Cloud security posture management (CSPM) covers the security of “cloud” infrastructures, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) services. Apply best practices universally across multi-cloud, hybrid, and container-based environments, focusing on compliance monitoring, incident response, and integration with DevOps. Microsoft Defender for Cloud already provides basic CSPM tools for free, but it is in combination with the Defender CSPM paid plan that it becomes one of the best solutions on the market. In this article, we'll go deeper into what are the reasons why your business should consider moving to Defender CSPM and the benefits that can be derived from it.
The Cloud Security Posture Management is one of the key elements of Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This comprehensive solution provides visibility, protection, and governance for cloud resources on Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. The CSPM continuously evaluates the cloud's security posture, identifies and corrects misconfigurations, and ensures compliance with security standards and regulations.
Defender for Cloud offers some basic CSPM features, such as resource discovery, security tips, and Secure Score, for free. However, to access advanced features such as Attack Path Analysis and Cloud Security Explorer, you must activate the optional Defender CSPM plan.
This optional plan, with its wide range of features related to the protection and active governance of its resources “in the clouds”, can make Defender for Cloud one of the best CSPM solutions currently available on the market.
How? Let's find out in the next sections.
But first let's do a proper review.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a broad category of tools that help companies strengthen the security of their cloud environment. Today there are numerous CSPM tools available on the market, all with different characteristics and strengths that must be evaluated to understand which solution best suits your needs.
However, to be truly defined as a quality CSPM tool, it must guarantee users full visibility and control over the cloud solutions used by the company, including the SaaS, IaaS and PaaS infrastructures and a whole range of features that have over time become an essential standard for these solutions.
So let's see together what you should definitely look for in a CSPM solution worthy of the name.
Lack of visibility is one of the main problems with cloud environments, hindering effective control and the ability to intervene promptly. Without continuous monitoring, obtaining complete visibility is impossible, which is why this is one of the fundamental characteristics of a CSPM.
It's important to ensure that the tool can monitor as many events as possible on all cloud platforms in use. These events include misconfigurations, access to systems and data, attacks, and regulatory compliance.
Often, professionals neglect compliance monitoring when choosing a CSPM, and are then forced to integrate third-party solutions to fill this gap or completely replace the tool.
One of the main issues in managing multi-cloud environments is the growing skills gap. Cloud solutions are evolving rapidly, the number of environments used by businesses is constantly increasing, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for security teams to keep up with these changes.
Companies suffer from a shortage of qualified professionals, while available professionals often lack the necessary skills. Additionally, with the growing number of cyberthreats, security teams don't have the time and resources to monitor and respond to every threat.
For this reason, it is essential that the CSPM has functionality for automated policy management and incident response.
A modern CSPM must include all of these features to ensure effective protection and reduce the complexity of managing cloud security.
In multi-cloud environments, one of the main problems is that the controls are distributed across multiple platforms. As a result, the IT security team must configure each platform separately in accordance with corporate security policies.
First, this inevitably leads to errors and consumes too much time. Second, different cloud platforms offer different security features, and some may not even have the necessary controls.
The CSPM solves these issues by providing a centralized dashboard. It is now possible to configure all platforms from a single point and ensure that security rules are consistent across multiple cloud environments.
In addition, reporting provides a global view of security trends in the organization and provides insights that might otherwise remain hidden.
The multitude of data coming from various cloud environments can be overwhelming for human perception and difficult to analyze. The threat intelligence capabilities of CSPMs can help the IT security team manage this challenge.
Threat intelligence analyzes all event logs from different cloud environments and classifies them according to their severity and urgency. Subsequently, this processed data is presented to the IT security team for a timely response. It helps to organize work, reduce its burden, and allocate team time more efficiently.
Vulnerability management provides the necessary controls to make timely and appropriate decisions on any flaws in your security posture.
Scalability is an important feature of any cloud solution, including CSPM. First, many companies are constantly growing. Second, many companies regularly explore new cloud environments that emerge on the market. The CSPM must be easily scalable in terms of the number of users and integrations.
Performance is another important aspect to monitor. If the increase in users causes CSPM to malfunction, this is not a good solution for your company.
Last but not least, the CSPM should have an intuitive and easy-to-understand interface. The main task of this tool is to lighten the workload of the IT security team.
If the team spends too much time searching for the necessary data or checking important information, the CSPM will not be able to save time and resources.
We have created the Infrastructure & Security team, focused on the Azure cloud, to better respond to the needs of our customers who involve us in technical and strategic decisions. In addition to configuring and managing the tenant, we also take care of:
With Dev4Side, you have a reliable partner that supports you across the entire Microsoft application ecosystem.
Now that we know what to look for in a CSPM solution that deserves our attention and money, here's the good news: Defender for Cloud offers all the features we mentioned above and even more.
All we need to understand is: What functionality do we need?
The CSPM features in Microsoft Defender for Cloud are available both in a free version (called Foundational and already available in Defender for Cloud) and in a paid version, depending on the required capabilities.
The Foundational CSPM level is designed to provide essential security functionality at no cost. When Defender for Cloud is activated, we will automatically get Foundational CSPM capabilities for all resources in the subscription.
This level is ideal for organizations that want to get started with cloud security without incurring additional costs. It offers a solid foundation for improving safety posture and ensuring compliance with various standards.
Among the free features we can find:
If, on the other hand, our security needs go a little beyond these basic capabilities, we can activate the Defender CSPM plan by adding additional protections, including governance, regulatory compliance, Cloud Security Explorer, attack path analysis and agentless scanning for a variety of scenarios.
