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 remediation runs in various tools. No unified view exists showing what prevention protects what resources across which layers.
Without visibility, security teams can't answer basic questions: What preventive controls do we have? Where do they apply? What gaps exist? Which recurring findings could be prevented? Where should we invest next?
Hard to Do or Change
Deploying preventive controls requires specialized cloud expertise. Each cloud provider uses different policy syntax and capabilities. AWS Service Control Policies, Azure Policy, and GCP Organization Policies work differently despite similar purposes. Testing impact requires analyzing audit logs manually. Tracking exceptions demands custom workflows. The complexity creates friction that keeps teams reactive.
Fear of Impact
No one wants to break production. Preventive controls can block legitimate actions if deployed without understanding actual cloud usage patterns. Without simulation capabilities, teams can't predict what controls will block before enforcement. Fear of unknown consequences keeps organizations from deploying prevention even when the risk of not deploying exceeds the risk of deployment.
Flexibility and Exceptions
Every organization needs exceptions to preventive controls. Legacy applications, temporary requirements, special projects, and edge cases all require flexibility. Without systematic exception management, prevention feels inflexible and blocks valid business needs. Teams avoid preventive controls to maintain agility rather than finding ways to make prevention work with exceptions.
PSPM platforms overcome these barriers through capabilities that make prevention visible, achievable, safe, and flexible.