LEVERAGING CSPM FOR PROACTIVE CLOUD CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Abstract

            Abstract – The widespread use of cloud computing has led to big and small organizations alike facing myriad and demanding security challenges. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools have been developed to help organizations manage not just security configurations on cloud infrastructure but other associated problems. This research takes on the difficulty of accurately assessing and maintaining cloud security. Such failing often goes undetected because top-down assessments of cloud infrastructure and services are hard to accomplish. Hence in this research a new methodology was proposed namely Dynamic Cloud Security Assessments (DCSA), to continually evaluate the use of CSPM tools in a series of real-world, real-time, and virtual experiments. A public cloud platform that the authors were more than familiar with and appeared to offer what one would call real-time visibility was chosen, within its terms of service. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) were the platforms under evaluation.