Why Is CNAPP Important?
Traditional security tools and approaches and tools were
designed to protect on-premises data centers and endpoints, not
cloud native apps and services. With the shift to cloud native
technologies, dynamic and ephemeral environments with strong
automation, faster release cycles, and modern development
practices (e.g., infrastructure as code [IaC], CI/CD pipelines,
containers, serverless functions, Kubernetes), those tools fall
short.
Changes occur frequently in the public cloud, and the security
team needs to handle security and compliance—ideally without
slowing the whole organization down. To do that, they need to
identify security issues and vulnerabilities early in
development, speed up remediation, and provide continuous,
consistent security and assurance. Unfortunately, accomplishing
all that amid the many interdependencies in modern environments
can be quite difficult with a traditional approach.
To optimize cloud security and compliance to support DevOps and
minimize friction, security teams need to evolve from protecting
infrastructure to protecting applications that run on workloads.
That means ensuring the security of cloud service configurations
and the production environment at a minimum, with runtime
protection a valuable layer of additional protection.
Benefits of CNAPP
As a unified security solution, a CNAPP offers complete security
coverage to help you keep up with ephemeral, containerized, and
serverless environments, providing:
- A single pane of glass, improving team collaboration and efficiency by identifying and correlating minor issues, individual events, and hidden attack vectors into intuitive visual flows with alerts, recommendations, and remediation guidance to support informed decisions.
- Reduced complexity and overhead, replacing multiple point products with a complete picture of risk via comprehensive visibility into configurations, assets, permissions, code, and workloads. A CNAPP analyzes millions of attributes to prioritize the most critical risks.
- Comprehensive cloud and services coverage, with visibility and insights across your entire multicloud footprint, including IaaS and PaaS, extending across VM, container, and serverless workloads and into dev environments, to identify and remediate risks early.
- Security at the speed of DevOps, integrating with IDE platforms to identify misconfigurations or compliance issues during development and CI/CD, as well as with SecOps ecosystems to trigger alerts, tickets, and workflows on violations so teams can act immediately.
- Guardrails to distribute security responsibility, injecting security controls at each level of the DevOps cycle, with native integrations into existing development and DevOps tools. Implementing guardrails enables developers to take ownership of security in their work, reducing friction between security and the DevOps team to better support DevSecOps.
How Does CNAPP Work?
CNAPP platforms bring together multiple security tools and functions to reduce complexity and overhead, providing:
- The combined capabilities of CSPM, CIEM, and CWPP tools
- Correlation of vulnerabilities, context, and relationships across the development life cycle
- Identification of high-priority risks with rich context
- Guided and automated remediation to fix vulnerabilities and misconfigurations
- Guardrails to prevent unauthorized architecture changes
- Easy integration with SecOps ecosystems to send alerts in near-real time