What Is a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform?

CNAPPs allow for a simpler, more unified approach to cloud-native security, monitoring, and action. They are meant to act as an end-to-end approach for cloud security. CNAPPs offer a complete infrastructure protection system that many organizations previously relied on disparate point products for.

With CNAPP, organizations can consolidate all monitoring, reporting, and detecting for their cloud environment into a single platform. This removes the increased amount of human error and toil that can come into play when working with multiple solutions that have siloed views of application risk and reduces the time that threat detection and reporting take.

CNAPP combines multiple cloud security capabilities into a single platform solution. This allows it to increase the overall visibility and detection of risks that could cripple or harm your cloud infrastructure, which is becoming increasingly important in today’s online business world. With CNAPP, your company’s security team can more easily quantify and respond to the risks that pop up within your cloud environment, without having to juggle multiple pieces of software.

Ultimately, CNAPP is a comprehensive tool that helps your DevOps and DevSecOps teams approach cloud security with a unified and automated system. This security solution is made up of several vital parts, all of which play a key role in ensuring your company’s cloud environment is as secure as possible, while also ensuring that it is all running smoothly, too.

CNAPP provides ways to automate basic tasks, as well as ways to scan for configuration issues and other problems that may pop up in the deepest levels of your company’s cloud infrastructure. All these pieces come together into a single, unified solution that helps prevent threats while also improving your company’s productivity and response time to vulnerabilities whenever they may be discovered.

As more organizations add security controls earlier in their development pipeline, it is important to find protection that can ensure your cloud-native applications and their associated development artifacts are secure and protected. CNAPP allows all these processes to be handled within a single platform, making managing it easier, especially in larger-scale distributed operations.

By making things simpler and more organized, CNAPP allows your company’s security team to make the most of its cloud environment. Your team can detect threats, monitor risks, and report on them without switching across multiple consoles. This means less chance of information breaking down between platforms and more opportunities to catch risks before they can harm your infrastructure.

One important feature that CNAPP offers is infrastructure-as-code (IaC) template scanning. With IaC scanning, your company’s security team can define guardrails that DevOps teams can deploy against using configuration files and specific code. IaC scanning can integrate with existing tools in your CI/CD pipeline, which helps minimize the number of risks associated with misconfiguration while keeping developers developing.

IaC scanning is very similar to code review in that it allows your company’s security team to ensure the code quality of the cloud infrastructure is configured correctly, by removing human error from the entry process. IaC scanning can also detect vulnerable network exposures, as well as infringements with resource access, and even compliance violations.

Another key part of CNAPP is cloud security posture management or CSPM. These solutions are designed not only to detect but also to prevent and remediate any misconfigurations that could lead to cloud resources becoming exposed to security risks. CSPM also helps to ensure that potential security incidents are detected early on, and that cloud resources and activities adhere to the industry-set regulations and mandates for compliance.

Additionally, CSPM alerts your security team if any compliance issues are detected, allowing your team to update and directly change any issues to ensure your cloud infrastructure remains up to regulations. This helps ensure that your cloud infrastructure is always configured according to best practices, and CSPM provides additional monitoring and risk analysis alongside its normal functions.

CSPM not only gives you additional visibility of possible security risks, but it also alerts and provides guided or even automated remediation options to help close any security gaps that may appear. This allows your security team to maintain the industry’s golden standards and ensure a healthy security posture in today’s online world.

Another vital part of CNAPP is the Cloud Workload Protection Platform or CWPP. CWPP allows for better protection of your company’s cloud infrastructure workloads from security risks and threats. These workloads cover a wide range of cloud services, including VMs, containers (such as Kubernetes), and even serverless functions. Finally, CWPP can detect and even suggest corrections to your cloud infrastructure’s security to help better protect from cybersecurity issues as well as keep business-critical applications running securely.

It’s also important to secure your cloud networks that connect your cloud environments and resources. Cloud network security focuses on protecting your cloud infrastructure in real time. It achieves this protection by utilizing mechanics like web application firewalls (WAF), as well as web application and API protection (WAAP). Cloud network security also makes use of TLS examination and intrusion prevention protection to help balance your infrastructure load and keep things running smoothly.

Kubernetes Security Posture Management, or KSPM, is another component of CNAPPs. Similar to CSPM, companies can ensure that the Kubernetes platform itself is free of misconfigurations. This allows for a deeper instrumentation of the Kubernetes environment, as well as making it easier to find and manage configurations. KSPM also allows your security team to report on misconfigurations and security issues more easily, while also letting them monitor the workload, configuration, clusters, environment, and more to minimize user errors.

Finally, Kubernetes Security Posture Management allows for better cluster penetration testing and benchmarking, both of which ensure your system is running as smoothly as it can with as few human errors as possible.

Another important part of the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM). CIEM allows for better permissions management and lets your company’s security team access and manage the rights access your company’s cloud environment in one place, including multi-cloud setups.

Typically, CIEM allows you to enforce the principle of least privilege, as well as to scan the environment and cloud infrastructure configuration to ensure there are no unnecessary access points for resources. If you do find any unnecessary access points, CIEM makes it easy to report them to your company’s security team so that they can be remediated as quickly as possible.

Finally, CIEM also allows you to detect and report on any misconfigurations which may be tied to a specific user or even a role. This helps ensure that no role or user is being given access to files and configurations they should not have access to, which can help keep your cloud infrastructure secure and running smoothly.

You should consider a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform if your company relies heavily on cloud infrastructure to run its most important and vital systems. With the ongoing threats that bad actors pose to online businesses, having an all-in-one solution that makes monitoring and detecting easy is vital to running a business smoothly. Look for a CNAPP that extends to also enable extended detection and response (XDR) and protect cloud file storage (ex. AWS S3).

With a CNAPP, your company’s security system will be able to take a proactive response to online security. Instead of waiting for cybersecurity issues to happen, you can prepare for them in advance, and detect them before they get out of hand. Additionally, it removes the trouble stemming from utilizing multiple point products and takes out a lot of the human error component that comes into play with large organizations. Developers and DevOps teams also benefit from CNAPPs, as tight integrations with their existing tools and processes drive better communication across teams. Applications cannot be perfect, and CNAPPs help to prioritize the remediation of security issues in a natural way for developers.

Many companies have adopted dozens of security tools to handle the jobs that a CNAPP can perform. With multiple tools involved, though, it’s more difficult to take a proactive approach. More often than not, organizations can simply react when something goes wrong. And, because you’re utilizing multiple programs, you have to find options that work well together and play smoothly in the same sandbox. This, in addition to lengthy manual integration work, can be difficult for your security team and also increases the possibility of human errors when moving information between tools.

Separation also creates blind spots. With CNAPP, you remove the need to manage multiple applications and solutions at one time, allowing for your company’s security team to better focus its efforts. This allows for more consistent detection, and more thorough scanning and monitoring of your company’s cloud infrastructure. And, because CNAPP puts everything on one platform, you’ll never have to worry about your company’s security team missing an issue because they were busy working within a separate solution.

Ultimately, CNAPP provides a much more unified security solution for companies that want to ensure their online presence is protected and upheld to the regulations and golden standards the industry’s leading security firms offer. With less point solutions to manage, your company’s security team can apply more consistent protections and turn a reactive situation into one that your company is prepared to deal with. Not only can this save issues from popping up, but it can also save your company thousands or even millions of dollars by mitigating and detecting risks before they get out of hand.

Finally, all CNAPP’s solutions are integrated into a singular platform, which makes it easier to manage and much simpler to configure to fit the needs of your company.