A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is a bundled security solution for cloud applications and their infrastructure. 

CNAPP protects microservices applications running in container environments like Kubernetes, OpenShift, or Docker. It provides centralized threat detection, controls, and incident response in one place.

To offer centralized protection for workloads, networks, and containers CNAPP combines features of various security tools which include:

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
• Cloud Service Network Security (CSNS)
• Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPPs)
• Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM)
• Let us understand why there was a need for CNAPP in the first place and the problem with a distributed security system. 

Why Do Businesses Need CNAPP?

The security challenges the cloud-native environment faces are quite different because the cloud environment is dynamic and constantly changes with unpredictable interactions.

These environments are prone to unintended internet exposure, overly permissive access, malware, and unauthorized access.

Hence, traditional security methods cannot protect these serverless and containerized environments. These tools mostly focus on assisting the security team to protect the cloud infrastructure only. 

Modern security tools need to protect both cloud infrastructure and applications.

Experts in the field like Gartner recommend a holistic approach to cloud-native security. This is where CNAPP comes into the picture. 

CNAPPs meet this need by using “shift left” and “shield right” strategies. Shifting left means adding security checks early in the development process. 

Shielding right means detecting and responding to threats in real time during the application’s runtime. This approach provides strong security throughout the application lifecycle.

Clearing the Misconception on CNAPP 

Businesses new to CNAPP are confused with these two things:

Is CNAPP a new tool?
Is it only offered by Gartner?

One, CNAPP isn’t a new security tool. CNAPP is a platform intended to consolidate multiple independent tools with a single holistic security solution for modern enterprises with cloud-native workloads. 

Secondly, CNAPP itself is not a product of Gartner. Gartner introduced the term “CNAPP” to describe a cohesive and integrated suite of security and compliance features to secure cloud-native applications throughout their development and production stages.

There are multiple vendors in the market that follow the guidelines laid out by Gartner to develop a CNAPP. In short, businesses can choose from vendors depending on their requirements. 

The Top Five Benefits of CNAPP

Easy Collaboration:

Challenge: Securing cloud environments, applications, and data requires collaboration among security, development, infrastructure, and operations teams. Undefined roles and policies can create security gaps.

Benefit: CNAPP is an all-in-one security platform that brings together all team members, improving collaboration and efficiency. It helps identify and correlate minor issues, individual events, and hidden attack vectors into intuitive visual attack flow graphs. This ensures quick alerts and recommendations for security and non-security experts. 

Cost and Complexity Reduction:

Challenge: Using multiple, non-integrated traditional security tools can increase the overheads.

Benefit: CNAPP replaces various point products like CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, vulnerability scanning, IaC scanning, DLP, and CMDB with a comprehensive view of critical risks. It offers visibility into configurations, assets, permissions, code, and workloads. Since businesses get to analyze millions of attributes in one place, they can invest in something other than 5-10 different tools. 

This reduces the noise, complexity, and costs associated with maintaining multiple solutions.

Comprehensive Coverage:

Challenge: Using multiple clouds leads to limited visibility and security silos as the security control is in the hand of multiple cloud providers. 

Benefit: CNAPP provides insights across the entire multi-cloud footprint, including IaaS and PaaS services, VM, container, and serverless workloads. It extends into development environments to identify risks early in the deployment cycle, continuously monitoring cloud resources for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and security threats. 

The most significant benefit of a CNAPP approach is better visibility and control of cloud-native application risk.

Gartner, Inc., Innovation Insight for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, Neil MacDonald and Charlie Winckless, August 25, 2021

Security at DevOps Speed:

Challenge: Rapid release cycles can introduce undetected coding mistakes. Traditional security testing after development slows down the DevOps process, making it hard for security teams to keep up with deployments.

Benefit: CNAPP integrates with popular IDE platforms and DevOps tools to identify issues during development and CI/CD, allowing teams to address risks before they are exploited. It also integrates with SecOps ecosystems to trigger alerts and workflows on violations, ensuring cloud environments remain secure and enabling smooth deployment of new programs.

Distributed Security Responsibility:

Challenge: DevOps teams need the freedom to innovate without security becoming a bottleneck. The complexity of DevOps environments and the lack of security expertise among developers can lead to vulnerabilities.

Benefit: CNAPP injects security controls at each level of the DevOps cycle, integrating with existing development and DevOps tools. This allows infosec teams to implement guardrails that developers can adopt in their daily work, reducing friction and enhancing overall security.

Key Capabilities of a CNAPP

CNAPP consolidates features from various tools into one platform. It integrates functionalities of CSPM, CIEM, IaC security, data protection, vulnerability scanning, compliance, and CWPP.

