The Problem PSPM Solves

Prevention-first security delivers compelling benefits: eliminated exposure windows, dramatically reduced alert volumes, freed team capacity, and faster innovation. Yet only 40% of enterprises have adopted organization-wide preventive controls.

Four barriers prevent broader adoption:

Lack of Visibility

Preventive controls scatter across cloud accounts, repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime systems. Organization policies (AWS SCPs, Azure Policy, GCP Organization Policy) exist in cloud consoles. IaC scanning rules live in repositories. Secure defaults hide in account configurations. Runtime remediat

PSPM Definition

Preventive Security Posture Management (PSPM) is a category of security tools that continuously manage cloud misconfiguration risk through visibility, simulation, and enforcement of preventive controls across the deployment lifecycle, from build to runtime.

PSPM platforms provide five core capabilities:

• Unified visibility into preventive controls across all four prevention layers (Build, Access, Config, Runtime) and all cloud accounts
• Gap analysis connecting prevention coverage to detection findings, identifying which alerts could be eliminated through prevention
• Impact simulation testing controls against historical cloud activity before enf

PSPM and CNAPP: Prevention and Detection Together

PSPM and CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform) serve complementary roles in cloud security:

CNAPP Provides Comprehensive Detection

CNAPP continuously scans cloud environments, identifies misconfigurations, detects threats, and surfaces findings. CNAPP excels at visibility - showing what exists, what's misconfigured, what's vulnerable, and what requires attention. CNAPP is essential for threat detection, compliance visibility, and risk assessment.

PSPM Provides Prevention Management

PSPM makes preventive controls visible, testable, and deployable at scale. PSPM reduces what reaches production by blocking i

Core Capability 1: Prevention Posture Visibility

This is one of five core capabilities PSPM platforms provide to enable prevention at scale. These capabilities work together to make the five prevention practices achievable across complex multi-cloud environments.

PSPM creates unified visibility into preventive controls across all four prevention layers:

Build layer visibility shows IaC scanning coverage across repositories. Which repos have scanning enabled? What frameworks (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, Pulumi) get scanned? What rules run in each scanner? What issues get blocked versus flagged as

Core Capability 2: Gap Analysis and Prioritization

This is the second of five core capabilities. While Prevention Posture Visibility shows what prevention exists, Gap Analysis identifies where to expand coverage for maximum impact.

PSPM correlates prevention coverage with detection findings to identify high-value prevention opportunities:

Finding correlation maps CNAPP or CSPM findings to prevention layers. For each finding type, PSPM identifies which prevention layer could stop it. Build-layer IaC scanning? Access-layer organization policy? Config-layer secure default? Runtime remediation?

Volume analysis identifies which findings appear most frequently. Issues that

Core Capability 3: Impact Simulation

This is the third of five core capabilities. After identifying what to deploy (Gap Analysis), Impact Simulation tests controls against real activity to predict impact and plan exceptions.

PSPM tests preventive controls against real cloud activity before enforcement:

Audit log analysis queries cloud audit logs (CloudTrail, Azure Activity Log, GCP Cloud Logging) to identify API calls or configurations that would have been blocked if the preventive control existed. This reveals impact without risk.

Affected user identification shows which teams, workflows, and identities would be affected by enforcement. PSPM maps blocked actions to s

Core Capability 4: Safe Deployment Orchestration

This is the fourth of five core capabilities. After simulating impact, Safe Deployment orchestrates gradual, reversible rollout that maintains organizational confidence.

PSPM orchestrates gradual rollout of preventive controls with monitoring, phasing, and exception management:

Monitoring mode deploys controls in audit-only mode before enforcement. Controls observe cloud activity and report what would be blocked without actually blocking it. Teams validate simulation findings and identify unexpected scenarios before enforcement.

Phased rollout deploys enforcement gradually. Start with test environments, then non-product

Core Capability 5: Coverage Measurement and Reporting

This is the fifth and final core capability. Measurement quantifies prevention effectiveness, demonstrates ROI, and guides the next iteration of the prevention cycle.

PSPM quantifies prevention effectiveness through metrics, dashboards, and trend analysis:

Coverage metrics track prevention expansion over time. Percentage of accounts with organization policies. Percentage of repositories with IaC scanning. Number of preventive controls by layer and cloud. Services with secure defaults enabled.

Effectiveness metrics measure prevention impact. Risky actions blocked by organization policies. Alert volume reduction from

PSPM Architecture: Objectives and Rules

Understanding how PSPM platforms organize prevention helps explain how they discover controls, assess coverage, and generate recommendations. This architectural foundation consists of Objectives, Rules, and Layers.

PSPM platforms organize prevention around two core concepts:

Prevention Objectives

Objectives are prevention goals - what you're trying to accomplish. Examples: "Require encryption for EBS volumes," "Prevent public S3 buckets," "Restrict usage to approved AWS regions."

Objectives are cloud-agnostic and focus on security intent rather than implementation mechanism. The same objective (prevent public data exposure) mi

PSPM Architecture: The Four Prevention Layers

Each rule (from the previous chapter) exists at exactly one prevention layer. Understanding these layers helps explain how PSPM tracks coverage and identifies where overlapping controls create defense in depth.

Each rule exists at exactly one of four prevention layers representing when and where in the deployment lifecycle prevention operates:

Build Layer - Catch problems before launch. IaC scanning and CI/CD pipeline policies stop misconfigurations before deployment. Build-layer prevention is highest value (catches issues earliest) but typically has incomplete coverage (only scans what's in

Who Needs PSPM?

This and the following chapter explore the PSPM market: who benefits from PSPM platforms, why the category is emerging now, and how it connects to the broader prevention-first movement.

PSPM provides value across different organizational maturity levels:

Organizations with CNAPP Deployed

You have comprehensive visibility into what's misconfigured. You're overwhelmed by finding volumes. You spend significant time on remediation coordination. PSPM reduces what reaches production, cutting CNAPP findings dramatically. CNAPP and PSPM together create the defense in depth that neither provides alone.

Organizations Scaling Cl

PSPM Market Emergence

Building on the audience analysis from the previous chapter, this section examines why PSPM is emerging as a market category now and how it enables the prevention-first movement.

PSPM is an emerging market category driven by prevention-first security adoption:

Why PSPM is Emerging Now

Alert volume is exploding. Cloud alerts surged 388% in 2024. Security teams can't scale headcount to match finding growth. Prevention provides force multiplication - one preventive control eliminates thousands of future findings.

Breaches from preventable issues continue. [50% of breaches

Getting Started with PSPM

Organizations can begin PSPM adoption through practical steps:

Step 1: Assess current prevention. Inventory what preventive controls already exist. Document organization policies, IaC scanning tools, secure defaults, and runtime remediation. Understand baseline coverage before expansion. Use the Discover practice to create unified visibility.

Step 2: Connect to detection tools. Integrate PSPM with CNAPP or CSPM platforms. Analyze which findings appear repeatedly. Identify which prevention layers could eliminate high-volume alerts. Use the Analyze practice

What's Next

This guide introduces PSPM as practice and platform. These resources explore related topics:

Understanding Prevention:

• Prevention 101 - Complete framework for prevention-first security
• The Prevention-First Manifesto - Core values and principles
• Why Prevention-First? - Benefits and ROI of prevention
• What We Prevent - Build, Access, Config, Runtime prevention in depth
• How We Prevent - Five practices for implementing prevention

*PSPM in Practice: