While cloud posture assessments help organisations understand their security baseline, they only reflect a single moment in time. As cloud usage scales and delivery speeds increase, this approach alone is no longer sufficient. Continuous Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has emerged to address this challenge, providing ongoing visibility and assurance as environments evolve.
This blog explores the challenges organisations face in the cloud, where traditional assessments fall short, and why a continuous approach is becoming essential.
What Are Common Challenges in the Cloud?
Speed of Change and Configuration Drift
Cloud adoption has transformed how organisations build, deploy, and operate technology, but it has also introduced security challenges that were not present in traditional environments. One of the most common issues is constant change. Infrastructure is no longer static, resources are created, modified, and removed daily, increasing the risk of misconfiguration.
This challenge is compounded by the fact that infrastructure can be deployed in multiple ways, including infrastructure-as-code, automation pipelines, command-line tools, and cloud portals.
As a result, misconfigurations can be introduced across the entire development lifecycle from how infrastructure is defined, through deployment, and into day-to-day operation. Without consistent standards and guardrails, the same service can be configured differently depending on how it is deployed, creating misconfigurations in multiple places.
Visibility
Limited visibility across cloud environments further amplifies this risk. As organisations scale, security teams often struggle to maintain a complete and up-to-date view of all resources and their configurations. Without consistent visibility across all stages of the development lifecycle, risks can go unnoticed and accumulate over time. Even when environments start in a secure state, configuration drift over time can erode security controls as changes are introduced through different teams and deployment paths.
Shared Responsibility and Ownership
The shared responsibility model introduces additional complexity. While cloud providers are responsible for securing the underlying platform, customers remain accountable for how services are configured, how identities are managed, and how data is protected. This distinction varies by service and is often misunderstood, leading to assumptions that security controls are in place by default when responsibility actually sits with the organisation.
This challenge is closely linked to ownership and accountability. Multiple teams often deploy and manage resources across shared platforms, with security responsibilities distributed between engineering, platform, and operations functions. Without clearly defined ownership and consistent guardrails, security issues can persist because it is unclear who is responsible for identifying, prioritising, and remediating them.
These challenges make it difficult to maintain a secure posture using manual or infrequent security reviews alone.
What is a Cloud Posture Assessment?
A cloud posture assessment is a focused, point‑in‑time review of how securely your cloud environment is configured, helping you identify risks, misconfigurations, and opportunities to strengthen your overall security posture. Unlike continuous monitoring, it provides a snapshot of your security posture at a specific moment, offering clear guidance on where improvements are needed.
What Are the Benefits of a Cloud Posture Assessment?
Cloud posture assessments are a common and valuable starting point for improving cloud security. They provide organisations with a structured view of their environment, typically assessing cloud resources against recognised best practices and security frameworks.
For many organisations, a posture assessment helps establish a security baseline. It highlights misconfigurations, identifies gaps in controls, and provides clarity on areas of highest risk. This insight is especially valuable when onboarding new cloud environments, supporting audits, or validating that foundational security controls are in place.
Posture assessments also help create shared understanding across security, engineering, and leadership teams. By translating technical findings into clear recommendations to improve the state of security, posture assessments support informed decision-making and prioritisation.
However, by design, posture assessments reflect the state of an environment at a specific point in time. They provide visibility into what is secure or insecure at the moment the assessment is performed.
Why Are Point-In-Time Assessments No Longer Best Practice?
The primary limitation of traditional cloud posture assessments is that cloud environments do not remain static.
As discussed earlier, resources are continuously created, modified, and removed. Access permissions change, automation introduces configuration updates at speed, and multiple teams deploy infrastructure through different pathways. As a result, the findings of a posture assessment can begin to lose relevance shortly after it is completed.
Point-in-time assessments also make it difficult to track how risk evolves over time. New misconfigurations introduced after the assessment are not detected, and previously remediated issues may re-emerge through configuration drift.
In fast-moving or large-scale cloud environments, this can create a false sense of assurance where an organisation believes its cloud posture is under control based on a report that no longer reflects reality.
This does not diminish the value of posture assessments, but it does highlight their limitations when used in isolation. To maintain confidence in cloud security over time, organisations need an approach that continuously validates posture as environments evolve. This is where continuous cloud security posture management comes in.
