Top 7 CSPM Use Cases with Real-life Examples in 2025

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is a set of technologies, procedures, and practices that assist companies in identifying and resolving security risks associated with their cloud posture.

Companies typically use cloud security posture management (CSPM) vendors to protect their data assets from malware, network threats, and data exfiltration. 

Below are the most common CSPM use cases that can help you assess your cloud security risks:

1. Identifying misconfigurations

CSPM systems offer standard configuration checks, also known as policies. These configuration checks continuously scan cloud environments to identify misconfigurations across cloud services and resources. 

CSPM products can identify misconfigurations such as:

• Open network ports
• Missing security patches
• Publicly available Kubernetes Service endpoints
• Overly permissive roles
• Exposed storage buckets

Here is an example of a misconfigurations tab on the findings page that displays the configuration risks identified by a CSPM solution:

Source: Elastic

Real-life example — Aramis Group uses CSPM to identify misconfigurations:

Aramis Group, a European B2C online automobile sales company, uses a CSPM system to identify and prevent misconfigurations and security threats across their cloud-native applications. This helps the company gain visibility into all cloud assets and apply pre-built policies to deliver faster compliance support and role-based access controls.

To learn more about data security explore our data-driven research:

2. Incident response

Some CSPM systems provide incident response capabilities, along with remediation suggestions, and DevOps integration in hybrid and multi-cloud environments/infrastructures.

These tools provide a set of protocols to follow when threats are discovered, and documentation for reacting to and resolving such threats. Moreover, these platforms enable users to integrate incident data with ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira), and alerting systems (e.g., Slack).

This enables security operations managers and analysts to monitor current and high-priority detection alerts and cases, as well as identify the hosts and people associated with them.

Here is an example of A CSPM tool displaying a list of alert counts and severity:

Source: Elastic

Real-life example — Petrofac leverages incident response with CSPM across its containerized resources:

Petrofac, an energy services company, uses CSPM to detect its containerized resources, identify vulnerabilities, and gather real-time data. This helps Petrofac’s security team obtain an in-depth visibility of their infrastructure and perform proactive protection against Kubernetes risks.

See Petrofac’s real-time network communication and analytics for Azure Kubernetes Service workloads:

Source: Upwind

3. Cloud compliance monitoring

Numerous compliance frameworks and rules vary by region, state, and/or country. CSPMs continuously monitor these standards across your cloud accounts and Kubernetes clusters, allowing your organization to identify, manage, and remediate threats.

Common compliance frameworks include the following: 

• ISO 27001
• PCI-DSS 
• SOC 2
• Center for internet security (CIS) benchmarks 
• General data protection regulation (GDPR)
• Health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 (HIPAA)

See examples of compliance risks that CSPM technology shows:

Source: Elastic

Real-life example — Intezer uses a CSPM tool to ensure compliance:

Intezer, an autonomous SOC platform, uses out-of-the-box monitoring for its cloud infrastructures to ensure compliance. The CSPM tool enables to run vulnerability scanning and container scanning. This helps the company to streamline its reporting process and readily show a strong security posture to auditors and stakeholders.

4. Threat detection

Traditional security techniques rely on proxies and sensors to identify threats like malware, and data exfiltration.

CSPM enables security teams to identify breaches in action by leveraging telemetry from cloud providers such as network traffic (e.g., Amazon VPC flow logs) and events (e.g., AWS CloudTrail event logs).

These systems use policies to constantly check logs and events for abnormalities and suspicious activities.

Real-life example — Resolution Life automates threat detection with CSPM, SOAR, and XDR:

Resolution Life, an Australian life insurance provider, utilizes a CSPM platform alongside security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and extended detection and response (XDR) systems to enhance its cybersecurity posture.

By leveraging these technologies, Resolution Life automates critical security processes, enabling real-time threat detection, quick incident response, and mitigation. This integrated approach helps the company to proactively detect and prevent modern threats across its operations.

5. Shadow IT detection

Shadow data refers to any organizational data that occurs outside of a centralized and secure data management system. This includes data duplicated, backed up, or kept in a way that does not adhere to the organization’s desired security architecture.

CSPMs monitor sensitive data through the cloud, assisting enterprises in identifying and automatically remediating data issues by:

• Discovering shadow data where it should not be.
• Identifying sensitive data with poor security postures.
• Detecting duplicate data, and tracking it across multiple environments

Real-life example — SE2 eliminates shadow IT

SE2 is a third-party administrator of life insurance contacts.  SE2 relies on a multi-account structure in AWS. Within those accounts, there are 500 EC2 instances with several hundred security groups and multiple users who are authorized to make configuration changes.

SE2 used a CSPM solution to eliminate any shadow IT activities. The solution automatically notified the SE2 team when a new workload was created, helping the company gain visibility across cloud and on-premise environments.

6. Risk prioritization

CSPM technologies may identify and classify security concerns based on their severity. This is especially crucial for teams managing large amounts of security alerts.

