More and more, we’re seeing businesses shift operations to the cloud. While the pandemic accelerated migration rates as companies sought to better support remote workers, the cloud had been gaining popularity for years thanks to its agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency advantages. Today, 94% of companies around the world use some form of cloud services.
However, migrating to the cloud and establishing a mature security posture is no small task. While the cloud empowers companies to scale rapidly and spin up new workloads with ease, it can also create complex, multilayered security environments where alerts and risks come from all angles. Navigating this dynamic threat landscape requires a proactive, unified approach.
A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) acts as a unified platform that simplifies cloud-native application and infrastructure security by integrating multiple solutions to embed security from initial code development to provisioning and runtime to help mitigate risks across hybrid and multicloud environments. This provides several key benefits for organizations, including:
By operationalizing CNAPP within their cloud environment, organizations can use these benefits to achieve a more mature cloud security posture. Here’s how.
When organizations first migrate to the cloud, they’ll often choose to deploy individual point solutions to manage various aspects of their cloud security. Also known as a best-of-breed approach, this strategy can result in decentralized visibility and security blind spots across the cloud estate because these siloed tools more than often fail to communicate with one another. It can also create highly manual workflows for addressing security concerns, lead to risky misconfigurations, and even result in inadequate data classification.
By contrast, a mature cloud security posture is characterized by a comprehensive, strategic approach that includes proactive threat hunting, advanced compliance adherence, rapid incident response, and accelerated time to remediation. Organizations at this level often have centralized, unified control over their cloud security tooling, which helps to streamline workflows and drive greater visibility across all resources.
CNAPP helps organizations reach this mature state of cloud security by integrating multiple cloud security solutions under one umbrella to protect cloud-native applications and infrastructure. These include, but are not limited to, cloud security posture management (CSPM), multipipeline DevOps security, cloud workload protections, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), and cloud service network security (CSNS).
At the development level, CNAPP can scan code for secrets or vulnerabilities that may have been unintentionally left behind, flag misconfigurations, and help unify security and developer teams by enforcing security best practices at all stages of the development process. This delivers more proactive security by addressing common risks before they can be pushed live.
In runtime, CNAPP connects insights from different aspects of cloud security to contextualize and prioritize alerts based on their potential risk to the business. For example, rather than identifying 1,000 containers that have been exposed to the internet, CNAPP can provide detailed information about the vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations within each container image and allow your team to assess the risk of each, helping them determine which to address first. CNAPP can also use CSPM to proactively identify attack paths that lead to vulnerable or exposed assets within your environment. This allows security teams to remediate the attack paths before they can ever be compromised.
CNAPP continuously scans cloud environments for new vulnerabilities or suspicious signals, working to protect your cloud environment from new and emerging threats. It can also assist with compliance and automate repetitive workflows to free up your defenders’ time for more dynamic security work. Similarly, some CNAPPs use generative AI to offer guided remediation next steps and upskill existing cyber defenders. These AI-driven capabilities are especially helpful in accelerating time to detection and response as they can either automatically block suspicious activity or help defenders remediate faster based on internal security guidance or industry best practices.
Securing cloud environments is a dynamic task that often requires a mindset shift for security teams. Rather than addressing individual alerts on their company’s private network or remediating incidents as they arise, defenders must embrace a more proactive mindset that can scale to the speed and sophistication of today’s attacks.
Embracing CNAPP is not just about the velocity of your defense. It’s about intelligently navigating complex cloud environments with finesse and foresight. From automating compliance checks to enhancing data protection, reducing code vulnerabilities, and accelerating incident response, CNAPP acts as a comprehensive toolkit that not only meets but anticipates your organization’s security needs.
By integrating CNAPP into their cloud environment, organizations can secure existing cloud infrastructure while also laying the foundation for a resilient approach that ensures they remain agile, compliant, and secure as their cloud application footprint continues to grow and evolve.
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