What is Continuous Cloud Security Posture Management?
Continuous cloud security posture management is the ongoing process of monitoring cloud environments to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and policy violations in real time. It provides continuous visibility across cloud services, ensuring that security baselines and compliance requirements are consistently met. By automatically identifying and prioritising risks, continuous cloud security posture management helps organisations maintain a strong and resilient cloud security posture.
Continuous cloud security posture management builds on traditional posture assessments by shifting security from a point-in-time exercise to an ongoing capability.
Rather than providing a single snapshot of risk, continuous cloud posture focuses on maintaining security over time. It continuously assesses cloud environments against agreed standards, best practices, and organisational policies, identifying misconfigurations as they are introduced.
What are the Benefits of Continuous Cloud Security Posture Management?
Continuous cloud security posture management reflects the reality and needs of modern cloud environments and operations. As environments evolve through automation, infrastructure-as-code, and frequent change, security controls must be validated just as frequently across all stages of the development lifecycle. Continuous posture enables organisations to detect configuration drift, track remediation progress, and maintain visibility as new resources and services are deployed.
Importantly, continuous cloud posture is not just about tooling. It combines people, process, and technology to provide meaningful insight into risk. Findings are prioritised based on impact and context, helping teams focus on what matters most rather than being overwhelmed by volume.
By providing ongoing assurance rather than periodic reassurance, continuous cloud security posture management allows organisations to align security with the pace of cloud delivery reducing risk while supporting, rather than slowing, innovation.
In practice, continuous cloud posture means integrating security validation into day-to-day cloud operations. Configuration changes are assessed as they occur, risks are identified early, and security teams gain ongoing insight into how posture evolves over time.
This enables more proactive risk management, clearer ownership of remediation, and improved alignment between security and engineering teams. Rather than relying on periodic reviews, organisations gain confidence that security controls remain effective as environments scale and change, supporting both governance requirements and faster, safer delivery.
How Does Continuous Cloud Security Posture Work?
Continuous cloud posture is often enabled through Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), which bring together posture management, visibility, and risk context across cloud environments. When implemented correctly, CNAPP platforms support continuous assessment, prioritisation, and remediation of findings using automation and workflows. Used as part of a broader operating model, CNAPP platforms help organisations manage cloud security at scale while maintaining flexibility and control.
Cloud security cannot rely on snapshots alone. Continuous Cloud Security Posture Management helps organisations maintain visibility, reduce risk, and scale securely.
FAQs
- What is continuous Cloud Security Posture Management?
Continuous CSPM is an ongoing capability that evaluates cloud environments in real time, identifying misconfigurations as soon as they are introduced rather than relying on periodic assessments.
- Why are point in time cloud posture assessments no longer enough?
Cloud environments evolve continuously. Because assessments only capture a single moment in time, their findings can quickly become outdated as new resources are deployed, or configuration drift occurs.
- What is the purpose of a cloud posture assessment?
A cloud posture assessment evaluates cloud resources against best practices and recognised frameworks to highlight misconfigurations, identify gaps in controls, and establish a baseline security posture.
- What causes configuration drift?
Configuration drift occurs when cloud resources gradually diverge from their intended secure state due to frequent changes across multiple deployment paths.
- How is continuous CSPM different from traditional assessments?
Traditional assessments provide a snapshot in time, while continuous CSPM validates security continuously as environments change.
- Who is responsible for cloud security under the shared responsibility model?
Cloud providers secure the platform, but organisations remain responsible for configuration, identity, and data protection.
- What tools support continuous CSPM?
CNAPP platforms provide continuous posture assessment, risk context, and automated remediation workflows.
- What role do CNAPP platforms play in continuous cloud posture?
CNAPP platforms provide end‑to‑end visibility by unifying multiple cloud security capabilities including CSPM into a single, integrated solution. By bringing together insights and context that were previously spread across separate tools, CNAPP enables continuous monitoring throughout the entire development lifecycle, covering resource configurations, code, and runtime activity. This unified approach allows organisations to quickly identify risks or potential attack paths and maintain a consistently strong cloud security posture as their environments evolve without the complexity of managing multiple tools.
Jakub Fras
Senior Cloud Security Consultant
