---
title: "Cloud Security Posture Management"
canonical: https://trickest.com/glossary/cloud-security-posture-management
description: "Cloud security posture management continuously checks cloud accounts for misconfigurations and policy violations, such as public storage buckets or overly broad permissions."
---

# Cloud Security Posture Management

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) watches cloud accounts for settings that drift away from a secure baseline. It pulls configuration state through provider APIs across services like compute, storage, networking, and identity, then evaluates each resource against policy rules. The checks catch a storage bucket left public, a security group open to the internet, logging turned off, or encryption missing on a database.

The need comes from how cloud changes happen. Anyone with access can create or alter resources in seconds, and a single setting can expose data with no exploit required. Manual review never keeps pace, so CSPM runs continuously and re-evaluates the account every time something changes.

CSPM overlaps with related work. It surfaces [cloud misconfiguration](/glossary/cloud-misconfiguration) broadly, while [IAM misconfiguration](/glossary/iam-misconfiguration) tooling drills into permissions and trust policies specifically. It complements [container security](/glossary/container-security), which inspects images and runtime rather than account-level config. Posture scans also expose [shadow IT](/glossary/shadow-it), since they enumerate every resource in an account, including ones nobody documented.

In a Trickest workflow, you schedule posture checks across accounts, normalize the findings, and route high-severity exposures into the same triage and ticketing pipeline as your other security signals.

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_Markdown source of https://trickest.com/glossary/cloud-security-posture-management._