How are CAASM and CSPM different?

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Comparing Cloud Security Posture Management to Cyber Asset Visibility and Attack Surface Management.

While there is overlap in functionality between tools that handle Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), the reality is they serve different functions and should be seen as complementary, not competitive. CSPM tools let you discover, identify, and remediate threats, misconfigurations, misuse, and compliance violations in your cloud infrastructure. CAASM tools give you full asset visibility, beyond cloud service providers, across your entire multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and enable asset inventory, asset management, identify scope of vulnerabilities, and identify gaps in security controls. 

CSPM and cloud workload protection

CSPM tools like Wiz, Lacework, Prisma Cloud, Orca Security and others help secure infrastructure, containers, and anything running in your cloud workloads. They integrate with the major cloud service providers (CSP) including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). CSPM tools will also help you scan for and manage vulnerabilities related to your cloud infrastructure, and may have built in compliance frameworks for cloud security.

CAASM and attack surface protection

You likely leverage dozens of tools in your technology stack, including SaaS applications, code repositories, identity and access providers, vulnerability scanners, ticketing systems, and more. These tools represent hundreds of thousands of assets containing critical information your security team needs to properly secure your environments. CAASM aggregates asset data from these tools, both internal and external cyber assets. This allows you to make queries to identify gaps in coverage for security tools, such as vulnerability assessments and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools. CAASM replaces time-consuming manual processes, making it easier to collect and manage asset information.

JupiterOne: complete cyber asset visibility

JupiterOne is a cyber asset attack surface management platform that aggregates and normalizes data from your CSPs, along with your IAM tools, SIEM, code repos, mobile device managers, endpoint detection, and other compliance and alerting tools. The additional asset and relationship data in JupiterOne gives you the necessary context to triage vulnerabilities, investigate security incidents, discover potential attack paths, control user access and permissions, automate compliance, and mitigate risk.

Recommended solution

By adding your critical infrastructure, workload, and vulnerability data from your CSPM via API to JupiterOne, you are enabling your team to manage security risks from one place, making it far easier to prioritize time and secure your entire technology stack.

CSPM Integrations

How it works

  1. Agentless Scanning with CSPM: CSPMs primarily use an agentless scanning approach to analyze your cloud applications and workloads.
  2. API-Based Integration with JupiterOne: JupiterOne uses an API-based approach to ingest data, including accounts, users, assets, and findings from your CSPM.
  3. Data Aggregation and Correlation: JupiterOne aggregates this data and correlates it to reveal connections between cyber assets.
  4. Centralized View for Security Operations: This centralized view enables security teams to triage incidents, track down vulnerabilities, assess the impact or blast radius across the organization, and ensure that your cloud, workloads, and applications are properly configured and secured.

Hundreds of pre-built queries

JupiterOne provides hundreds of pre-built questions that cannot be answered without the full breadth of integrations that we provide.  Click here to see a list of SecOps questions and the associated queries that enable better identity and access management, incident response, and vulnerability management. 

Sample Environment

This sample technology stack leverages multiple software providers that each solve different problems. JupiterOne aggregates data from your entire technology stack to provide a more holistic picture of your security posture.

CSP Integrations

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP

Non-CSP Integrations

  • Okta
  • Slack
  • Jamf
  • CrowdStrike
  • GitHub
  • Qualys

Highlighting asset relationships and context

Every line in this diagram represents a relationship that adds contextual knowledge to help you answer security questions faster and easier. 

As you can see, there are many connection points between asset data in AWS, Azure, Jamf, GitHub, Qualys, Okta, and other tools. The level of detail obtained by aggregating and normalizing this data in JupiterOne can’t be found without connecting the dots between all of these tools, mapping the relationships, and giving you a simple way to ask questions of the data.

With a CSPM and JupiterOne, cloud security risks discovered in a CSPM platform map directly to JupiterOne asset entities. JupiterOne aggregates data and findings from your CSPM's applications and cloud services. Using the JupiterOne graph data model, you can correlate this information with asset data from other applications in your security and IT stack via API integrations with over 200+ cloud and on-premise applications, as well as custom integrations that you can easily set up on the platform.

Integrating allows users to view CSPM results in JupiterOne and gain a unified view of cloud security risks. Assets from your CSPM may have relationships with other entities outside of cloud infrastructure, giving your teams greater visibility and making it easier to prioritize risks with the added context that JupiterOne provides.

Schedule a personalized demo to see how your team can leverage JupiterOne to secure your cyber assets and attack surface. Visit www.JupiterOne.com to learn more.

John Le
John Le

John is the Director of Product Marketing at JupiterOne. He is an experienced cybersecurity product marketer and excels in crafting consistent messaging, extracting valuable insights from data, and connecting different teams to ensure alignment across the organization. Outside the office, John enjoys wakesurfing, carving down slopes, and supporting his beloved Texas Longhorns and Austin FC.

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