CASB vs. CSPM vs. CWPP: Comparing Cloud Security Tools

Address distinct cloud security needs through CASB, CSPM, and CWPP. CASB secures cloud access, CSPM ensures cloud configuration compliance, and CWPP protects workloads.

The ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity indicates that new threats and attack methods are emerging constantly. With new advancements in technology, malicious actors across the spectrum continue to adapt and new threats have been emerging from all corners of the world. To ensure the safety of the networks and important sensitive data, it is essential that business organizations around the world leverage technologies like cloud security.

Cloud security points to a collection of technologies and procedures designed and developed to address external and internal threats for a better security posture of business organizations. This article discusses in detail, cloud-based security policies such as Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP). We’ll discuss the similarities and differences among these cloud security technologies, their key features, and their use cases.

What is a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)?

CASB is an on-premise or cloud-based software that sits between cloud applications and cloud service users. Its purpose is to monitor all activities and enforce security policies. It offers a large number of services to companies that make use of cloud computing by protecting them from data breaches and cyberattacks. It further enhances visibility, data control, threat detection, and analytics.

Key Features of CASB

1. Cloud Governance: It helps to manage cloud resource usage with greater efficiency and effectiveness as it effectively enforces governance policies. It further helps to optimize cloud operations and ensures that cloud services are used in a secure and compliant manner.
2. Threat Protection: CASB evolves continuously to respond to the ever-changing threat landscape and proactively ensures threat detection. CASB leverages technologies like artificial intelligence, and machine learning along with other automation tools to detect anomalies and other threats such as ransomware and malware.
3. Encryption: CASB encryption encrypts data before it travels to the CSP. It is a data security process wherein plain text data is encoded into ciphertext to keep it secure while the data travels between different environments.
4. Configuration Audit: Before deployment of software, CASB ensures that the software satisfies the specified requirements. Configuration Audit is conducted by CASB for Software as a Service (SaaS) through security posture management solutions. This solution improves visibility into possible misconfigurations in the SaaS service and allows the security management team to remediate them.
5. Shadow IT discovery: Shadow IT is discovered by CASB by analyzing network traffic and logs, which assists with the identification of unauthorized cloud services and apps used within an organization.

What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?

The primary focus of CSPM is to identify and remediate risks by automated visibility, ensuring uninterrupted monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows. It assists in improving the cloud security posture by looking out for misconfigurations across diverse cloud environments and infrastructure. It can be considered as a segment of IT security tools that are designed for the identification of misconfiguration issues and compliance risks.

Key Features of CSPM

1. Threat Detection: The automated threat detection of CSPM tools leverages technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies ensure that CSPM proactively identifies threats and improves monitoring capabilities for cloud infrastructures.
2. Automated Remediation: CSPM has automated remediation capabilities, which not only assist with the identification of misconfigurations but also assist in fixing the detected misconfigurations. It helps organizations to quickly address the problems they come across. It also helps to reduce the risk exposure of business organizations.
3. Visibility: To detect threats with greater efficiency and to respond to those threats, visibility into cloud infrastructure plays a crucial role. CSPM provides organizations with improved visibility into their cloud environment. It allows organizations to detect risks quickly and respond to those risks swiftly. It also helps to have a closer look at the security configuration. CSPM solutions, in most cases, make use of AI-based connectivity to improve visibility into cloud assets and configuration.
4. Continuous Monitoring: CSPM allows for continuous monitoring of cloud-based risks, which allows the detection of threats, and response to threats in real-time. Continuous monitoring features of CSPM tend to identify plus look after all the deployed cloud resources and assets in real-time. It ensures cloud security by continuously monitoring the misconfigurations and security breaches.

What is a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)?

CWPP is a security tool focused on the detection and removal of threats inside cloud software. CWPPs are agent-based, wherein a software agent runs permanently into a computer machine that needs to be protected. It helps to gather data relevant to security and send the collected data to the cloud-based services. CWPP provides ongoing security by monitoring and managing cloud workloads. It supports workloads interacting with cloud environments automatically detecting and addressing threats, vulnerabilities, and errors within any of the infrastructures.

Key Features of CWPP

1. Vulnerability Management: CWPP assists with the identification of potential vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure. It also helps to remediate the vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are identified by a regular scanning of the environment. It is capable of applying necessary patches and updates as per the requirement.
2. Network Security: The primary purpose of deploying CWPP is to protect the cloud network. Security of the cloud network is ensured here by the implementation of firewalls, intrusion detection systems (or IDS), intrusion prevention systems, and other security controls to minimize the risk of cyberattacks by malicious actors.
3. Access Control: Access control helps manage user access to the cloud environment deployed by an organization. It involves the implementation of robust authorization and authentication mechanisms in the system to ensure that there is no unauthorized access to valuable data and information of the organization.
4. Threat Detection and Prevention: CWPP helps with threat identification and assists in responding to security threats in a timely and optimized manner. It includes the implementation of security processes and security management tools, which assist in the proactive detection of threats and also assists in countering system security breaches as they occur.

