Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms
CNAPPs address the full life cycle protection requirements of cloud-native applications from development to production. Security and risk management leaders responsible for cloud security strategies should use this research to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
Key Findings:
- CNAPP offerings bring together multiple disparate security and protection capabilities into a single platform focused on identifying and prioritizing excessive risk of the entire cloud-native application and its associated infrastructure.
- The attack surface of cloud-native applications is increasing. Attackers are targeting the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure (network, compute, storage, identities and permissions), APIs and the software supply chain itself.
- Developers are increasingly responsible for operational tasks, such as addressing vulnerabilities, deploying infrastructure as code, and deploying and tearing down implementations in production, thus requiring tools that address this expanded scope.
- Because security is often viewed as an obstacle to developers, it is absolutely critical to prioritize risks identified and provide sufficient context for the developer to remediate it.
- Multiple providers market CNAPP capabilities — some starting with runtime expertise and some starting with development expertise. Few offer the required breadth and depth of functionality with integration between all components across development and operations.
- Agentless workload scanning has become a popular approach and an expected core CNAPP capability, although in-workload approaches provide the best protection.