What is CSPM?
The primary focus of CSPM is the identification and mitigation of cloud infrastructure security risks.
It acts as a sort of internal auditor for the cloud environment, ensuring vulnerabilities are proactively addressed, enforcing security policies, and maintaining regulatory compliance.
CSPM’s main features and capabilities are:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning: CSPMs can detect misconfigurations or vulnerabilities introduced in development, alerting staff to flaws in need of remediation. To accomplish this, they employ static application security testing (SAST) to analyze IaC templates and scripts prior to deployment. The scans can additionally pinpoint misconfigurations in diverse cloud components such as storage buckets, firewalls, and IAM policies.
- Continuous Monitoring: CSPMs provide continuous monitoring of cloud infrastructure, including an updated list of cloud assets. CSPMs frequently leverage machine learning algorithms to detect unusual behavior or activity which may indicate a threat. They evaluate cloud resources against predefined security policies, enhancing adherence to compliance guidelines. Anomalies detected by CSPMs result in real-time alerts to notify security staff of potential threats.
- DevOps Integration: CSPMs integrate seamlessly with popular continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools. They embed security checks within the development lifecycle, at various stages of the CI/CD pipeline, to ensure that only secure code gets deployed. They additionally offer APIs and SDKs for custom DevOps tooling integration.
CSPMs offer organizations enhanced capabilities to secure and monitor their cloud infrastructure, ensuring compliance and reducing the risk of security incidents.
What is CWPP?
CWPP is a security solution designed to secure individual workloads running within the cloud.
It guards cloud workloads in real-time, safeguarding applications, containers, and serverless functions throughout the development lifecycle. Its primary features are:
- Runtime Application Protection: CWPP can enforce policies on specific files, directories, and processes to prevent unauthorized execution. It protects an application’s memory allocation against buffer overflows, heap spraying, and other memory-based exploits. CWPP can additionally monitor individual processes within an application to detect anomalous behavior indicative of an attack.
- Application Behavior Visibility: Application runtime monitoring capabilities of CWPP allows for behavior comparisons against established baselines, rapidly identifying deviations. CWPP is able to inspect network traffic for data exfiltration or other potentially dangerous communications. It also offers user analytics to identify unusual activity which may indicate a threat, such as a compromised account.
- Container Security: Ahead of deployment, CWPP can scan container images for vulnerabilities, malware, and other security issues. During container operation, it enforces security policies, monitors behavior, and controls interactions with the host system or other containers. CWPP helps to manage secrets such as API keys, passwords, and certificates used within the container environment.
The strong protections provided by CWPP enable organizations to mitigate risks and maintain a strong security posture in their cloud environments.
Similarities Between CSPM and CWPP
CSPM and CWPP both enhance cloud security and are commonly paired together in the same DevSecOps workflows. They have some of these capabilities in common:
- Integration: Both CSPM and CWPP offer automation and integration with popular DevOps tools and CI/CD pipelines.
- Continuous Monitoring: Both solutions provide continuous monitoring capabilities, facilitating the rapid detection of abnormal behavior, ensuring security staff is promptly alerted.
- Policy Enforcement: CSPM verifies that cloud infrastructure adheres to best practices, while CWPP enforces policies at the workload level.
- Visibility: CSPM offers a view inside cloud asset configuration, while CWPP provides visibility into application, container, and user behavior.
These two security solutions have similar basic capabilities – but their focus and purposes are distinct.
The Difference Between CSPM and CWPP
While CSPM and CWPP have some overlapping capabilities from a conceptual standpoint, these security solutions ultimately have very different purposes.
CSPM – focusing on cloud security posture
The primary focus of CSPM is in strengthening the overall cloud security posture. It targets the infrastructure: virtual machines, storage, networking and other resources. CSPM’s main uses are in:
- Misconfiguration detection
- Unauthorized access identification
- Policy enforcement
- Compliance assessment
Organizations that manage their own Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resources, have strict compliance requirements, or need security flaws remediated early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) can benefit from CSPM implementation.
CWPP – protecting the workloads
On the other hand, CWPP’s focus is to secure platforms, including:
- Containers
- Serverless functions
- Other high-level cloud services
CWPP focuses on runtime application protection, behavior analysis and threat detection within cloud workloads. It’s intended to address malware infections, malicious insiders, abnormal application behavior, and zero-day exploits.
Which One to Choose?
Organizations with a strong focus on protecting their applications, APIs, and related services benefit from CWPP deployment, where CWPP’s real-time threat detection and incident response capabilities are a valuable asset.
Organizations adopting containerized or serverless architectures, which require workload-specific protection, also benefit from CWPP solutions.
Use of CWPP and CSPM for Comprehensive Protection
A layered approach to security has several benefits, including:
- Establishing redundancies and fail-safes which provide resilience.
- Promoting flexibility that is able to adapt to a broad range of threats.
- Reducing risks by mitigating multiple potential threat vectors.
Implementing both CSPM and CWPP creates a layered security approach for the cloud, enabling organizations to secure both the underlying infrastructure (CSPM) and the applications running on it (CWPP). And, by sharing threat intelligence data between these solutions, the organization’s overall security posture is further enhanced.
The combination of these two powerful security solutions helps organizations to construct strong defenses against a wide range of cloud security risks.
CWPP and CSPM with CloudGuard CNAPP
CSPM and CWPP work together to secure cloud environments. CSPM continuously monitors cloud infrastructure and configurations for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, while CWPP provides real-time protection of workloads from malware, insider threats, and similar security risks.
CloudGuard CNAPP offers a unified approach to cloud security management by integrating both CSPM and CWPP capabilities into a single platform. The Ultimate Cloud Security Buyer’s Guide shows how CNAPPs eliminate the need for separate cloud security tools, reduce operational overhead, and provide comprehensive visibility and control over both infrastructure and application security.
To learn more about how Check Point Software helps organizations better maintain compliance, protect sensitive data in the cloud, and ensure business continuity, sign up for a free demo of CloudGuard.
Feedback