continuously monitor, assess, and remediate security risks and misconfigurations in their cloud environments.