Introducing PSPM: Preventive Security Posture Management

Cloud security teams face an impossible challenge: alert volumes surged 388% in 2024, while the average time to identify and contain a breach remains over 241 days. More visibility into risks hasn't made organizations more secure. It's just given security teams more alerts to chase.

Most teams we work with struggle with alert overload from their CNAPP platforms. They have excellent visibility into what's misconfigured, but findings pile up faster than teams can address them. Unresolved risks stay open, quietly multiplying exposure.

The solution isn't more detection. Organizations need to shift from reactive remediation to proactive prevention. Stop security issues before they reach production. Block misconfigured resources before they're created. Enforce guardrails that keep cloud environments secure by default.

The Power of Prevention

Prevention-first security transforms how organizations approach cloud security. Instead of discovering and fixing issues after deployment, preventive controls enforce boundaries that stop problems at the source. Learn more about the philosophy and framework in Prevention-first Cloud Security 101.

The impact is substantial:

• Reduce Risk: Close the exposure gap. Preventive controls stop risky changes before they reach your cloud.
• Shields Up: Stop misconfigurations before they start. Deploy preventive controls that protect every cloud, every time.
• Stop Chasing Alerts: Breaking the cycle of retrospective remediation frees up security and product teams to drive broader business value.

50% of breaches stem from preventable human error and IT failures, and Organizations that implement preventive controls save $2M per breach. Resources secured from the moment they're created means zero-day security posture with no exposure window.

Despite these benefits, only 40% of enterprises have adopted organization-wide preventive controls. Prevention remains difficult to implement and manage at scale.

What Prevents Prevention?

Four critical barriers keep organizations stuck in reactive mode:

Lack of Visibility Without real-time context into your current preventive posture, deploying new controls becomes guesswork. Which accounts have SCPs applied? Where are the gaps? What's already preventing what? Teams lack the visibility needed to confidently manage preventive controls across their cloud estate.

Hard to Do (or Change) Preventive controls require niche skills and careful cross-team coordination. Service Control Policies, Azure Policy, GCP Organization Policies each has its own syntax, behavior, and gotchas. Making changes without breaking production requires expertise that's in short supply.

Fear of Impact The fear of blocking legitimate workloads or creating business impacts keeps teams reactive. Without a way to safely test preventive controls before enforcement, the risk of production disruption looms large.

Flexibility and Exceptions Every "just this once" exception erodes consistency. Without a systematic approach to managing preventive controls, exceptions multiply and coverage fragments across the organization.

Introducing PSPM: Preventive Security Posture Management

PSPM makes prevention-first cloud security achievable at scale. As a practice, PSPM provides the operational framework for how organizations systematically discover, analyze, simulate, deploy, and measure preventive controls across their cloud environments. As a platform category, PSPM tools provide unified visibility into preventive controls, simulate impact before enforcement, orchestrate safe deployment, and measure prevention effectiveness across the entire deployment lifecycle from build through runtime.

PSPM platforms provide four core capabilities:

1. Visualize Current State Understand and communicate your current preventive posture across all clouds, accounts, and organizational units. Transform complex policies (AWS SCPs, Azure Policies, GCP Org Policies) into visual dashboards that highlight gaps, discrepancies, and anomalies at a glance.

2. Understand Gaps Assess your prevention posture against industry benchmarks like CIS. Map gaps to specific objectives and use opportunity scoring to prioritize high-impact improvements. Maturity scoring shows your progress from Level 0 (no prevention) to Level 5 (defense in depth).

3. Simulate & Test Test policies against real CloudTrail data before deployment. Visualize which accounts and resources will be affected. Refine controls iteratively without production risk. See the prevention path for any action: where it's prevented, by which policy, and under what conditions.

4. Rollout & Expand Deploy preventive controls across stakeholders with prescriptive recommendations, ready-to-use policy JSON, CLI commands, and deployment guidance tailored to your environment. Track prevention coverage and measure effectiveness over time.

Working Alongside Your CNAPP

PSPM works alongside your existing CNAPP platforms to stop misconfigurations before they happen and auto-remediate drift at runtime. The result is a dramatic reduction in both risk and alert fatigue.

	PSPM	CNAPP
Primary Focus	Prevent misconfigurations	Detect & respond to misconfiguration
When It Acts	Before resources are created	After resources are deployed
Approach	Enforce at deployment time	Scan and alert on existing resources
Coverage	Policy enforcement	Runtime posture visibility
Key Benefit	Zero-day security posture	Visibility across cloud estate
Time To Resolution	Proactive → Block	Reactive → Fix

High-volume CNAPP alerts signal gaps in prevention. PSPM platforms integrate with CNAPP findings to associate runtime issues with prevention objectives, creating a feedback loop that continuously improves your preventive posture.

The Layers of Prevention

PSPM operates across four layers of the cloud deployment lifecycle:

• Build: Code scanning and IaC validation catch issues in repositories
• Access: Service Control Policies and organization policies enforce boundaries
• Config: Default service configurations and guardrails prevent misconfiguration
• Runtime: Real-time remediation blocks or corrects policy violations automatically

Each layer provides defense in depth. A mature prevention strategy leverages all four.

Turbot PSPM: Visualize, Simulate, Deploy Preventive Controls

Turbot has spent the last decade helping enterprises implement automated cloud governance. Focused on helping teams achieve agility and ensure control with runtime prevention guardrails growing to over 14,000 OOTB policies in our Turbot Guardrails platform. Now the platform has expanded its capabilities with PSPM, preventive controls, shifting further left to help cloud security teams enable a prevention-first security operations.

Turbot's PSPM platform provides:

• Prevention posture visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, and Kubernetes with visual dashboards and org hierarchy mapping
• Policy simulation against user events to test org policy impact before deployment
• Benchmark assessment with industry frameworks (CIS, NIST, etc.) and maturity scoring to identify gaps and prioritize improvements
• Prescriptive recommendations with ready-to-deploy policy JSON and deployment guidance
• Runtime prevention with guardrails that auto-remediate drift and enforce controls continuously

Learn more about Turbot Guardrails.

Start Your Prevention Journey

Explore the Prevention Library We've published comprehensive guides on prevention-first security, PSPM practices, and implementation frameworks. Browse the Prevention Library to learn the fundamentals, or read our announcement of the Prevention Library for an overview of what's available.

See PSPM in Action PSPM gives security teams the visibility, confidence, and tooling to make prevention achievable at scale. Stop chasing alerts and start preventing them with Turbot Guardrails.

Get a free preventive posture assessment and 14-day trial of Turbot Guardrails. We'll analyze your current state, identify gaps, and show you how to visualize, simulate, and deploy preventive controls in your environment. Connect with us to get started.