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Ensure Total Visibility with a Powerful Cloud Security Assessment Tool

If your organization is like most, your cloud computing infrastructure is constantly evolving as new assets are spun up, old ones are retired, and resources are reshaped to meet business needs. However, with this rapid pace of change comes risk. Ephemeral cloud assets, if not closely monitored, can present unique security challenges.

Follow along as we discuss:

  • Why securing your cloud environment is critical
  • The role of cloud security assessments
  • The benefits of cloud security assessments
  • Types of cloud security assessment tools
  • How Censys can enhance your overall posture

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illustration of complex cloud environment

Dynamic Cloud, Dynamic Risks

Cloud platforms offer unique flexibility, scalability, and cost savings, making it possible for organizations to be more agile and efficient.

Yet, as organizations build out their presence in the cloud and reap the benefits, many are confronted with another reality: the challenge of managing, and securing, these complex and continually-changing environments.

The challenges of securing a cloud environment can include:

  • Evolving Assets Are Hard to Track: The ephemeral nature of cloud resources make it difficult to maintain up-to-date asset inventories, and monthly and weekly inventory updates are not enough. Temporary or unknown/forgotten cloud assets can be easily missed in traditional security scans.
  • The Risk of Misconfiguration Can Be High: Cloud services are easy to deploy, widely available, and have many more permissions and settings that could be potentially misconfigured (think: open storage buckets, exposed APIs). It’s why misconfigurations are the leading cause of cloud breaches.
  • The Shared Responsibility Model Can Create Confusion: Major cloud providers provide the underlying infrastructure, but organizations themselves are responsible for properly configuring and securing their cloud applications. Misunderstanding or overlooking this responsibility can lead to security gaps.
  • Achieving Total Visibility Isn’t Easy: Enterprise organizations are dealing with expansive, multi-cloud environments incurred from mergers, acquisitions, and hypergrowth that make gaining visibility into all of their assets difficult. Without complete visibility, the ability to identify vulnerabilities, Shadow IT, or unauthorized access becomes even harder.
  • Prioritizing What Attackers Can Exploit: Attackers target what’s exposed and exploitable, often faster than organizations can identify risks. Navigating complex cloud environments to understand what is exposed is challenging but a necessary factor to consider to reduce critical risk and close security gaps before they are exploited.

For these reasons and more, security teams need a dedicated strategy for securing their cloud. Cloud security platform tools are an essential part of this strategy. These tools empower security teams to assess, address, and prevent potential threats before they impact business operations.

How Cloud Security Assessment Tools Protect Your Cloud Environment

Cloud security assessment tools help security teams address the unique risks of the cloud. They’re designed to provide a clear, up-to-date view of what’s happening in a cloud environment and help teams stay ahead of potential threats. Security teams can run these assessments on their cloud environments to identify security risks, vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps.

A typical cloud security assessment will analyze:

  • What you have: An assessment will inventory all of your cloud assets, even the temporary or hidden ones.
  • What’s at risk: An assessment should pinpoint weaknesses and highlight exposures like open storage buckets or insecure access settings.
  • How to fix it: An assessment will offer actionable recommendations to secure your assets and reduce your risk.

The Benefits of Cloud Security Assessments

Cloud security assessments give organizations an advantage in a number of ways, including:

Benefit #1: Improved Asset Visibility

We know that cloud environments are dynamic, with cloud assets frequently being added, removed, or modified. A cloud security assessment tool will provide an up-to-date inventory and ensure that all resources, including ephemeral ones, are accounted for​​.

Benefit #2: Identify Vulnerabilities Before Threat Actors Do

As mentioned, misconfigured cloud services are among the leading causes of data breaches (e.g., publicly exposed S3 buckets). Cloud security tools can uncover issues with misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them​​.

Benefit #3: Mitigate Risks

By identifying and addressing vulnerabilities, an assessment reduces the likelihood of cyber threats like data breaches, ransomware attacks, and compliance violations​​.

Benefit #4: Strengthen Compliance

A cloud security assessment can help ensure compliance with industry standards and security policies to help organizations avoid fines and suffer reputational damage. This is especially important for companies in highly-regulated industries like finance and healthcare.

Choosing a Cloud Security Assessment Tool to Secure Your Attack Surface

There are a variety of cloud security solution tools available to security teams, including Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools, Cloud Workload Protection Programs, and Cloud Compliance Management tools.

Each of these assessment tools delivers slightly different capabilities, and Attack Surface Management (ASM) serves as a valuable complement by contributing continuous mapping and monitoring of dynamic cloud environments.

