Top 7 CSPM Use Cases with Real-life Examples in 2026
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and fixes security risks in your cloud infrastructure. Companies use CSPM to protect data from malware, network threats, and data theft.
Here are the most common CSPM use cases, with examples from companies that are actually using them.
Use case | Industry | Real-life example |
|---|---|---|
B2C automative sales services | Aramis Group uses CSPM to identify misconfigurations in cloud-native apps. | |
Energy services | Petrofac uses CSPM to monitor containerized resources and detect vulnerabilities. | |
Security software services | Intezer ensures compliance with CSPM for vulnerability scanning and container analysis. | |
Insurance | Resolution Life combines CSPM with SOAR and XDR for real-time threat detection. | |
Insurance | SE2 eliminates shadow IT by monitoring AWS accounts and alerting on new workloads. | |
Healthcare | IntelyCare prioritizes risks using CSPM to address critical vulnerabilities. | |
Banking | A regional banking giant uses CSPM for automated compliance reporting across AWS accounts. |
1. Identifying misconfigurations
CSPM systems continuously scan cloud environments to identify misconfigurations across services and resources.
Common misconfigurations CSPM catches:
- Open network ports
- Missing security patches
- Publicly available Kubernetes Service endpoints
- Overly permissive roles
- Exposed storage buckets
Source: Elastic1
Real-life example:
Aramis Group uses CSPM to identify misconfigurations:
Aramis Group, a European online automobile sales company, uses CSPM to identify and prevent misconfigurations across cloud-native applications.
Visibility into all cloud assets, pre-built policies for faster compliance support, and role-based access controls.2
Real-life example:
Petrofac leverages incident response with CSPM across its containerized resources:
Petrofac, an energy services company, uses CSPM to detect containerized resources, identify vulnerabilities, gather real-time data.3
Results: In-depth visibility of infrastructure, proactive protection against Kubernetes risks.
Source: Upwind4
3. Cloud compliance monitoring
Compliance frameworks and rules vary by region, state, country. CSPMs continuously monitor standards across cloud accounts and Kubernetes clusters.
Common compliance frameworks include the following:
- ISO 27001
- PCI-DSS
- SOC 2
- Center for internet security (CIS) benchmarks
- General data protection regulation (GDPR)
- Health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 (HIPAA)
See examples of compliance risks that CSPM technology shows:
Source: Elastic5
Real-life example:
Intezer uses a CSPM tool to ensure compliance:
Intezer, an autonomous SOC platform, uses out-of-the-box monitoring for cloud infrastructures to ensure compliance.
What they run:
- Vulnerability scanning
- Container scanning
Results: Streamlined reporting process, readily shows a strong security posture to auditors and stakeholders.6
4. Threat detection
Traditional security techniques rely on proxies and sensors to identify threats like malware and data exfiltration.
CSPM approach: Identifies breaches in action by leveraging telemetry from cloud providers:
- Network traffic (Amazon VPC flow logs)
- Events (AWS CloudTrail event logs)
Systems use policies to constantly check logs and events for abnormalities and suspicious activities.
Real-life example:
Resolution Life automates threat detection with CSPM, SOAR, and XDR:
Resolution Life, an Australian life insurance provider, uses CSPM alongside security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), and extended detection and response (XDR) systems.
Results: Automates critical security processes, enables real-time threat detection, quick incident response and mitigation. Proactively detects and prevents modern threats across operations.7
5. Shadow IT detection
Shadow data: organizational data occurring outside a centralized and secure data management system. Includes data duplicated, backed up, or kept in ways not adhering to the organization’s desired security architecture.
How CSPMs monitor sensitive data:
- Discover shadow data where it shouldn’t be
- Identify sensitive data with poor security postures
- Detect duplicate data, track it across multiple environments
Real-life example:
SE2 eliminates shadow IT
SE2, a third-party administrator of life insurance contracts, relies on a multi-account structure in AWS with 500 EC2 instances, several hundred security groups, and multiple users authorized to make configuration changes.
Solution: CSPM automatically notified the SE2 team when a new workload was created.
Results: Eliminated shadow IT activities, gained visibility across cloud and on-premise environments.8
6. Risk prioritization
CSPM technologies may identify and classify security concerns based on their severity. This is especially crucial for teams managing large amounts of security alerts.
Here’s an example of how CSPM platforms may identify risks in a cloud environment:
- S3 buckets that are publicly available, or a cloud database service with poor or no authentication, would be considered a high-priority risk since they may result in a significant data breach.
