Colocation, or COLO, is a facility where organizations can rent space, power, cooling, and network connectivity to house their own server and networking equipment. Organizations own and maintain their hardware and equipment, while the COLO facility provides the physical environment. It’s a cost-effective solution for organizations that want control over their hardware and infrastructure without the upfront capital investment of building their data centers.

• Shadow IT and unauthorized assets: Shadow IT refers to employees utilizing cloud services or resources without the knowledge or approval of the IT department. It involves the unauthorized adoption of technology outside the purview of IT governance and can pose various security and compliance risks. These unauthorized assets can introduce security risks and compliance violations. CSPM tools must have mechanisms in place to detect and identify shadow IT resources and include them in the asset inventory.
• Lack of standardized tagging and naming conventions: Cloud resources are often provisioned with different naming conventions and tags, which can vary across teams, projects, and cloud platforms. Inconsistent or missing tags and naming conventions make it difficult to group and categorize assets accurately. Effective CSPM tools support intelligent tagging mechanisms and provide options to normalize and enforce consistent naming conventions.
• Scale and volume of assets: Large organizations and cloud-native applications can have many assets, including virtual machines, storage buckets, databases, and containers. Managing and tracking these assets manually becomes impractical and error-prone. CSPM tools should offer automated asset discovery and inventory capabilities, including periodic scans and integration with cloud provider APIs to scale efficiently.
• Asset visibility in shared environments: In multi-tenant cloud environments, organizations share underlying infrastructure with other tenants. This shared infrastructure can make it challenging to gain full visibility into assets and understand their interdependencies. CSPM tools need to provide comprehensive visibility into shared resources and ensure assets are attributed to the appropriate tenant with accuracy.
• Continuous monitoring and updates: Asset inventory management is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process. Assets change over time, and new assets are provisioned regularly. CSPM tools must provide continuous monitoring and update mechanisms to track changes in the asset inventory, detect unauthorized or misconfigured assets, and generate alerts for potential security issues.

Addressing these challenges requires a combination of robust technology, automation, and integration capabilities within CSPM tools. Now, let’s understand the best practices to overcome these challenges.