CNAPP - A Swiss Army Knife for Cloud-Native Developers and Security teams

A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), is a suite of security tools that enable developers and security teams in any enterprise to identify, prioritize, and remediate security, legal, and compliance risks (in Cloud, Containers, Clusters, and Code) across the development lifecycle, from the build phase, all the way through to production operations.

The growth of cloud-native applications introduces security challenges

The rapid growth of the digital economy fostered the adoption of microservices architectures, cloud, and container technologies across nearly every product engineering team. This introduced new technology vectors and digital assets in an organization, all of which is dynamic and highly automated. This introduction of new technologies has added complexity and process challenges to information security teams seeking to protect digital assets.   

To solve these challenges, security teams turned to the industry and the industry responded with a broad range of commercial and open source cloud security tools like CSPM, CIEM, Container security, KSPM (Kubernetes security posture management), IaC (Infrastructure as code), and SCA (open source vulnerabilities) to analyze the risk posture and keep the platforms secured and compliant.

Leveraging so many tools in large-scale cloud-native deployments means complexity and overhead. Each tool generates numerous alerts that must be triaged, prioritized, assigned, and responded to. Each tool must be integrated with other tools in the enterprise including Version Control Systems, CI/CD Tools, IDEs, ticketing systems, and more. And managing the overhead of operationalizing each tool means that product engineering teams have less time to focus on their core roles, reducing the velocity of application development. 

The solution: a CNAPP platform

A CNAPP can scan, detect, track, monitor, correlate, and remediate different types of security and compliance issues, consolidating several point products into a single, powerful platform. CNAPPs work across cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.), covering all services (IAM, VMs, containers, serverless functions), container orchestrators like Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation, container registries, open-source vulnerabilities, application binaries their licenses and cloud entitlements. Importantly, these platforms are built to correlate across several areas to find the combinations of weaknesses that represent the greatest risk to the enterprise, prioritizing those areas to cut down on alert fatigue and help product engineering teams maximize efficiency so they can focus on developing products, not fixing security issues.

CNAPP is a powerful suite that can protect any cloud-native application and assets by enabling security from build to runtime. A single pane of glass that empowers developers and security professionals to support speed and agility.