Cloud posture management is the continuous monitoring of cloud accounts, services, and configurations to see whether they match security policy and compliance requirements. It compares the live state of the environment against expected settings, such as public access rules, encryption, identity permissions, logging, and network exposure.
This matters because cloud risk changes quickly: a single misconfigured storage bucket, overly broad IAM role, or disabled audit log can create an immediate weakness. In defense, posture management tools surface these issues early, prioritize them by risk, and help teams prove control alignment for audits and frameworks like SOC 2 or FedRAMP. In attacks, adversaries often exploit the same gaps posture tools are designed to catch, especially exposed services, weak permissions, and drift from approved baselines.