What if someone handed you a static picture of a highway and asked you to drive using only the picture? Would you still drive even if you knew you could not see all the traffic around you?
Yet traditional CSPM solutions show the state of your environment as a snapshot in time, usually once per day, only giving you partial vision, blinding you from the traffic that is potentially compromising your security. So, we ask you do you really know what your risks are if you’re only seeing part of your cloud security picture?
99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault. – Gartner
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) originally emerged to address critical misconfigurations in cloud accounts that could potentially open organizations to attacks and compliance violations.
In fact, one of the most preferred entry points for cloud-based attacks is cloud misconfigurations. Just last month, Aqua Nautilus found more than 250 million software artifacts exposed due to misconfigured cloud registries, which affected some of the world’s largest organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies.
So, while many organizations tend to begin their cloud security journey with CSPM to find and fix configuration issues across multiple cloud providers and accounts, there’s more to cloud security today than configuration issues. In order to accurately assess cloud risk, you need to consider risks associated with not only the infrastructure, but also with the workloads running on top of it. Agentless scanning attempted to close this gap, but it also introduces significant limitations.
The first being there are simply some things they cannot see.
Challenges of modern CSPM solutions
If you’re relying on legacy CSPM or even modern CSPM solutions, then you probably face these challenges:
- Lack of visibility – Because traditional CSPM solutions only take a snapshot of the disk every few hours, they miss attacks that target CPU and memory (e.g., ghost containers, fileless malware, and more).
- Alert fatigue – There is too much noise from too many findings, without a clear indication of what is most important, which leads to an inability to prioritize or resolve issues efficiently.
- Little-to-no context – Impeding the ability to prioritize without real-time context on what the alert is or where to begin to resolve the issues.
- Cloud complexities – Modern organizations commonly run multiple workload types across multiple cloud providers. Not all alerts are created equal so it’s important to consider issues in the context of the environment to see the most critical risks.
- Compliance burdens – The lack of context and insufficient reporting by different and siloed security tools create a mismatch of findings and interpretations leaving teams spending too much time looking across platforms and systems to prove compliance to auditors.
Cloud environments are maturing, becoming more intricate, complex, and quite frankly so large that security teams can lose clarity of exactly what they have. Traditional CSPM tools help, yet they offer only partial visibility. More modern CSPM offerings with agentless scanning improved visibility, but today 52% of cloud native attacks evade agentless detection. So if you can’t see everything, then you can’t properly prioritize what’s truly most critical to your organization.
Real-Time CSPM – Identify, prioritize, and remediate critical cloud risks across environments
Real-Time CSPM provides a deeper layer of visibility and context to what is happening across the entirety of the cloud environment, leading to the capacity to prioritize the most critical cloud security risks.
Introducing Aqua’s Real-Time CSPM which offers the ability to:
Accurately identify attacks – Aqua’s unique approach extends the capabilities of traditional CPSM utilizing agentless and in-workload visibility to provide complete, real-time visibility of your entire attack surface. We identify fileless and in-memory attacks that agentless solutions cannot see to gain complete real-time visibility across multi-cloud environments. This allows for better context and prioritization of the most critical risks, enabling faster and more efficient remediation.
Point-in-time scanning opens the door for increased attacks. According to the IDC report, “The State of Cybersecurity Maturity in Vulnerability Management Among U.S. Organizations,” 74% of organizations scan less than 85% of their IT assets when they do scan, leaving an opportunity for many vulnerabilities to go undiscovered until an attacker makes use of them. By then it is too late.
Further data from Aqua Nautilus, Aqua’s cloud security research team, supports the need for real-time scanning. Nautilus uses an extensive honeypot network to detect and analyze over 80,000 attacks a month. Of those attacks, one in three do not leave a footprint and would be missed by point-in-time scanning solutions.
Prioritize efficiently– With real-time visibility, you have the context needed for accurate and efficient prioritization. Real-Time CSPM provides a complete view of your true cloud security risk, matching correlated findings across multi-cloud environments, and reducing the time spent trying to connect findings across environments and disparate tools.
With contextualized insights and risk scoring tailored to your environment, you can accurately detect your risk exposure to complex vulnerabilities such as Spring4Shell that require multiple issues or dependencies to be exploitable by attackers. Real-Time CSPM surfaces top risks in your environment, and deduplicates findings to significantly reduce volumes so you spend less time chasing false positives and more time fixing critical issues.
Once you can see all your risks, you have better context to prioritize what is most important, thus reducing noise and eliminating the time suck of sifting through tickets.
Remediate issues efficiently – Aqua’s Real-Time CSPM provides meaningful impact to risk reduction to manage, investigate, and respond with built-in list of action items and expert guidance connecting issues found in respective code repositories. In other words, our Real-Time CSPM reports back and tells you not only what the risk is but the importance of that risk to your build. Furthermore, it tells you where to find it in your environment and identifies risk ownership to ensure priority issues are resolved.
With Aqua’s Real-Time CSPM, teams have a complete view of cloud security risk and can accurately identify the most critical findings. Instead of wasting time on issues with low effective risk, customers can focus on what truly matters most and provide the context needed for resource owners to remediate quickly and secure their cloud applications.
We help you see what others don’t and fix what others can’t
Aqua Real-Time CSPM is the only solution in the industry that provides a complete and prioritized view of your cloud security risk in real-time. Our unique approach works to quickly assess your basic risk posture across all of your cloud resources running in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud through auto discovery capabilities. We dispense a unified view of your cloud inventory so you can easily search, see, and drill down into specific cloud resources and risk. Furthermore, in-workload visibility provided by Real-Time CSPM offers deeper insights and better context, enabling you to prioritize what’s most important.
All of this is delivered by one tightly integrated platform, to efficiently reduce your attack surface and costs, ensure better internal communication, report accurately to auditors and management, and best improve your organization’s cloud native security posture.
Conquer your cloud security risk. Join our webinar Real-Time CSPM: Cloud Security Starts with Complete Visibility on June 1st and see Aqua’s Real-Time CSPM solution. Discover how it can help you gain clarity with a unified view of the top risks in your environment and context of actionable insights, to remediate security issues with confidence to drive down risk rapidly and efficiently.