Introduction to Unified Security Posture Management (USPM)

What is unified security posture management (USPM)?

As organizations adapt to an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape, they face challenges like managing, securing, and maintaining visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These factors expand the attack surface, making it harder to maintain a cohesive security strategy as organizations rely on a jigsaw of cloud security and vulnerability tools covering individual layers like infrastructure, applications, APIs, data, AI, and SaaS. Unified cloud security posture management (USPM) addresses these challenges by offering an integrated security approach that consolidates security data from across all layers of cloud infrastructure, enabling organizations to monitor, analyze, and improve their overall security posture in real-time.

At its core, USPM is a solution that centralizes security data, providing visibility into both multi-cloud and hybrid environments. This emerging model addresses the limitations of siloed tools like cloud security posture management (CSPM) and external attack surface management (EASM) — by integrating data and insights from various sources. USPM bridges CSPM, DSPM, ASPM, CIEM, and EASM gaps, offering a more unified and comprehensive approach to managing security across both cloud and on-premises infrastructures. This evolution ensures security teams have the full context to identify and mitigate risks more effectively.

USPM key features

USPM brings together essential capabilities that empower security teams to manage and enhance their organization's security posture, including:

Integrated threat intelligence

USPM integrates with a wide range of threat intelligence sources, providing security teams with a broader understanding of the ever-evolving threat landscape. By centralizing this information, USPM helps identify potential risks from both internal and external sources, offering a real-time view of current tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This comprehensive integration ensures that security teams can proactively address vulnerabilities, respond to emerging threats faster, and stay ahead of adversaries.

Real-time monitoring of security posture changes

With USPM, organizations benefit from continuous, real-time monitoring of their security posture. This feature automatically tracks any changes — from misconfigurations to anomalous behavior — and immediately flags them. This enables security teams to act swiftly to any emerging issues before they escalate, ensuring a more agile and responsive security strategy. Whether it's a shift in cloud security or a new vulnerability on an endpoint, USPM ensures that security teams know about new risk exposures as they emerge.

Automated risk analysis and prioritization

USPM’s automated risk analysis takes the heavy lifting out of vulnerability management. By automatically analyzing security risks and prioritizing them based on business impact, USPM helps security teams to focus on the threats that matter most. This automation not only saves time but also reduces the likelihood of human error. The system continuously evaluates the organization's security standing, ensuring that resources are directed toward mitigating the most critical risks first.

Unified dashboard for actionable insights

A central feature of USPM is its unified dashboard, which provides a consolidated view of security data across all integrated tools. This dashboard delivers actionable insights that help security teams quickly assess their security posture, identify potential weaknesses, and track ongoing efforts. With everything in one place, teams can easily monitor trends, prioritize actions, and collaborate effectively. This unified approach helps streamline the decision-making process and makes it easier to act on security intelligence when it's most needed.

USPM vs CSPM

As organizations expand their digital environments, the tools they use to manage security posture need to evolve. So, what’s the difference between USPM and cloud security posture management (CSPM), and why does it matter?

CSPM’s primary focus is on identifying misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues within cloud infrastructures. Its purpose is to ensure that your cloud environment adheres to best practices and compliance standards, protecting them from cloud-specific risks.

But as organizations move toward hybrid and multi-cloud environments, there’s a growing need for a holistic approach, and that’s driven the demand for USPM solutions. Unlike CSPM, which is focused solely on cloud infrastructure, USPM provides visibility across organizations’ infrastructure, applications, APIs, data, AI, and SaaS. This includes hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures, endpoints, and even external attack surfaces. By integrating security data from all these different sources, USPM enables organizations to manage their security posture in a more unified and comprehensive way.

USPM benefits

USPM offers a range of benefits designed to streamline and strengthen security operations. Some of the most significant benefits include:

• Enhanced threat visibility: USPM gives organizations a holistic view of their security landscape, ensuring that risks across both cloud and on-premises environments are captured and analyzed. This comprehensive visibility empowers security teams with better situational awareness, allowing them to spot vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats in real-time.
  
• Centralized security operations: By consolidating insights from various security tools into a single platform, USPM helps reduce the complexity of managing multiple security solutions. This centralization alleviates alert fatigue, which provides teams with a more manageable flow of information. The unified approach also streamlines incident response efforts by presenting clear, actionable data, which accelerates decision-making and response times.
  
• Improved compliance management: USPM helps organizations stay on top of regulatory requirements by automating the tracking and reporting of compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. With a unified audit trail, USPM ensures that all activities and changes are logged and can be easily reviewed during audits. This automation reduces the manual effort involved in maintaining compliance, minimizes the risk of non-compliance, and ensures that organizations are always prepared for audits.
  
• Automation and scalability: USPM automates routine tasks, such as vulnerability scanning and patching, which helps security teams save time and resources. Additionally, the platform scales effortlessly with the growth of IT environments. As organizations expand, the platform can handle increased complexity without compromising performance.

How USPM complements existing tools

USPM enhances existing security tools by integrating data into a single platform. This integration creates a centralized source of truth, giving security teams a more complete and accurate picture of their security posture across all environments. By consolidating insights from various tools, USPM improves the overall effectiveness of existing systems, ensuring that they work together seamlessly.

Additionally, USPM fosters stronger collaboration between IT and security teams by providing a unified framework for managing security. This shared platform helps bridge operational silos, promoting more efficient workflows and a coordinated response to threats. With USPM, organizations can maximize the value of their existing security investments while improving cross-team processes.

Falcon Cloud Security’s approach to USPM

Unified security posture management is revolutionizing the way organizations approach cybersecurity by addressing the limitations of isolated tools. With its centralized approach to monitoring and management, USPM provides the visibility, automation, and operational efficiencies needed to combat evolving threats. By adopting USPM, organizations can strengthen their overall security posture, ensuring robust protection and regulatory compliance across all platforms.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security provides USPM capabilities with its unique CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform) that continuously monitors cloud risks across CSPM, ASPM, data security posture management (DSPM), AI security posture management (AI-SPM), CIEM and SaaS security posture management (SSPM) to provide full-stack security insights. This integrated approach offers a real-time, comprehensive 360-degree view of an organization’s security posture, spanning across multi- and hybrid cloud environments. With FCS, cloud security teams gain unparalleled insights into their entire infrastructure, enabling them to proactively identify and mitigate risks across all layers of their organization’s cloud environment.