- S3 buckets that may be accessed by numerous users, as well as databases with an excessive number of administrative users, are considered low-priority risks.
Real-life example:
IntelyCare leveraged CSPM to prioritize risks:
IntelyCare leveraged its CSPM solution to prioritize risks within its cloud environment. Here’s how the company utilized CSPM to achieve this:
- The platform analyzed cloud misconfigurations and permissions and ranked risks based on their severity.
- By focusing on the highest-priority risks first, the team addressed vulnerabilities without overwhelming resources.
By leveraging CSPM for risk prioritization, IntelyCare was able to:
- Address critical risks within two months.
- Avoid manual, resource-intensive processes that would have taken months for multiple security professionals.
- Scale its cloud security strategy across all AWS environments, including Kubernetes.9
7. Monitoring and reporting
As security teams consistently discover and remedy cloud infrastructure misconfigurations, risk should decrease over time.
CSPM reporting helps answer:
- Do I pass or fail my compliance checks?
- How much of my environment is compliant?
- Which resources are not compliant, and how can I address them?
CSPM systems generate easily consumable reports. Security teams produce a PCI DSS report in PDF format, displaying each PCI rule and proving the cloud architecture satisfies each control.
Real-life example:
A regional banking giant secures 8,000+ public cloud resources with CSPM:
One of the largest banks in ASEAN region uses CSPM platform that continuously monitors and collects policy, configuration, and check data from AWS and Azure cloud accounts.
What it provides:
- Automated measurements and trends on cloud posture
- Compliance violations tracking
- Key performance indicators
- Alignment with customer goals and external standards
Results: Savings of 1-2 hours per week of manual reporting.10
Source: Human Managed11
What is cloud security posture management (CSPM)?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and mitigates risk by automating visibility, continuous monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows to look for misconfigurations across various cloud environments/infrastructure, including:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
CSPM also ensures that your cloud services and applications are accurately configured to ensure that your organization adheres to compliance standards such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, and CIS.
How do CSPM tools help to secure cloud infrastructure?
Cloud misconfiguration occurs when a cloud infrastructure’s security architecture violates a configuration policy. CSPM provides insight across cloud environments, allowing you to detect and correct configuration issues through automation.
CSPM tools monitor and mitigate risk across an organization’s entire cloud attack surface using:
- Continuous monitoring
- Threat detection and prevention
- Remediation workflows
Any workloads that do not match security criteria or identified risks are flagged and added to a prioritized list of issues to address. This enables you to implement these guidelines to mitigate the likelihood of attacks on each of your cloud assets.
Why is CSPM important?
As the number of people and companies moving to the cloud grows, so does the number of purposeful and unintentional security vulnerabilities.
And, while data breaches are common, the majority of errors are still caused by cloud misconfigurations and human error.
Threats to cloud security configurations and infrastructures, as well as the increasing risk of inadvertent disclosure, can take various forms. A CSPM can protect your company from the following:
- Misconfiguration
- Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
- Account hijacking
- Legal and regulatory compliance concerns
- Lack of visibility
- Unauthorized access
- Insecure interfaces/APIs
- External data sharing
Industry insights: What do analyst firms say about CSPM?
According to Gartner, CSPM is gaining interest, with numerous studies looking into its role as a standalone solution and as part of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs). In the market Guide for CNAPPs report, Gartner says 75% of new CSPM purchases will be integrated into CNAPP solutions by 2025.12
Forrester defines CSPM as an important component of Cloud Workload Security (CWS). They evaluated CSPM capabilities as part of their overall review of CWS providers in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security Q1, 2024.13
GigaOm, one of the few businesses that conducts specialized CSPM research, evaluated and ranked prominent CSPM providers in their 2023 GigaOm Radar: Cloud Security Posture Management study, which provides new insights into this evolving area.
14CSPM vs other cloud security solutions
- CSPM and CNAPP: CNAPP offers a comprehensive picture of cloud security concerns in a single platform. It includes cloud security policy management (CSPM), cloud service network security (CSNS), and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP).
- CSPM and CWPPs: CWPPs only protect workloads; CSPMs examine entire cloud environments. Additionally, CSPMs provide more complex automation and guided remediation than CWPPs.
- DSPM and CSPM: Both DSPM and CSPM give visibility, identify and rectify misconfigurations, and improve compliance; however, CSPM is more focused on cloud infrastructure configuration. DSPM focuses on data stored in the cloud.
Further reading
Reference Links
Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.
Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.
He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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