CSPM Cloud Security Posture Management
Continuous monitoring of cloud configuration drift across AWS, Azure and GCP. Detects misconfigurations, over-permissioned roles and policy violations before they become exposure.
CSPM continuously evaluates how a cloud environment is configured against a known-good baseline, usually drawn from CIS benchmarks, the provider’s own well-architected guidance and whatever regulatory framework applies. It works through the provider APIs rather than agents, so it can inventory every account, subscription and project and check thousands of settings without touching a workload.
The failure mode it exists to catch is drift. Cloud configuration is changed constantly by many people and by automation, and an environment that passed an audit in March can be wide open by June without anyone doing something obviously wrong. Storage opened up for a one-off data transfer and never closed, a security group widened during an incident, logging disabled to reduce cost, a public snapshot created for a migration: none of these look like attacks, and all of them create exposure.
This is why point-in-time assessment underperforms. An annual or quarterly review establishes that the environment was acceptable on the day it was examined, which says little about the other three hundred days. Continuous evaluation converts posture from a periodic report into a monitored signal, which is the only form in which it can be acted on quickly.
Common questions
What does CSPM stand for?
CSPM stands for Cloud Security Posture Management. It refers to continuously assessing the configuration of cloud environments against security baselines, flagging misconfigurations and drift across accounts and providers.
What is the difference between CSPM and CWPP?
CSPM assesses how the cloud environment is configured: whether storage is public, whether logging is on, whether a security group is too permissive. CWPP protects what runs inside it at runtime, watching process and network behavior in virtual machines, containers and serverless functions. One secures the shape of the environment, the other secures what happens in it.
Does CSPM require an agent?
No. CSPM connects through the cloud provider APIs and reads configuration state, so it needs permissions rather than software installed on workloads. That is what lets it cover an entire estate quickly, and also why it cannot see runtime behavior, which is CWPP territory.
CSPM is one signal.
We watch the rest.
Vijilan runs a 24/7 SOC across endpoint, identity, cloud, network, SaaS and mobile, and acts on what it finds rather than forwarding an alert.