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 stem from preventable human error and IT failures. These aren't sophisticated exploits. They're S3 buckets that shouldn't be public, security groups that shouldn't allow unrestricted access, and encryption that should have been enabled by default. Prevention stops these issues before they create exposure.
Cloud complexity is increasing. Multi-cloud environments, hundreds of services, thousands of accounts, distributed teams - all increase misconfiguration risk. Prevention controls scale across this complexity more effectively than manual remediation.
Organizations have CNAPP deployed. CNAPP adoption is widespread. Organizations have comprehensive detection. The next logical step is reducing what detection finds through prevention. PSPM and CNAPP together create defense in depth.
Cloud providers are building prevention capabilities. AWS, Azure, and GCP continuously add preventive capabilities: organization policies, secure defaults, declarative policies, service-specific controls. The tooling exists. PSPM makes it visible, testable, and deployable.
PSPM platforms abstract cloud-specific complexity, provide unified visibility across clouds and layers, enable simulation and safe deployment, and demonstrate prevention value through metrics. As prevention-first adoption accelerates, PSPM tooling becomes essential infrastructure.
PSPM and the Prevention-First Movement
PSPM enables execution of the Prevention-First Manifesto:
Prevention over detection. PSPM makes prevention visible, testable, and deployable at scale. Organizations shift from detecting after deployment to preventing before deployment.
Risk reduction over risk awareness. PSPM reduces findings that reach production rather than just surfacing them. Alert volumes drop as prevention coverage expands.
Guardrails over guidelines. PSPM deploys automated enforcement that blocks risky actions. Teams can't accidentally violate what guardrails prevent.
Shift-left over shift-blame. PSPM enables fast feedback through build-layer scanning and clear boundaries through organization policies. Prevention accelerates teams rather than blocking them.
PSPM is the operational platform that makes these principles real at enterprise scale.