CSPM vs SSPM

The explosion of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps and cloud usage is related. After all, today, it’s commonplace for enterprise teams to call up an app that lives in a cloud infrastructure and have it perform specialized business tasks. Where else would these apps live? Could SaaS exist without the cloud? 

So why are their security solutions different?

Does anyone really need both? 

In spite of their similar-seeming domains, here we are: different solutions made to protect different needs and ecosystems.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) are on the radar of modern cloud-first organizations. So let’s look at how these technologies interact and complement each other. This article will summarize the distinctions between CSPM and SSPM, as well as provide selection criteria and best practices for each. 

High-Level Comparison: Understanding CSPM and SSPM

Though they may be relegated to the nearly endless capacity of cybersecurity products to create new acronyms from similar names, CSPM and SSPM differ in some significant ways. Let’s start with the basics.

What is CSPM? 

CSPM tools manage and monitor the configuration and posture of cloud infrastructure that teams provision on platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure. That includes: 

• Identity and Access Management (IAM), from over-permissive roles and policies to the use of root accounts and privilege escalation paths.
• Compute services like unpatched virtual machines (VMs), misconfigured auto-scaling groups, and improper tagging.
• Storage services like buckets without encryption, publicly accessible buckets, or those missing versioning or logging.
• Networking issues, ranging from open ports to missing authentication.
• Logging and audit issues, like drift detection and alerting.
• Compliance enforcement, like validation vis à vis frameworks like GDPR or CIS Benchmarks, and mapping resource states to compliance controls.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can also be included in CSPM capabilities, scanning templates for insecure defaults and managing pre-deployment misconfiguration detection.

CSPM solutions tend to provide near real-time alerts to potential misconfigurations or violations, ensuring that security teams do not let issues go unaddressed. These alerts come from monitoring the entire cloud infrastructure of the organization for potential issues. 

What is SSPM? 

SSPM tools manage and monitor the configuration and posture of SaaS applications that organizations license and rely on, including Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Slack. These applications are externally hosted and maintained, which limits an organization’s control over deployment and infrastructure, but SSPMs help manage those parts that customers can control, including:

• Who has access (IAM)
• What they can see and share (data exposure)
• Which third-party apps are connected (OAuth governance)
• How well settings adhere to compliance rules

Core Differences Between CSPM and SSPM

CSPM and SSPM differ in a few key ways. 

Feature	CSPM	SSPM
Scope of coverage	Cloud infrastructure and services (like IaaS/PaaS), including IAM, networking, storage, and compute configurations	SaaS application settings and user access, via vendor APIs (like Google Workspace)
Risk domains	Misconfigurations leading to data exposure, privilege escalation, insecure networks, or noncompliant cloud services	Data leakage, third-party OAuth risk, dormant user access, and compliance violations within SaaS platforms
Access model complexity	Federation across cloud IAM, often with external IdPs, managing least privilege access across roles and services	Decentralized SaaS admin panels with inconsistent permission models, limited control over enforcement of IdP-based policies
Integration depth	Deep access to cloud-native APIs, infrastructure-as-code templates, and cloud provider security services	API-based visibility only, no access to SaaS backend. Monitoring limited to what vendors exposure (which varies)
Policy management	Enables enforcement of posture baselines across multiple cloud accounts or orgs. Supports drift detection and remediation	Detects deviation from internal or external compliance baselines like GDPR, often offers guided or auto-remediation for SaaS-specific risks
Asset discovery challenges	Shadow accounts, forgotten cloud services in multi-cloud orgs, lateral risk across cloud regions or providers	Shadow SaaS usage, unvetted OAuth apps, duplicate accounts across platforms, and orphaned access after offboarding
IAM complexity	IAM policies, trust relationships, temporary credentials, service roles, and access keys	SaaS user roles, SSO enforcement, account linking, external collaborators, and inconsistent MFA application
Compliance mapping	Strong alignment with frameworks: CIS, PCI-DSS, NIST, ISO. Typically mature controls.	Often focused on SaaS-specific compliance like GDPR, HIPAA, and CPRA

Organizations often adopt CSPM first when they begin scaling cloud infrastructure across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. They’ll need visibility into misconfigurations, exposed services, and unmanaged identities that become harder to track as resources and infrastructure scale. CSPM gives teams the ability to apply consistent posture policies, identify drift, and align with baseline compliance controls. 

