The cloud storage market will reach a market value of about $109 billion in 2023, with a growth rate of 23% until 2030. With remote work becoming popular, more businesses and organizations intend to store their confidential information on the cloud.
While cloud storage services are more scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient than conventional data storage, they have unique shortcomings. With their rapid growth and complexity, cloud solutions can be difficult to navigate through when it comes to day-to-day operations.
In this article, we’ll discuss cloud security posture management (CSPM) as an emerging solution to streamline business operations, reduce risks, and use resources effectively, and how automating it can enhance your cloud efficiency.
What Is CSPM?
CSPM, or Cloud Security Posture Management, is designed to help organizations monitor, regulate, and mitigate potential security threats to their cloud. This security solution provides real-time insights into any possible misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in the cloud.
How Companies Can Benefit From Cloud Security Automation
A key component of CSPM solutions is automating core tasks, such as real-time monitoring, notifications and alerts, and managing compliance. This automation can make a massive difference in improving the efficiency and security of a company’s operations and data.
Three critical capabilities of CSPM that every business can benefit from are robotic process automation (RPA), compliance management, and centralized visibility.
1. Robotic Process Automation
CSPM solutions often incorporate software or ‘bots’ that help automate any repetitive tasks in a business, such as data entry, data extraction, form filling, and report generation.
These perform tasks and interact more efficiently than humans, reducing error and generating a detailed audit trail of their actions.
It may seem like a pricey investment at first glance, but RPA can save the cost of manual labor for your business, especially for administrative tasks. They can also be incorporated into several systems, making data transfer smooth.
With the increasing developments in AI and machine learning, they could aid a company’s administrative decision-making process very soon.
2. Compliance Management
Compliance management ensures that a company adheres to laws, regulations, standards, and internal policies designed by bodies like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR to run its operations. Risk management is vital to determine if an organization’s practices are legal, ethical, and well-regulated.
Determining whether a business is free of such security risks can be a hefty task. A continuously monitoring CPSM system can help pinpoint non-compliance and propose instant solutions to the issue before it causes significant problems for your company.
It can also help determine if third-party vendors comply with the company’s policies and penalize them if they don’t. And with everything logged, companies can also look into improving their data security and overall compliance policy in the long run.
3. Centralized Visibility
Since CSPM is often enforced organization-wide, it means there will be centralized visibility across all cloud environments. In simple terms, all the company’s data will be available on a centralized dashboard or console and can be monitored simultaneously.
That way, companies can eliminate any security loopholes centrally and more efficiently. Any data traffic will also go through a central monitoring system over the cloud, so malware detection becomes foolproof.
Endnote
CSPM is a handy tool for cloud security, and its automation has become a hot topic of discussion in the cloud security world.
Its cloud automation capabilities include robot process automation, centralized visibility, compliance management, the ability to integrate with DevOps environments, and scalability.
If you’re using the cloud, we highly recommend incorporating automated CSPM into their cloud security system.
