Most CSPM tools are exceptional at telling you what went wrong. They are nearly useless at preventing it. Detection without prevention is a treadmill — you fix today's drift while tomorrow's is already in flight.
The Detection-Prevention Gap
CSPM tools monitor deployed infrastructure and alert on policy violations. But by the time a misconfigured S3 bucket appears in your findings dashboard, it may have been accessible to the internet for hours.
Policy-as-Code: Prevention at Pull Request Time
Embedding security policy checks in CI/CD pipelines — using tools like Checkov, tfsec, or OPA with Conftest — moves the enforcement point before deployment. A Terraform plan that would expose a database to 0.0.0.0/0 fails the pipeline.
CSPMCloud DriftPolicy-as-CodeGitOpsAWS