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 Cloud Adoption

You're expanding to multiple clouds. You're adding accounts rapidly. You're onboarding new teams. PSPM ensures consistent prevention coverage across all clouds, accounts, and teams without linear security team growth. Prevention scales better than manual remediation.

Organizations Facing Alert Fatigue

Security teams drown in CNAPP findings. Remediation cycles consume capacity. The same issues appear repeatedly. PSPM eliminates preventable alerts so detection focuses on genuine threats. Alert volumes drop 50-80% as prevention coverage expands.

Organizations Pursuing Compliance

Auditors require evidence of preventive controls. Remediation backlogs create compliance gaps. Manual processes don't scale to audit requirements. PSPM provides continuous compliance evidence through preventive controls that enforce requirements automatically.

Organizations with Prevention in Place

You've deployed organization policies, IaC scanning, or runtime remediation organically. You lack unified visibility across prevention layers. You can't quantify prevention effectiveness. PSPM makes scattered prevention visible, measurable, and improvable.

The common thread: organizations shifting from purely reactive detection to proactive prevention at scale.