Your Guide to Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

• What is CSPM?
• Why is CSPM critical for businesses?
• Common challenges in cloud security
• How does CSPM work?
• CSPM vs. other cloud security solutions
  Secure your cloud environment with Salesforce
• CSPM FAQs

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a set of tools and practices that help you identify and fix security risks across your cloud environments — automatically, and continuously.

CSPM connects to your cloud providers through APIs to scan for misconfigurations, compliance gaps, and risky settings. Think of it as a 24/7 data security check that notifies you when sensitive data might be exposed or at risk.

It strengthens your cloud security posture without slowing down innovation. Whether you're using one cloud platform or several, CSPM helps you stay compliant and react faster to potential threats without the manual effort.

It also plays a central role in aligning with a cloud security framework, offering structured visibility into how cloud services are configured and how they’re performing against your security policies.

As cloud infrastructure grows more complex, security risks can multiply fast, especially when you’re working across multiple cloud platforms. Fortunately, CSPM can help give better visibility and control over your infrastructure.

Juggling multiple cloud providers can make aligning configurations tricky. Each platform has its own tools, settings, and naming conventions, and that fragmentation can create risk. CSPM helps bring everything together.. It centralizes your cloud configurations so you can monitor, fix, and manage security posture consistently, no matter where your data and workloads live.

When cloud environments scale, visibility suffers. CSPM gives you a clear picture of your entire cloud footprint — from access permissions to exposed assets — and alerts you when something looks off.

This continuous monitoring helps you stay ahead of threats instead of reacting to them after the fact.

CSPM automatically checks for regulation compliance like HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001. It flags violations, logs changes, and generates reports that keep your audits simple and stress-free.

It also supports strong data practices by helping enforce policies tied to data governance tools and your broader data governance framework. That means tighter access controls, clearer ownership, and policies that hold up to scrutiny.

When mapped to a cloud security framework, CSPM helps you keep up with evolving compliance standards without overloading your team.

Every cloud configuration carries some level of risk, ranging from minor to critical. CSPM helps you identify the most significant threats. It prioritizes high-risk issues and gives you the context to act fast, whether it’s a public storage bucket or overly broad access permissions.

Manual audits and one-off scans aren’t cutting it in today’s digital landscape. . To keep up with the pace, CSPM brings in automation. Now, tasks that used to take hours — like identifying misconfigurations, running compliance checks, or generating reports — can turn into minutes. It frees up your security and DevOps teams to focus on strategic work, not just chasing alerts.

Even with strong policies and tools in place, cloud environments are constantly shifting, and that opens the door for missed vulnerabilities.

One of the biggest causes of cloud breaches is simple human error. It can be something as seemingly harmless as a misconfigured database, a wide-open firewall rule, or even an exposed container. These issues can go unnoticed, especially in fast-moving environments.

CSPM tools scan for misconfigurations across your infrastructure, from network settings to identity permissions. It flags issues immediately and provides step-by-step remediation, so there’s no need to hunt through cloud provider dashboards. For example, if an object storage bucket is set to public or an internal app is accessible externally, CSPM catches it before data is exposed.

Because cloud environments can grow so rapidly, it's easy for data security and management to lag behind. CSPM helps you stay in control by continuously monitoring all assets, including untagged or forgotten ones. It can detect unmanaged workloads, shadow IT, and changes to environments that haven’t been approved or reviewed.

This visibility helps you prevent blind spots that can quietly escalate into security incidents. It also gives IT and security teams the confidence that nothing’s operating outside of policy, even as infrastructure scales.

CSPM works behind the scenes, using APIs to continuously scan your infrastructure, apply security policies, and flag anything that puts your data or systems at risk. Here’s how the main elements come together.

CSPM integrates with your cloud service providers using secure APIs. Once connected, it collects configuration data from your accounts, including settings for networking, identity access, storage, and more.

This data forms the baseline for posture assessments. From there, CSPM evaluates whether each resource meets your defined policies or known compliance benchmarks. Issues like overly broad permissions, open endpoints, or outdated encryption settings are flagged instantly.

You can also layer in platform-specific protections. For example, Salesforce Shield enhances your visibility with built-in encryption, audit trails, and event monitoring. This gives you even more insight into how data is accessed and secured across your applications.

