A Quick Look Into Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

by davidmundy on January 6, 2021

The cloud security solutions market is growing rapidly and there are many types of solutions to support your specific business needs. But figuring out the right tool, let alone the right type of tool, can be difficult. Gartner has 5 security archetypes that fall under the broader cloud security management platform umbrella. This article gives a quick look into the CNAPP archetype:

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP),
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM),
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).

What Is It?
Gartner recently designated CNAPP as a new category to reflect emerging trends in cloud security. CNAPPs bring application and data context in the convergence of the CSPM and CWPP archetypes to protect hosts and workloads, including VMs, containers, and serverless functions. “As security scanning for CWPP shifts back into development, it is also advantageous to scan the cloud configuration for excessive risk as well.”

In What Context Is It Best Used?
IaaS and PaaS environments.

Benefits

The convergence of CSPM and CWPP
Scan workloads and configurations in development and protect workloads and configurations at runtime.
Strong automation and orchestration.
Better security by enabling standardization and deeper layered defenses.
Allows workloads to be accessed more frequently.

For a deeper dive into Gartner’s cloud security archetypes, read: A Practical Guide to Gartner’s Cloud Security Archetypes.