Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP): Why the Time for Unified Cloud Security is Now

The Emergence and Importance of Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

Enterprises are rapidly shifting their applications to the cloud while embracing cloud-native practices, which require new security measures. This trend has led to the emergence of CNAPP, which is expected to become one of the biggest security categories, estimated to be worth $25-30 billion.

CNAPP allows organizations to streamline security measures and optimize operational efficiency. By connecting the dots across the cloud application lifecycle, CNAPP can provide effective security for cloud-native applications. The increasing demand for CNAPP stems from the need for CISOs to consolidate tools and enhance security measures.

Gartner recently defined CNAPP as a comprehensive set of security and compliance capabilities that offer unified protection for cloud-native applications throughout the development and production phases. CNAPP consolidates multiple capabilities previously managed in silos, including container security, cloud security posture management (CSPM), Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM), infrastructure-as-code scanning, runtime cloud workload protection, and runtime vulnerability/configuration scanning.

Reasons Why Your Organization Should Deploy a CNAPP

Regularly demonstrate compliance in a changing cloud environment:

Complying with regulatory mandates has always been challenging for enterprises. However, maintaining ongoing compliance is even more challenging in a highly dynamic and automated public cloud environment. Automation frequently alters cloud deployments without prior notice, while development teams adopt new cloud services constantly evolving due to rapid innovation by major cloud service providers. As a result, proving compliance today may not guarantee compliance tomorrow.

CNAPP provides ongoing monitoring of your entire cloud infrastructure. It learns as your team changes your cloud deployments and adapts to new cloud services from providers. These policies are mapped to security frameworks like CIS or NIST and a wide range of regulatory frameworks. Continuous compliance monitoring in the cloud could be more manageable than past compliance efforts.

The development team's pace is being hindered by your infosec team:

Traditionally, security teams have implemented strict checks on application development, scrutinizing new deployments and applications before they can be deployed to production. However, this approach is expensive and time-consuming as issues found at this stage have to be sent back to developers, who may have already moved on to other projects. This results in delays and can slow down the pace of innovation.

To address this problem, CNAPP provides native integrations with various developer and DevOps tools, allowing security teams to set policies and provide feedback on security issues much earlier in the development process. With this level of integration, developers receive feedback while writing code in their development environments, making it easier to identify and fix policy violations early on. This approach is more efficient and avoids costly rework.

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of risk in your cloud environment is challenging:

Software vulnerabilities classified as "high" or "critical" are frequently found without being patched. The challenge with relying solely on CVSS scores to evaluate the severity of a vulnerability is that it only considers the vulnerability itself, not the environment in which the affected asset is operating. This makes it challenging for infosec teams to assess and communicate risk accurately.

For instance, a critical CVE may not pose a significant risk to the organization if the affected asset is isolated without internet access or access to sensitive data or applications. However, suppose the same asset is connected to the internet and can access sensitive data in a cloud database or object storage service. In that case, that same CVE may pose a significant risk to the organization.

CNAPP combines various signals from different security weaknesses in your cloud infrastructure and correlates them, identifying the actual risk of a breach or incident. This produces a risk-based and prioritized overview of what your team should focus on addressing first.

Your organization is using more than one cloud provider.

Many organizations adopt multiple cloud providers for various reasons, such as needing specific services only on one cloud service provider, cost containment, disaster recovery initiatives, or growth through mergers and acquisitions. As a result, many organizations end up with multiple cloud providers, each with its unique set of services, configuration options, permissions and entitlements model, and security services that mainly apply to that specific cloud service provider.

CNAPP is designed to support multiple cloud providers, providing coverage for all services, configurations, workloads, and data through a unified set of policies. This means that organizations receive a single, prioritized set of alerts across their entire cloud infrastructure, with a reduced need for cloud-specific knowledge to manage and mitigate cloud risks effectively.

Why Traditional Security Tools are Insufficient for Securing Cloud-Native Applications

The rise of CNAPPs is due to the complex nature of cloud-native applications, which pose new security challenges. Traditional security tools and niche solutions lack the necessary integrations and visibility to secure cloud-native architectures effectively. While free tools may seem like an option, integration, and maintenance costs are often high. Doing nothing leaves organizations vulnerable to high-risk attacks that can result in revenue and operational losses. Attackers are aware of the limitations of these tools and are targeting misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure, vulnerabilities in code, and the software supply chain.

Furthermore, the move towards shift left is increasing the responsibility of DevOps teams for security remediation tasks, resulting in the need for tools that can address the expanded scope of DevSecOps.

CNAPPs provide a way to simplify security measures while enhancing both security and the developer experience. Many security solutions are designed to identify, assess, prioritize, and adapt to cloud-native applications and underlying infrastructure risks. CNAPPs offer complete end-to-end security for cloud-native environments, unlike traditional cloud security approaches.

The Advantages of a Single-Vendor Approach to Cloud Native Security with CNAPPs

Gartner predicts Cloud Native Security will consolidate from using 10 or more tools/vendors to 2-3 vendors over the next few years. Macro-economic concerns do not solely drive this recommendation but are based on the benefits of adopting a single-vendor approach to security. These benefits include improved security through contextual awareness, increased operational efficiency using fewer tools requiring management and training, and cost reduction.

Adopting containers and serverless computing has made traditional Cloud CWPP ineffective in securing cloud-native application technology stack. As a result, organizations have implemented multiple tools from various vendors to address different functions, leading to silos of users and findings that make it challenging to obtain a unified picture of risk. Gartner recommends a shift to a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) approach, as it provides more benefits than a best-of-breed strategy that is challenging to scale.

CNAPPs should identify and understand the effective risk across multiple layers of modern cloud-native applications. When integrated into a single platform, CNAPP combines data from agents and agentless tools to provide greater context, enabling better prioritization of security issues. This approach allows organizations to efficiently reduce their attack surface and stop attacks in real time.

Conclusion

CNAPP is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect cloud-native applications. It provides ongoing compliance monitoring, accelerates application development, enhances risk assessment, and simplifies security measures. As cloud-native applications become more prevalent, CNAPPs are essential for enterprises to secure their cloud infrastructure effectively.