Risk detection is where CSPM really shines in your security stack. These tools continuously scan cloud environments for vulnerabilities — not just with fixed rules, but often with machine learning models that surface unusual patterns or configuration drift.

Some common risk areas CSPM identifies include:

• Storage buckets with public access
• Over-permissioned IAM roles and service accounts
• Unrestricted firewall rules or open ports
• Misaligned DNS configurations or SSL issues

These issues aren’t always obvious, especially in large cloud environments where things change constantly. CSPM gives you prioritized alerts based on severity and impact, so your teams know what to fix and in what order. Security Center brings all of this together with a centralized view of your organization’s posture, so you can easily assess your security baseline and catch misconfigurations early in one place.

Fixing issues manually can be time-consuming, especially when they span across teams or providers. CSPM helps by offering guided remediation instructions or, in some cases, applying safe, automated fixes directly.

Let’s say your cloud storage is accidentally exposed to the public. CSPM can either block access automatically or notify your team with clear next steps. It may also recommend policy changes to prevent the same issue from happening again.

Privacy Center helps simplify this process by automating privacy and retention policies—especially useful when personal data is involved. Paired with Data Mask, it reduces exposure by protecting sensitive fields across sandboxes during testing or development.

This balance of automation and control means you can scale your security response without adding more manual effort. You get the insight you need without being overwhelmed by alerts.

Security isn’t static, and CSPM is designed to adapt. Once deployed, it provides continuous monitoring that tracks your cloud security posture in real time. Dashboards update automatically, reports stay current, and alerts come through as soon as something changes.

This makes it easier to identify trends, measure progress, and show improvement over time. During audits or assessments, you’ll have the data to back it up, including logs, evidence of remediation, and posture scores that reflect how risk is being managed day to day.

For long-term oversight, tools like Backup & Recovery helps you keep your data protected and restorable even in the event of a security incident. Meanwhile, Archive helps reduce exposure by moving aging data to lower-cost storage, while keeping it searchable for compliance and reporting needs.

Not only are you improving how you mitigate these security incidents, but you are also building long-term confidence in how your cloud environments are configured and secured.

Cloud security covers a lot of ground, and CSPM isn’t the only tool in the toolbox. But understanding where it fits can help you build a more complete defense strategy. Here’s how CSPM compares to other common cloud security solutions:

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) focus on controlling and monitoring user access to cloud apps. CASBs are typically used to manage data sharing, detect unauthorized behavior, and enforce security policies across SaaS applications.

In contrast, CSPM focuses on your cloud infrastructure itself — things like storage, compute, and identity settings across AWS, Azure, and other platforms. While CASBs prevent sensitive data from being exposed through risky user activity, CSPM prevents risks from misconfigurations or weak infrastructure controls.

Ultimately, they work well together: CASB helps manage who has access, while CSPM helps secure what they’re accessing.

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) take a broader approach to cloud security. These tools combine several capabilities — including CSPM, container security, CI/CD scanning, and workload protection — into a single platform.

While CSPM is focused on configuration and posture at the infrastructure level, CNAPP zooms in on the application layer. It’s used by teams building and deploying code in cloud-native environments to detect risks in runtime, dependencies, or code pipelines.

You can think of CSPM as a component within a larger CNAPP strategy. If you don’t need full application-layer protection, CSPM offers a more focused — and often faster — way to secure your cloud environment.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms collect and analyze event data from across your tech stack. They’re essential for incident detection, investigation, and response, especially in enterprise environments.

But SIEMs typically don’t assess configuration risks or check for compliance drift. That’s where CSPM fills the gap. Instead of relying on logs and alerts after something happens, CSPM helps you proactively find and fix issues in your cloud posture before they lead to an incident.

Used in tandem, SIEM and CSPM offer both event-driven response and posture-driven prevention.

The more your cloud presence grows, the more important it becomes to stay ahead of security risks. And when your configurations are clean, your policies are enforced, and your risks are under control, everything runs smoother. CSPM gives you the visibility and control to make that happen.

The Salesforce Platform supports secure, scalable cloud experiences that grow with your business. Whether you’re building applications, managing sensitive data, or aligning with compliance requirements, having the right security posture sets the foundation for trust and agility.

Learn more about the Salesforce platform to see how you can better secure your cloud infrastructure.