Rather than provide a point-in-time assessment that offers a snapshot of a cloud environment, an ASM solution will automatically discover and track assets in the cloud on an ongoing basis, including those security teams may not even be aware of, like Shadow IT. In this way ASM is an important addition to a cloud security tech stack, bridging visibility gaps and ensuring continuous coverage.

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cloud connectors connected to censys

How Censys Takes Cloud Security to the Next Level

Censys is the industry’s leading provider of Attack Surface Management. Censys ASM significantly enhances the security of cloud environments by providing continuous visibility, risk prioritization, and actionable insights into cloud assets.

Censys customers improve their cloud security posture with the ability to:

Gain Comprehensive Visibility Across All Cloud Assets

Censys ASM provides unmatched visibility into both known and unknown cloud assets. Censys uses cloud connectors to directly integrate with major cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure for the best cloud visibility. This enables real-time tracking of ephemeral assets, ensuring no asset is missed​​​.

  • Cloud connectors refresh assets up to 6x per day, providing the most up-to-date view of your cloud attack surface compared to tools that rely on scheduled or static scans​​.

Discover Assets Beyond Traditional Scans

Unlike other cloud security tools that primarily focus on misconfigurations and compliance policies, Censys ASM goes beyond by discovering exposed internet-facing assets, including those not explicitly tied to cloud services, such as forgotten subdomains, exposed storage buckets, or misconfigured APIs​​.

  • Proprietary Internet Scanning: Censys leverages its global internet map and scanning capabilities to cover 65,000+ ports and detect services running on non-standard ports​​.

Accurate Mapping with Advanced Attribution and Discovery Logic

Censys ASM uses multi-layer attribution to link cloud assets back to an organization through advanced pivots like IP-to-domain relationships, certificates, and DNS records. This ensures a more accurate mapping of cloud assets compared to traditional tools that depend on user-provided configurations​​.

  • For example, ASM can identify assets tied to subsidiaries, mergers, or acquisitions by continuously updating based on real-time changes​​.

Proactively Identify and Prioritize Risk

Censys ASM focuses on not just asset discovery but also risk prioritization, enabling security teams to address vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk. Censys fingerprints over 2000 risk types, including misconfigurations, CVEs, and TLS/SSL vulnerabilities, ensuring cloud exposures are addressed before attackers exploit them​​.

Response Quickly to Emerging Threats

Censys ASM integrates threat intelligence into its risk assessments, automatically correlating known exploited vulnerabilities (such as those from CISA’s KEV catalog) to cloud assets. This capability supports faster remediation during critical zero-day vulnerabilities​​.

Continuous Monitoring, Not Point-in-Time Assessments

Traditional cloud security tools often rely on periodic scans or manual configuration inputs. Censys ASM offers continuous discovery and monitoring, with daily refreshes that ensure that any new or misconfigured asset is immediately identified.

Seamlessly Integrate with Broader Ecosystems

Censys ASM integrates directly with SIEMs, SOAR platforms, and ticketing systems, making it easy to incorporate ASM findings into your organization’s workflows. This contrasts with standalone cloud-specific tools that lack this level of ecosystem support​​.

Harnessing the Power of Censys Cloud Connectors

As mentioned, within the Censys ASM platform, cloud connectors make it possible to gain unparalleled visibility into cloud assets. Customers can use cloud connectors to integrate data from AWS, GCP, or Azure cloud environments directly into Censys ASM. These cloud connectors are hosted by Censys, eliminating the need for teams to host and maintain their own infrastructure for connectors and significantly reducing onboarding and maintenance time.

The Takeaway: Censys ASM’s cloud connectors provide the most accurate, up-to-date data on cloud inventories available, providing users with fewer false positives and unmatched coverage.

Read: Censys Cloud Connectors Brief

Watch: Censys ASM Cloud Connectors Demo

How an International Real Estate Firm Uses Censys for Cloud Asset Discovery

A publicly traded real estate company needed to uncover internet-facing security risks stemming from both their cloud and on-premise assets. Using Censys ASM, they discovered more than 600 cloud assets outside of their monitored accounts, which was 80% more than what the company previously believed was online.

“Censys provides a good lens into things that we don’t know about. Censys was able to quickly discover multiple S3 storage buckets that were publicly accessible on the Internet and contained sensitive data.” – International Real Estate Firm

Read the Case Study

Protect Your Cloud with the Right Security Tools

By using comprehensive cloud security tools like Censys Attack Surface Management, security teams ensure their cloud environment remains resilient, secure, and aligned with organizational and regulatory expectations. Whether you’re scaling operations or defending critical data, tools like these are your first line of defense against cyber threats.

Secure your cloud. Safeguard your business.

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