What Are the 6 Principles of Cloud Security Posture

As a child, everyone is taught to "work on your posture." Why is that? Having great posture can improve your health, mood, and confidence. The same applies to clouds and workloads. Focusing on proper posture will ensure your cloud data stays healthy and secure, and that you'll have confidence to take on any risk that may be thrown at it.

In the world of technology, poor cloud posture can be a silent killer. While organizations commonly focus on fortifying the front door, it's often an innocuous misconfiguration that allows adversaries to sneak right in. In fact, 80% of cloud breaches are due to misconfigurations. Part of the challenge is that many teams setting up cloud infrastructure or cloud services prioritize connectivity and functionality, taking focus away from security.

Before we take a deep dive on Zscaler's new innovations around posture, let's set the stage a bit. The two main industry approaches to posture management currently focus on SaaS and IaaS. SaaS security posture management (SSPM) ensures misconfigurations in business platforms like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google aren't putting your data at risk from a breach. Its counterpart on the IaaS side, called data security posture management (DSPM), does the same for AWS, Azure, and Google, and provides data discovery and classification. In short, these services help you understand where all your sensitive data is located and which misconfigurations may be exposing it.

So with that, let's explore 6 principles of cloud data protection you should think through.