SSPM enters the picture later, when an organization becomes more heavily reliant on SaaS apps for collaboration, customer management, or document storage, and when those SaaS apps start to pose real data governance risks. 

It’s a quiet transition: over-shared Google drives and unvetted third-party apps connected to Slack often sneak into environments without much fanfare and even less oversight. 

SSPM becomes essential when teams need visibility and control over who has access to these SaaS environments and the assets in them, and when regulatory rules dictate they’ll need to keep closer tabs on these distant environments.

Can One Tool Do Both Jobs? What About CNAPP?

There’s no tool today that does CSPM and SSPM well since they operate in fundamentally different ecosystems with different data access models. When tools offer both features, they do so through different modules that are architecturally distinct. 

CNAPPs are a typical upgrade for CSPM when teams need to add runtime protection to their pre-deployment misconfiguration management strategies, but the move doesn’t typically include SSPM. Using a CNAPP for CSPM makes sense because security posture is tightly linked to workload runtime behavior, identity misuse, and threat detection. 

CNAPPS can correlate misconfigurations with live exploit paths and attack surface exposures, which extends the abilities of basic CSPMs in actionable ways. But SSPM lives outside this domain. It complements CSPM or CNAPPs, securing a parallel SaaS stack that organizations rely on but don’t directly control.

How to Evaluate Whether You Need CSPM, SSPM, or Both

Evaluating whether to deploy CSPM, SSPM, or both can come down to organizational priorities. It is possible for security teams to need only one solution, but they are often used together for more complete coverage. Keep in mind that these two technologies address distinct areas within the larger context of cloud security. 

Deciding between these solutions requires considering several factors: 

• What is being protected: The difference in focus between CSPM and SSPM can drive the decision on which to deploy. If the goal is to secure cloud infrastructure, then it would make more sense to deploy a CSPM. Monitoring SaaS applications for issues as a priority leans more toward an SSPM. 
• Which controls are required: CSPMs focus on applying controls at the base level of cloud infrastructure, while SSPM emphasizes protections for data that’s stored in third-party applications. Depending on which controls the organization needs, this can be a decision point for organizations in deciding which solution to deploy. 
• Visibility requirements: CSPM tools provide granular visibility into cloud resources and underlying infrastructure. SSPM solutions do not offer that visibility largely because organizations don’t deploy that software at all. If the security team needs to protect underlying cloud resources, then a CSPM is likely the better choice. 

Ultimately, multi-cloud teams with a robust SaaS stack need to use CSPM and SSPM solutions in unison. Their use-cases are different enough, and their protection broad enough, that leveraging both engenders stronger cloud security than choosing one over the other. 

How? It goes deeper than what they cover separately.

How CSPM and SSPM Work Together for Complete Coverage

CSPM secures the infrastructure layer, including cloud accounts, services, and configurations across IaaS and PaaS platforms. SSPM, in contrast, secures application-layer configurations in licensed SaaS platforms where team control is limited to identity, access, and sharing policies. Together, they cover operational and visibility gaps between cloud infrastructure and SaaS platforms. 

But the combination isn’t always perfect. Here’s what the team is  likely to face when deploying this particular combo:

Managing the Friction Layer Between Cloud and SaaS

For teams already using both CSPM and SSPM, the real challenge becomes managing the interaction layer between IaaS/PaaS infrastructure and SaaS app usage. While posture is now visible at both ends, the space in between, where developers, third-party vendors, and identity providers bridge the cloud and SaaS environments, can be poorly managed.

For example, users may have least privilege in AWS, but retain persistent admin rights in GitHub, Confluence, or Snowflake, and that means inconsistent enforcement of access policies. 

