Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Cloud Security Posture Management

Cloud platforms move fast. Resources are provisioned in seconds, identities accumulate over months, and configuration drift is a constant threat. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) gives security teams continuous visibility into the security state of their cloud environments, automatically detecting misconfigurations, mapping attack paths, and providing the evidence needed to drive remediation.

ExternalScan embeds CSPM capabilities directly into its External Attack Surface Management platform, so teams never have to choose between monitoring what is exposed on the Internet and monitoring how their cloud is configured.

What is CSPM?

CSPM refers to a category of security tools designed to continuously monitor, assess, and improve the security posture of cloud environments. These tools collect configuration data from cloud platforms and evaluate it against established security policies and best practices.

According to the UK National Cyber Security Centre, misconfiguration is the leading cause of cloud breaches. CSPM addresses this by:

• Maintaining a comprehensive, always-current inventory of cloud resources across accounts, regions, and subscriptions.
• Detecting misconfigurations before they are exploited, from overly permissive storage buckets to publicly reachable management ports.
• Providing contextual risk prioritisation so that findings are ranked by exploitability and business impact rather than raw severity.
• Mapping network exposure and attack paths to show how an attacker could move laterally from one resource to another.
• Surfacing Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) recommendations to prevent the same misconfiguration from being redeployed.

CSPM capabilities in ExternalScan

Cloud resource inventory

ExternalScan connects to your cloud accounts and identity providers to build a real-time inventory of every resource that could carry risk. The inventory covers:

• Domains, hostnames, and IP addresses discovered from DNS and cloud networking metadata.
• TLS certificates: including expiry dates, algorithms, and mismatches between subject names and deployed services.
• Network blocks (CIDRs) tracked as first-class assets with ASN, organisation, and country enrichment.
• Identity principals: user accounts and service principals collected from Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) via the Microsoft Graph API, with department, job title, account status, and associated email addresses.

Identity and access monitoring

Poorly managed identities are one of the most exploited attack vectors in the cloud. ExternalScan discovers every user and service principal in your Entra ID tenant and models them as principal assets alongside your network assets. This provides a unified view of:

• Enabled vs. disabled accounts: inactive principals with lingering permissions.
• Service principals and application registrations with broad Graph API permissions.
• Email addresses associated with each account, enabling correlation with domain and certificate assets.

Misconfiguration and drift detection

ExternalScan runs continuous baseline scans and flags configuration drift the moment it occurs:

• New services or open ports appearing on the perimeter.
• Certificates renewed with weaker algorithms or shortened validity.
• Net blocks expanding into previously unmonitored address space.
• Principals re-enabled or permissions elevated outside a change window.

Attack path and network exposure analysis

ExternalScan builds a graph of relationships between assets, domains resolving to IPs, certificates bound to hosts, principals owning cloud resources, and highlights paths an attacker could traverse from an external entry point to a sensitive internal resource.

Compliance and reporting

Evidence of control is a compliance requirement. ExternalScan produces:

• A continuously updated asset inventory ready for audits, M&A due diligence, or regulatory reviews.
• Trend dashboards showing how the attack surface and principal count evolve over time.
• Exportable reports that demonstrate remediation progress to leadership and regulators.

CSPM and EASM: stronger together

CSPM and External Attack Surface Management are complementary disciplines.

Treating them separately creates blind spots. A misconfigured storage account is a CSPM finding; the public DNS record pointing to it is an EASM finding. ExternalScan correlates both in a single platform, so you see the complete picture, from the first DNS resolution to the cloud resource it reaches.

Get started

Ready to assess your cloud security posture?

Book a demo and our security team will walk you through how ExternalScan discovers your cloud assets, detects misconfigurations, and maps identity risk across your environment.