Defender CSPM also offers guidelines for improving security and provides visibility into the current state of security (security posture). It continuously evaluates the state of resources, subscriptions and the organization for any problems, presenting its security posture through a Secure Score. A higher score indicates a lower level of risk.
Now let's take a look in the table below at the features that the plan introduces.
One of the main advantages of the Defender CSPM plan that we only mentioned in the previous section is the presence of agentless scanning capabilities. These allow cloud resources to be analyzed to identify vulnerabilities, sensitive data, secrets and exposures, without having to install additional software.
These features are especially useful for cloud-native services, such as PaaS databases and storage accounts, that don't support the installation of agents or require minimal management.
When combined with contextualized cloud posture management (CPM), attack path analysis, and security risk analysis, features can help improve the overall cloud security strategy and play a critical role in protecting containerized applications, Kubernetes environments, VMs, and data.
By offering a comprehensive approach to cloud security, they adapt efficiently to the growth and complexity of their infrastructure, ensuring a holistic security posture. In addition, all of these benefits are included in the cost of the plan with no additional charges.
In addition, they offer significant advantages in terms of scalability, integration, reduced complexity, proactive threat mitigation, improved efficiency, and cost savings. Easily scaling with your company and its cloud infrastructure, they integrate seamlessly into different configurations, eliminating the complexity of managing individual agents. By prioritizing proactive threat detection through continuous monitoring and real-time analysis, they facilitate rapid responses to security threats.
The absence of individual agents improves efficiency and allows IT teams to focus on strategic planning. Adopting agentless functionality eliminates the need for agent software maintenance, resulting in cost savings.
By maintaining their active state and using them regularly, organizations can remain vigilant against evolving risks and promptly address potential vulnerabilities. This enduring commitment to using these capabilities is crucial to establishing a resilient and secure cloud environment that can adapt to changing circumstances.
The Defender CSPM plan includes four agentless features by default, which we present with the following table.
By correlating the insights generated by these agentless capabilities, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their security profile. It's a synergistic approach that can provide a solid foundation for building a proactive cloud security strategy.
Let's explore how these elements work together within your security infrastructure.
Agentless capabilities can significantly improve Cloud Posture Management (CPM) by offering a more contextualized and comprehensive understanding of the cloud environment.
For example, the vulnerability assessment functionality of the Azure container registry provides information on potential security weaknesses in containerized applications, allowing CPM to prioritize and address risks based on severity and potential impact.
By automating asset discovery and continuous monitoring, these capabilities help maintain an up-to-date asset inventory, which complements CPM's role in providing accurate and timely visibility into the cloud's security posture.
Attack path analysis is another area that benefits significantly from the insights generated by agentless capabilities. By discovering VM vulnerabilities and potential attack vectors, these capabilities facilitate a more targeted and effective analysis.
For example, agentless VM vulnerability assessment provides information about possible attack paths that an adversary could exploit. This data can then be used to prioritize remediation actions based on the potential impact on the environment, effectively reducing attack paths and minimizing the risk of a successful breach.
By taking advantage of agentless capabilities, security risk analysis can be even more proactive and comprehensive. Real-time detection of potential threats, whether related to data sensitivity or container vulnerabilities, allows security teams to quickly identify and mitigate risks.
In addition, Discovery features for Kubernetes can provide useful information about configuring Kubernetes environments, further helping to identify security risks associated with misconfigurations or obsolete components.
Companies that operate in the cloud today find themselves having to face challenges regarding the security of their data that, even at the beginning of the century, would have been considered an exaggeration in the corporate cybersecurity sector.
Yet we have arrived at this point, with a monstrous increase in cyber threats and the risks associated with them that can no longer be ignored and for which every self-respecting business should take appropriate countermeasures.
Defender for Cloud and the Defender CSPM plan are positioned in this scenario as incredibly solid solutions to adopt for any company that operates within Microsoft, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, in order to give their teams of experts the tools necessary to set up the best defenses for their digital infrastructures “in the clouds” with only a minimum additional cost.
So all we have to do is invite anyone interested to get a first taste of the basic CSPM functionality of Defender for Cloud and evaluate the transition to the Defender CSPM plan once they understand the needs related to their security posture.
Defender CSPM is the advanced Cloud Security Posture Management plan integrated into Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It is used to monitor and improve the security posture of cloud resources (Azure, AWS, GCP) with advanced threat detection, governance, compliance and response capabilities.
The Foundational tier is free and includes basic features such as the Secure Score, continuous security assessment, the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark, and compliance monitoring. The paid Defender CSPM plan adds advanced capabilities such as Cloud Security Explorer, attack path analysis, agentless scanning, and threat detection with artificial intelligence.
Yes. Defender CSPM extends visibility and security controls beyond Azure, also including AWS and Google Cloud Platform. It allows centralized security management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
They allow cloud resources to be scanned without installing agents, reducing complexity and costs. They improve the security of containers, VMs, Kubernetes environments, and sensitive data through continuous, contextualized assessment.
Yes. With policy automation, unified dashboard, and integrated threat intelligence, it simplifies security management even for teams with limited resources or expertise.
The combination of continuous monitoring, multi-cloud visibility, automation, scalability, compliance management and agentless functionality makes it a complete solution suitable for the most advanced cloud security needs.
The Defender CSPM plan is optional and comes at an additional cost compared to the free version of Defender for Cloud. However, all the advanced features (including the agentless approach) are included in the plan without additional surcharges.
The Infra & Security team focuses on the management and evolution of our customers' Microsoft Azure tenants. Besides configuring and managing these tenants, the team is responsible for creating application deployments through DevOps pipelines. It also monitors and manages all security aspects of the tenants and supports Security Operations Centers (SOC).