Achieving Normalization in Compliance Monitoring

Normalization and context can remain barriers to compliance even when visibility is comprehensive. Each tool, after all, comes with its own set of alerts, risk categories, and compliance maps. That can mean different rules about severity and ownership. The next challenge? It’s to correlate cloud control features with SaaS data exposures in a way that’s actionable for internal governance and for auditors.

Key secondary issues are:

• Inconsistent control mapping: If both tools claim to cover GDPR, what does that mean operationally? What does it mean across data residency, identity, and logging policies?
• Policy fragmentation: Is there a centralized policy engine or governance layer? Without one, security teams can duplicate rules and overlook drift while heading off false positives instead.
• Audit overhead: Compliance reporting can’t be siloed efficiently, with teams working from both dashboards. They’d ideally like unified reporting and traceable remediation.

The path forward isn’t always about combining multiple tools, but building a compliance abstraction layer that unifies the tools that teams do have and use. That typically happens via SIEM/SOAR integration for both CSPM and SSPM, so their data is contextualized and normalized against the host of other data sources that protect enterprise resources.

In the end, compliance at scale means stitching together context, not just coverage.

Upwind Unifies Cloud Posture without Losing Depth

Upwind’s advanced CSPM capabilities are part of a broader CNAPP platform, so security teams get deep visibility into cloud infrastructure misconfigurations, identity risks, and runtime exposures, all in one place. While CNAPPS like Upwind won’t offer SSPM, they’ll integrate with identity providers and SaaS-aware IAM tools to correlate across environments, helping teams understand how cloud roles and SaaS environments interact in practice. 

With runtime-aware context, Upwind doesn’t just flag posture issues. It prioritizes them based on exploitability and real-world risk.

Want to see cloud misconfigurations mapped to live workloads and attack paths so you can prioritize what matters most? Schedule a demo.

FAQs

How does SSPM help prevent SaaS data breaches?

SSPM can help prevent data breaches by continuously monitoring and assessing SaaS application configurations, permissions, data sharing settings, and user activity. They focus on:

• Identifying over-permissive user roles and unused accounts
• Finding publicly shared files so they can be protected
• Flagging risky third-party OAuth apps connected to core platforms
• Making sure MFA, SSO, and logging are enforced
• Monitoring for drift from compliance standards

The key? It’s how SSPM automates and remediates issues across all these areas.

Can a single solution cover both CSPM and SSPM needs?

While some organizations might only require either CSPM or SSPM, it’s common for these solutions to be used together, as they address different aspects of cloud security. A single solution could potentially cover some aspects of both, but often, a combination of solutions is the most effective approach for securing both cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications. What do you need to know?

• API access, risk models, and control surfaces differ significantly
• Some vendors offer modular platforms, but they will come with distinct engines for each capability
• Unified reporting is possible through modularity or integrations 
• Most organizations use separate best-in-class tools, or federate both into a broader security platform. Integration is the most common route to achieve the “single pane of glass” that teams desire.

What compliance standards do CSPM and SSPM typically support?

Because they protect different things, CSPM and SSPM align with different standards. 

CSPM typically supports:

• CIS benchmarks
• NIST 800-53
• PCI-DSS
• ISO 27001
• SOC 2 (Infrastructure scope)

SSPM typically supports:

• GDPR
• HIPAA
• CRPA/CCPA
• ISO 27001 (data access and control scope)
• SOC 2 (SaaS usage and data sharing scope)

How do CSPM and SSPM integrate with DevOps workflows?

Both CSPM and SSPM integrate with DevOps workflows by automating security checks within CI/CD pipelines, enforcing policies during development, and providing continuous monitoring of cloud and SaaS environments. Here’s what that looks like.

CSPM can:

• Surface cloud misconfigurations in the CI/CD pipeline
• Scan infrastructure-as-code templates 
• Trigger remediation via GitOps or ticketing workflows

SSPM can:

• Alert on risky SaaS changes (like new admin roles granted) via chat or ticketing
• Sync with identity governance programs
• Detect policy drift post-provisioning