What is Cloud Security Posture Management?

Businesses around the world today need to comply with an ever-increasing roster of regulatory requirements to protect their customers, with highly regulated industries such as healthcare and finance facing especially stringent requirements just to keep the doors open much less remain competitive. But any company, even those without regulatory requirements, can be at risk for phishing, hacking, or other malicious attacks.

Cloud security posture management is the continuous process of cloud security improvement, optimization, adaptation, assessment, and monitoring to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack.

No matter the regulatory compliance body or standard that one needs to deal with, at the end of the day it’s all about the data. Specifically:

• Identifying all potentially sensitive data and understanding where it resides
• Protecting sensitive data
• Monitoring sensitive data for access and use, and auditing same
• Alerting appropriate personnel of any breach

AWS’s “Shared Responsibility Model” establishes that Security and Compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. Specifically, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud (i.e. of the infrastructure building blocks), and the customer is responsible for security in the cloud (i.e. of their environment, data and applications running in the cloud). You can read more about our AWS experience to understand our approach.

Our updated Cloud Security Whitepaper goes into more detail the 7 steps you can take to improve your cloud security posture. It also includes a list of helpful resources.

For more on cloud security posture, check out our Cloud Security Posture Management Hub.

And if you are working with a cloud managed services provider, make sure that cloud security posture management is part of your contract!