Here’s an example of how CSPM platforms may identify risks in a cloud environment:

• S3 buckets that are publicly available, or a cloud database service with poor or no authentication, would be considered a high-priority risk since they may result in a significant data breach.
• S3 buckets that may be accessed by numerous users, as well as databases with an excessive number of administrative users, are considered low-priority risks.

Real-life example — IntelyCare leveraged CSPM to prioritize risks: 

IntelyCare leveraged its CSPM solution to prioritize risks within its cloud environment. Here’s how the company utilized CSPM to achieve this:

• The platform analyzed cloud misconfigurations and permissions and ranked risks based on their severity.
• By focusing on the highest-priority risks first, the team addressed vulnerabilities without overwhelming resources.

By leveraging CSPM for risk prioritization, IntelyCare was able to:

• Address critical risks within two months.
• Avoid manual, resource-intensive processes that would have taken months for multiple security professionals.
• Scale its cloud security strategy across all AWS environments, including Kubernetes.

7. Monitoring and reporting

As security teams consistently discover and remedy cloud infrastructure misconfigurations, they should observe a decrease in risk over time.

CSPM products with built-in reporting features assist security teams in validating their work and communicating with important stakeholders. Organizations implementing regulated apps on public cloud infrastructure can use CSPM to address compliance posture concerns such as:

• Do I pass or fail my compliance checks?
• How much of my environment is compliant?
• Which resources are not compliant, and how can I address them?

CSPM systems provide the ability to generate easily consumable reports. For example, security teams may produce a PCI DSS report in PDF format, displaying each PCI rule and proving that their cloud architecture satisfies each control.

Real-life example — A regional banking giant secures 8,000+ public cloud resources with CSPM:

One of the largest banks in the ASEAN region uses a CSPM platform that continuously monitors and collects policy, configuration, and check data from the client’s AWS and Azure cloud accounts, as well as running distributed data analytics pipelines to generate reporting. 

The reporting provides automated measurements and trends on cloud posture, compliance violations, key performance indicators, and alignment with customer goals and external standards. This helps savings of 1-2 hours per week of manual reporting.

Here is an example of a CSPM solution providing insights into cloud assets, cloud security controls, cloud misconfigurations, cloud vulnerabilities, and cloud compliance:

Source: Human Managed

What is cloud security posture management (CSPM)?

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and mitigates risk by automating visibility, continuous monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows to look for misconfigurations across various cloud environments/infrastructure, including:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

CSPM also ensures that your cloud services and applications are accurately configured to ensure that your organization adheres to compliance standards such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and CIS.

Cloud misconfiguration occurs when a cloud infrastructure’s security architecture violates a configuration policy. CSPM provides insight across cloud environments, allowing you to detect and correct configuration issues through automation.

CSPM tools monitor and mitigate risk across an organization’s entire cloud attack surface using:

• Continuous monitoring
• Threat detection and prevention
• Remediation workflows

Any workloads that do not match security criteria or identified risks are flagged and added to a prioritized list of issues to address. This enables you to implement these guidelines to mitigate the likelihood of attacks on each of your cloud assets.

Why is CSPM important?

As the number of people and companies moving to the cloud grows, so does the number of purposeful and unintentional security vulnerabilities.

And, while data breaches are common, the majority of errors are still caused by cloud misconfigurations and human error.

Threats to cloud security configurations and infrastructures, as well as the increasing risk of inadvertent disclosure, can take various forms. A CSPM can protect your company from the following:

• Misconfiguration
• Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
• Account hijacking
• Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
• Lack of visibility
• Unauthorized access
• Insecure interfaces/APIs
• External data sharing

Industry insights: What do analyst firms say about CSPM?

According to Gartner, CSPM is gaining interest, with numerous studies looking into its role as a standalone solution and as part of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs). In the market Guide for CNAPPs report, Gartner says 75% of new CSPM purchases will be integrated into CNAPP solutions by 2025.

Forrester defines CSPM as an important component of Cloud Workload Security (CWS). They evaluated CSPM capabilities as part of their overall review of CWS providers in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security Q1, 2024.

GigaOm, one of the few businesses that conducts specialized CSPM research, evaluated and ranked prominent CSPM providers in their 2023 GigaOm Radar: Cloud Security Posture Management study, which provides new insights into this evolving area.

To learn more about CSPM tools check our data-driven articles evaluating top CSPM vendors:

CSPM vs other cloud security solutions

• CSPM and CNAPP: CNAPP offers a comprehensive picture of cloud security concerns in a single platform. It includes cloud security policy management (CSPM), cloud service network security (CSNS), and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP).
• CSPM and CWPPs: CWPPs only protect workloads; CSPMs examine entire cloud environments. Additionally, CSPMs provide more complex automation and guided remediation than CWPPs.
• DSPM and CSPM: Both DSPM and CSPM give visibility, identify and rectify misconfigurations, and improve compliance, however, CSPM is more focused on cloud infrastructure configuration. DSPM focuses on data stored in the cloud. 

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