CASB vs CSPM vs CWPP: An Analysis of Key Differences

As most organizations shift to the cloud, securing cloud networks has turned out to be the priority across the spectrum. Tools such as CASB, CSPM, and CWPP have been at the forefront of ensuring cloud security for organizations. However, there are some major differences in their features and functionality.

1. CASB: CASB is considered to be the firewall for cloud services. The focus here is on ensuring that the actions of the user comply with the security policies of the organization in an authorized manner through security policy enforcement gateways. One of the major benefits of CASB is that it can identify the cloud services being used by the organization and can raise alerts when necessary. It provides policy-based encryption and ensures regulatory compliance with its auditing and reporting tools and malware detection. The primary four pillars of CASB are visibility, compliance, data security, and threat protection.
2. CSPM: The primary function of CSPM is to identify and remediate risks by automated visibility, ensuring uninterrupted monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows. It focuses on the protection of cloud environments from the outside by assessing the secure and compliant configuration of the cloud platform’s control plane. It assists with continuous compliance monitoring, and security operations along with configuration drift prevention. CSPM tools provide the necessary cloud visibility to detect and prevent configuration errors before they cause a breach. Risk assessment, risk visualization, risk identification, and incident response are some of the key features of CSPM.
3. CWPP: CWPP is a workload-centric security protection solution for all types of workloads. It ensures comprehensive and targeted protection for workloads both on-premise and in the cloud environment. It scans the cloud environment to look out for improperly configured security settings that do not meet the requirements of regulatory compliance. It also helps to identify vulnerabilities beforehand, reducing the exposure of the organizations to risk. It ensures faster detection of exploits and threats in real-time, while vulnerability scanning and configuration management ensure cloud security. Accessibility and automation make it popular among organizations.

Parameter	CASB	CSPM	CWPP
Primary Focus	Ensures that the actions of the user comply with the security policies of the organization in an authorized manner through security policies enforcement gateways	Identification and Remediation of risks by automated visibility, ensuring uninterrupted monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows	CWPP is a workload-centric security protection solution for all types of workloads. It ensures comprehensive and targeted protection for workloads both on-premise and in the cloud environment.
Key Features	Visibility, compliance, policy-based encryption, threat protection, and malware detection	Compliance monitoring, security operations along configuration drift prevention.	Vulnerability scanning, configuration management, real-time threat detection, and automation
Visibility	Identifies the cloud services being used and raises alerts if necessary	Ensures automated visibility to identify risks across the cloud environment	Scans the cloud environment to look out for improperly configured security settings
Compliance	Regulatory compliances with auditing and reporting tools	Compliance monitoring	Regulatory compliances for workloads
Threat Protection	Protects against threats through enforcement of policies	Detection and prevention of configuration errors to avoid breaches	Real-time and comprehensive threat detection
Automation	Automated security policy enforcement	Automation is not a primary feature in this case	Automatically scans for vulnerabilities and manages configurations.
Target Environment	Primarily protects SaaS applications	Protects cloud platform planes	Protects workloads
Core Benefits	Visibility, compliance, policy-based encryption, threat protection, and malware detection	Compliance monitoring, security operations along configuration drift prevention.	Vulnerability scanning, configuration management, real-time threat detection, and automation

CASB, CSPM, and CWPP Use Cases

CASB Use Cases

1. Discover and Control Shadow IT: CASB discovers shadow IT through automation and reveals the risky apps being visited by users. Automated policy enforcement then allows for actions like allowing and blocking, restricting the usage, and preventing the upload.
2. Controls Sharing of Risky Files: CASB is capable of crawling files in your SaaS tenants to look out for sensitive data, check the users with whom the file is being shared, and respond to risky shares.

CSPM Use Cases

1. Multi-Factor Authentication: CSPM solutions are capable of assisting with multi-factor authentications and help to implement encryption across all cloud accounts.
2. Data Protection: It assists with the prevention of credential leakage, data thefts, and other security misconfigurations.

CWPP Use Cases

1. Division of Network: It helps with easily managing the security of multiple networks by dividing the network.
2. Threat Monitoring and Detection: It helps to monitor and detect threats in cloud workloads across different types of cloud environments.

Conclusion

CASP, CSPM, and CWPP play a crucial role in ensuring the safety of organizations against cloud-based cyber threats and help to come up with a robust cloud security posture for organizations. Leveraging these tools and services is essential for organizations all across the globe to enhance visibility into their network, protect their crucial data, and come up with automation for better remediation.

FAQs

Is CASB better than CWPP for protecting cloud applications?

It depends on the requirements of the organization. If the requirement is to protect workloads, then CWPP is a better choice than CASB.

What is the difference between CWPP vs CSPM?

CSPM is more focused on assessing and ensuring the security configuration of the cloud environment, while CWPP is concerned about protecting the workloads.

Can CSPM help prevent data breaches caused by CASB policy violations?

Yes, the automated detection features of CSPM can help to detect and mitigate risks of an ongoing bias.

How does a CWPP address runtime threats?

CWPP addresses runtime threats through behavioral analysis and machine learning.