• CSPM scans cloud environments for threats and ensures compliance.
• CIEM enforces least-privilege access, reducing breach risks.
• IaC security integrates security into development workflows for early vulnerability fixes.
• Data protection secures confidential data across cloud repositories.
• CWPP safeguards hosts, containers, VMs, and serverless functions throughout the application lifecycle.
• CNAPP offers comprehensive control over cloud infrastructure, resources, data, and identities.

Tips to Implement CNAPP in Your Organization

These recommendations are summarized from Gartner’s CNAPP Market Guide.

Initial Planning: Create a DevSecOps strategy to make the developer experience better and improve risk identification. Form a CNAPP strategy group with members from cloud security, container security, application security, and DevSecOps. Check the security of the CI/CD pipeline tools and reduce the number of vendors to simplify processes.

Solution Evaluation: Form a team of developers and security experts to identify the needed features. Choose CNAPP providers with strong relationship graph analytics. Test the CNAPP with real developers and applications to ensure it meets all requirements.

Deployment: Start with cloud-native applications that need fast development and risk identification. Focus on scanning containers and open-source software libraries. If agents can’t be used, use agentless snapshots to keep an eye on risks.

5 Evaluation Criteria to Choose CNAPP Service Providers 

Multiple tools in one

A CNAPP aims to combine multiple cloud security tools into one platform. However, combining tools is just part of the goal. More importantly, it must detect risks and vulnerabilities in your cloud environment, including malicious activities, to ensure security and compliance.

Organizations should be wary of solutions that simply bundle tools together without adding real value. The true benefit of CNAPPs lies in their ability to intelligently combine data from various layers of the technology stack, highlighting critical security issues rather than generating numerous unrelated alerts.

Ask if the vendor detects vulnerabilities in cloud resources and workloads, PII on exposed assets, unknown malware, lateral movement risks, etc. Also, make sure they scan all workloads and scaling groups.

“When vulnerabilities, context, and relationships are integrated throughout the development process, it helps highlight excessive risks. This allows development teams and product owners to prioritize fixing the most critical areas of the application.”
Gartner, Inc., Innovation Insight for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, 2021

CI/CD security and integrations

When choosing a CNAPP, make sure it fits into current workflows and protects cloud-native apps throughout development. Look for one that integrates security into the CI/CD process for early issue detection. This encourages collaboration between engineering, DevOps, and security teams. A good CNAPP scans development artifacts, source code, containers, serverless functions, VMs, and IaC. It should also have many technology integrations for automation and efficient remediation, integrating alerts into existing workflows.

In short, the vendor you choose should scan code repositories, IaC capabilities, and third-party integrations.

Develop a security strategy that spans the entire lifespan of cloud-native apps, from development to production
Gartner Inc., “Innovation Insight for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms”,2021

Agentless

Traditionally, CWPPs relied on agents for cloud security, but newer CSPM solutions operate agentless, focusing solely on misconfigurations without workload insight.

Although agents could provide insights on workload they have the following disadvantages: 

• Agents needed for every asset
• Operational burden for teams
• Partial deployment leads to blind spots
• Performance impact on critical apps
• Risk of supply chain attacks
• Organizational friction for maintenance

Some CNAPPs still require agents, but newer agentless ones lead in innovation. They collect data externally, providing complete coverage without agent downsides. Agentless solutions offer faster deployments, wider asset coverage, less friction, and lower costs. Ask about agentless protection, support for various cloud assets, and event capture from cloud logs.

“Cloud-native workloads are typically short-lived, making it difficult to use traditional standalone protection that relies on agent deployment.”
Source: (Gartner, 2021).

Context-aware risk prioritization

A major benefit of CNAPPs is how they show risks holistically in one unified view, not separate ones. This lets security teams quickly see and fix the most important issues and prioritize them on the basis of impact, access, and severity. 

Yet, only a few tools actually provide coherent control from one single administration point. Most of them only use CVSS scores, missing key factors like the asset’s connectivity with the internet or lateral movement risks. 

This leads to misleading risk priority. While teams focus on low-risk threats, the high-risk ones are left unattended. 

When evaluating CNAPPs, ask if the vendor can visualize attack paths to critical assets and determine business impact with MITRE ATT&CK. Ensure whether or not the CNAPP can detect PII, prioritize risks, and handle lateral movement.

Vendor support & ratings

When evaluating CNAPPs, think about the quality of customer support and if the vendor can meet your specific needs. Make sure they offer enough support for your team’s size and learning curve. 

To support your choice further, look for case studies, customer success team, support hours, references, pricing, and PoC availability.

To make the best decision for your business you must evaluate your security requirements too. Look at what Cloud-native security expert Rani Osnat mentions in his research paper “Rethinking security with cloud-native in mind”:

The CNAPP comes as a shield against rising risks to cloud-native setups. But choosing one isn’t as easy as grabbing something off the shelf. Organizations aiming to enjoy the perks of cloud-native apps must also think hard about their security needs.