In the 50’s BC, Roman General Julius Caesar was able to conquer Gaul, a wealthy, advanced region that today consists of France, as well as large swaths of Germany, Belgium and Italy. Caesar conquered this region by employing a strategy we refer to today as, “divide and conquer.” Unlike the Roman Empire, Gaul had no central authority or leadership, Rather, there were many tribes in Gaul, some of whom cooperated, others who looked out solely for themselves. Over a period of years, Caesar exploited these divisions between tribes to conquer Gaul, one tribe at a time. Had the tribes of Gaul cooperated, working together towards a common goal of defeating Caesar, they might have avoided the ensuing 500 years of Roman rule.
So, what do Julius Caesar and millennia old military strategies have to do with Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)?
Well, unfortunately, the various teams responsible for delivering, and securing, public cloud applications and infrastructure often work like separate tribes, each with their own goals and direction. Unlike the Gauls.
A well-designed CNAPP can help these disparate groups work together towards a common goal of minimizing cloud risk while at the same time allowing them to work in silos, with minimal direct cooperation amongst teams. The approach relies on compartmentalizing each group’s tasks into smaller sub-functions, with shared policies and agreed-upon guardrails. Rather than focus the team on complex, cross-functional goals initiatives, this divide and conquer approach breaks down each team’s task into smaller, easier to tackle, components, with a single platform (CNAPP) tracking overall progress towards risk reduction.
In other words, CNAPP can help form a loose federation across your organization’s tribes that dramatically increases the likelihood of overall public cloud risk reduction. Let’s explore a bit further on the role that several of these tribes are meant to play, and how a CNAPP helps them accomplish their objective.
With their ability to consume and contextualize a broad range of public cloud security weaknesses, Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) are quickly becoming the dominant tool for identifying, prioritizing and remediating cloud risks. Importantly, these platforms are not only a tool to reduce risk, but one that serves multiple teams, each of which has their own role to play in cloud security.
To learn more about Zscaler’s CNAPP solution and about how we can help you determine how a CNAPP can help your organization, reach out today.
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