Sysdig today rolled out a new unified cloud and container security tool, which adds continuous cloud security posture management (CSPM) to the Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as a new a free forever tier for one cloud account. 

The new offering is based on Cloud Custodian, an open source tool for securing cloud infrastructure, and introduces cloud asset discovery, cloud service posture assessment, and compliance validation capabilities. According to Sysdig, this will enable cloud security teams to manage their security posture by automatically discovering cloud services and flagging misconfigurations and or compliance and regulatory violations.

Sysdig also added support for multicloud threat detection for GCP audit logs, in addition to enhancing support for AWS CloudTrail, using the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) de facto runtime security project, Falco. The service continuously inspects cloud audit logs within a user’s cloud account, which helps to protect sensitive data and eliminate costs tied to exporting logs. 

The company claims the service will provide security teams with a bird's-eye view of their cloud accounts, and enable them to continuously detect suspicious activity or configuration changes across their infrastructure, without relying on periodic configuration checks.

This is important because misconfigurations are the leading cause of breaches and compliance violations in cloud applications. To protect against this threat, Sysdig performs static configuration analysis of cloud infrastructure based on benchmarks like the Center for Internet Security, while CSPM highlights the points of your cloud infrastructure in need of better security.

Because humans are prone to making mistakes and errors are inevitable, Gartner recommends all cloud security vendors invest in CSPM, and forecasts “through 2024, organizations implementing a CSPM offering and extending this into development will reduce cloud-related security incidents due to misconfiguration by 80%.”

CSPM “is only becoming more important,” said Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. “It allows organizations to identify where they have known or unacceptable risk in their cloud configurations, and there’s been multiple acquisitions in this space.”