A company uses internet cloud services, but they might have accidentally made some parts unsafe. What are the two types of smart cloud helpers, one that checks all the safety settings to see if they are wrong, and another that protects the actual running programs inside the cloud, that a security team uses to stop cloud attacks?

Security teams use two primary types of smart cloud helpers to defend against attacks. The first type is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool. A CSPM tool automatically scans and continuously monitors all the safety settings and configurations within a cloud environment. It checks for misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security risks, essentially acting like an automated auditor for your cloud setup. For instance, if a cloud storage bucket is accidentally set to be publicly accessible when it should be private, a CSPM would detect this misconfiguration and alert the security team. The second type is a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP). A CWPP focuses on securing the actual running applications and workloads, such as virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions, that are hosted in the cloud. It provides runtime protection, detecting and preventing threats that target these running programs. Examples of CWPP functions include malware detection within running applications, vulnerability scanning of active software, and intrusion detection that monitors for malicious activity during program execution. Together, CSPM and CWPP provide comprehensive security by both ensuring the cloud infrastructure is correctly configured and by protecting the applications that run on it.