As organizations increasingly rely on the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, managing and securing these environments has become a top priority. Two key solutions in this space are SaaS security posture management (SSPM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM).
Both play essential roles in protecting your digital assets. The question is, how do you decide between SSPM and CSPM? The question comes down to your unique organizational needs and the scope of your cloud environments. Here’s everything you need to know so you can identify which solution is right for your business.
Defining SSPM and CSPM
Before shifting attention to the SSPM vs. CSPM head-to-head comparison, it’s important to consider the intended purpose of these two solutions.
What Is SSPM?
SaaS security posture management is designed to secure SaaS applications such as Salesforce. While each of these applications can be essential to your day-to-day operations, they also hold business-critical data that must be secured.
SSPM’s primary role is to monitor, manage, and secure your SaaS applications by configuring them per established best practices and security standards. SSPM technology continuously monitors your configurations and permissions to identify any misconfigurations that may expose your business to undue risks.
If a misconfiguration is discovered, the SSPM technology will typically provide a way to fix any affected data, permissions, etc.
What Is CSPM?
In contrast, cloud security posture management focuses on cloud infrastructure environments. These environments include platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, where you run your workloads, store data, and manage resources. Misconfigurations within your cloud infrastructure could lead to security vulnerabilities.
CSPM tools provide insights into network security, access control, and compliance with cloud-specific regulations. Your security team can use these insights to improve the company’s cybersecurity posture and help mitigate security risks that could lead to unplanned downtime or compromise your reputation.
Why They Are Both Important
When it comes to SSPM vs. CSPM, it’s essential to realize that both play key roles in achieving and maintaining SaaS security. The increased adoption of cloud and SaaS applications broadens your attack surface and increases the risk of accidental errors.
In reality, it’s not a question of SSPM or CSPM. Both CSPM and SSPM solutions can assist you in reducing the risk of data breaches. The tools complement one another, with SSPM protecting SaaS applications and user data and CSPM securing your cloud infrastructure.
Core Differences Between SSPM and CSPM
Understanding the fundamental differences between SaaS security posture management and cloud security posture management can help your organization determine where each solution adds value. Both approaches are essential in their respective areas (SaaS app protection and cloud infrastructure management). However, they differ in some critical areas.
The SSPM vs. CSPM comparison comes down to four key differences, which are outlined below.
Scope of Protection
In terms of protection, SSPM vs. CSPM tools have very different areas of focus. SSPM revolves around securing your SaaS applications and the data stored within them. SSPM tools are meant for popular cloud-hosted applications, such as Salesforce, to ensure that your access controls and configurations are consistently monitored and optimized.
The key here is that SaaS apps are managed by third-party providers. SSPM helps you exercise user-side control over SaaS environments, which includes access, permissions, and configurations. SaaS security posture management tools don’t monitor backend servers or databases directly. Instead, they focus on protecting the data within your SaaS environment.
In contrast, CSPM secures your cloud infrastructure, which may include platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. These environments host a variety of resources that you need to manage and monitor for security issues, including virtual machines, databases, and storage services.
CSPM tools take a broader, infrastructure-centric approach, focusing on areas like storage security, networking, and access policies across your entire cloud environment. By providing real-time visibility into your cloud applications and infrastructure, CSPM helps you identify security gaps and expedite incident response.
Compliance and Regulatory Focus
SSPM solutions are relevant to compliance standards that apply to your SaaS application security posture. For example, SOC 2 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are important frameworks that address how you should handle and protect user data within SaaS environments.
SOC 2 is a security framework that mandates that SaaS apps meet specific criteria for safeguarding customer data. The GDPR applies to data involving EU citizens and focuses heavily on privacy. SSPM tools assist your organization in maintaining compliance by ensuring that your SaaS apps are configured correctly to protect data.
CSPM helps your organization monitor and maintain compliance across its cloud environments by ensuring that security settings and data storage protocols meet regulatory standards. When you leverage CSPM, you can protect your company from regulatory violations and maintain consumer trust.
CSPM solutions are focused on compliance with cloud infrastructure-specific regulations. Examples include the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and NIST.
Monitoring and Management
The final SSPM vs. CSPM difference is what each one is designed to monitor and manage. SSPM tools provide real-time monitoring of SaaS apps. These solutions give you a better understanding of configurations, permissions, and usage patterns. Continuous monitoring empowers your company to detect unusual behavior and enables your IT teams to respond promptly to threats.
SSPM tools can also flag any changes to app configurations that might expose your business to additional risk. This visibility into the SaaS environment allows your business to maintain control over its applications and limit access to authorized users.
The scope of CSPM tools is much broader. These solutions continuously assess and monitor your entire cloud infrastructure. CSPM tools can be valuable to your cybersecurity efforts, as they can detect and alert you to any configuration issues that may open the door for a data breach.
CSPM solutions automatically detect potential misconfigurations and alert administrators. Some of the more advanced CSPMs can even correct minor issues automatically, which further reduces your attack surface. This proactive approach to cloud security enables your business to address vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them.
When to Use SSPM, CSPM, or Both
While both tools are essential in certain contexts, the choice of which solution to implement — or whether to use both — depends on your organization’s infrastructure and security needs.
SSPM is particularly useful if you rely heavily on SaaS applications. These tools provide comprehensive monitoring of permissions and configurations. Similarly, if you store sensitive client or patient information within SaaS applications, SSPM tools can lower the risk of data breaches.
Some organizations have extensive cloud infrastructure, such as e-commerce platforms with cloud-hosted databases or tech companies using virtual machines. These businesses are prime candidates for CSPM. The technology will provide your team with crucial visibility when multiple cloud services are in use.
In environments where your business heavily relies on both SaaS applications and complex cloud infrastructure, implementing both SSPM and CSPM represents the best approach. For instance, suppose that you host customer data on Google Cloud but use Salesforce to manage your customer-facing operations. In that case, your business would benefit from both solutions.
How Can Own Help with Data Security?
The SSPM vs. CSPM conversation leads to one logical conclusion: you need to do everything you can to stop security threats in their tracks. Taking advantage of both tools can help you do exactly that.
At Own, our SSPM tool for Salesforce, Own Secure, can help strengthen your security posture in Salesforce and reduce risk. Explore our data security solutions to learn more.
