The Three Pillars of a CARTA-enabled CSPM Strategy

This blog was originally published by Secberus here.

Written by Fausto Lendeborg, Secberus.

The cloud has changed how enterprises operate today. It has allowed companies to more easily store and share data. And with all this new data, it's increasingly important to make sure your security strategy is aligned with business intent. The best way to ensure alignment? With an adaptable, customizable and scalable governance solution. When considering a cloud security posture management strategy within your governance plan, a continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment enabled-CSPM (CARTA) is imperative. Using a CARTA-enabled CSPM strategy allows you to create customizable policy statements, leverage adaptable policy logic, and utilize context-rich policy workflows. Here's why these three things are important to you.

1. Policy Statement

A high-level description of the security goal that you are trying to achieve.

When creating a policy statement, you want to define a security strategy that applies to specific OUs, applications, and environments so you can monitor and minimize drift from intended baseline security configurations. However in the process, you may run into issues involving customizability and limitations when configuring your security strategy.

Using a product that is CARTA-enabled, you can define, customize, and apply policies across data sources in multi-cloud environments. A CARTA-enabled product can configure policies to support exceptions and read tags, adjust to risk, and completely align with the intent of your business. This allows you to minimize drift and almost completely eliminate false positives.

2. Policy Logic

The underlying code that is executed to validate control configurations required by the policy statement.

When mapping your regulatory compliance to custom policies, one of the pain points you may encounter involves your policy logic not being able to adapt to the bespoke needs of your business.

A CARTA-enabled product gives you built-in and customizable mapping capabilities that you can map to your required compliance requirements. All of your policies can be scoped in accordance with your organizational logic and business requirements to ensure real-time compliance and reporting.

3. Policy Workflow

A policy workflow allows you to configure your violation management based on policy execution (policy logic + exceptions).

In remediating misconfigurations, you will want to return your security posture to the appropriate baseline as quickly as possible to reduce risk exposure.

With a CARTA-enabled product you get an accurate baseline that allows you to nearly eliminate false positives and alert fatigue. And with the violations that you get, you can use context-rich workflows to send to the right team at the right time. This allows developers (or any engineer) to remediate faster without the guesswork and get back to business.

Keep reading about what a Governance Platform with a CARTA-enabled CSPM strategy can do for your enterprise. Check out: What if we saw an end to alert fatigue?