Effectively using a CSPM dashboard is crucial for maintaining a robust security posture and ensuring compliance in your cloud environment. Here are some best practices so that you can make the most of your CSPM dashboard:

• Regular monitoring and review: Regularly monitor the dashboard to stay updated on the security and compliance status of your cloud infrastructure. Review the data, alerts, and reports provided by the dashboard to identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities.
• Configure real-time alerts: Set up real-time alerts for critical security events or policy violations. This allows you to respond quickly to security incidents and address issues as they arise.
• Prioritize critical risks: Focus on addressing high-severity risks and vulnerabilities first. Prioritize remediation efforts based on the potential impact on your cloud resources and data.
• Automate remediation: Integrate the CSPM dashboard with cloud orchestration and automation tools to automate remediation tasks. This helps streamline the process and reduces the time it takes to address security issues.
• Customize policies: Customize the CSPM dashboard’s policies so that they align with your organization’s specific security requirements, compliance standards, and risk tolerance levels.
• Drill down into details: Utilize the dashboard’s drill-down capabilities to investigate and analyze specific cloud resources and configurations in detail. This will help you understand the root cause of security issues.
• Share insights with stakeholders: Share the dashboard insights and reports with relevant stakeholders, including IT teams, security teams, compliance officers, and management. Effective communication ensures everyone is on the same page regarding security risks and compliance status.
• Implement security best practices: Follow security best practices recommended by your CSPM provider and cloud service providers to optimize your cloud security posture.
• Educate and train teams: Ensure that your IT and security teams are familiar with the CSPM dashboard and its features. Provide training to maximize its effectiveness and empower them to use it efficiently.
• Periodic reviews and updates: Periodically review and update your CSPM policies, configurations, and alerts so that you can adapt to changes in your cloud infrastructure and security requirements.
• Integrate with other security tools: Integrate the CSPM dashboard with other security tools, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems and threat intelligence platforms, to enhance your overall security capabilities.
• Continuous improvement: Continuously analyze the data and trends provided by the dashboard to identify areas of improvement in your security practices. Use these insights to implement proactive measures and continuously enhance your security posture.

By following these best practices, organizations can effectively leverage their CSPM dashboards to identify and address security risks, maintain compliance, and strengthen the overall security posture of their cloud environment. These dashboards become powerful tools for proactive security management and ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of cloud resources and data.

Summary

CSPM dashboards serve as visual interfaces that provide insights into an organization’s cloud security and compliance posture. This chapter delved into different types of dashboards, including risk dashboards, inventory dashboards, identity dashboards, network security dashboards, and reporting dashboards. Each dashboard type has unique features tailored to specific aspects of cloud security and management. This chapter emphasized the importance of visualizing data related to risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, user identities, network infrastructure, and compliance statuses. It also touched on the value of exporting CSPM dashboard data to external reporting tools, enabling comprehensive analysis, sharing, and collaboration across different departments and stakeholders.

In the next chapter, we will dive deeper into major configuration risks.

Further reading

To learn more about the topics that were covered in this chapter, take a look at the following resources:

• Simplifying Your Multi-Cloud Security Strategy: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/2019/03/simplifying-multi-cloud-security-strategy/
• Manage & prioritize vulnerabilities across your entire cloud estate: https://orca.security/platform/vulnerability-management/
• CSPM Executive Dashboard: https://help.accuknox.com/saas/cspm-executive-dashboard/