Mid-sized companies increasingly find themselves in need of CNAPP, as their reliance on the cloud matures. But how should they choose the right person? What questions should they ask and what criteria should they use? Here we explain six key considerations that will help them weigh their options and make an informed decision.
As cloud security technologies evolve, mid-sized organizations face unique challenges when choosing a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP). With limited resources and the need for strong protection, they must understand the critical capabilities that determine the effectiveness and value of CNAPP. Here are some of the most important considerations for mid-sized organizations.
Basic criteria for choosing a CNAPP
#1 Seamless integration versus disparate technologies
In today's increasingly complex cloud environments, CNAPPs must provide seamless integration across their features to avoid operational silos and risks. Platforms that develop features organically provide a smoother user experience. Through integrated data streams, these platforms allow for efficient telemetry collection. Disparate technologies with poor integration often lead to security vulnerabilities and workflow inefficiencies, leading to increased costs and administrative overhead.
#2 Identity as a foundation for cloud security
A strong focus on identity and access management is key to securing complex cloud workloads. Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) is especially critical, because it helps organizations control and enforce least privilege across multiple cloud environments. By addressing identity-related risks, powerful CIEM capabilities enable organizations to prevent lateral movement, privilege escalation, and unauthorized access, which, along with misconfigurations, remain the most significant threats in cloud security.
#3 Benchmark pricing and future investments
Medium-sized businesses often operate with limited budgets, which makes standard pricing an attractive option. A flexible pricing structure allows companies to start small and add capabilities as needed. Choosing a CNAPP that integrates with your broader exposure management platform ensures future-proofing of hybrid, multi-cloud and even on-premises workloads. This approach not only reduces initial costs, but also provides scalability to meet evolving business and security requirements.
#4 Regulatory pressures and repatriation
As regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the EU AI Act impose increasingly stringent penalties for non-compliance, many organizations are reconsidering public cloud deployments in favor of on-premises or Mixed environments. Midsized organizations should prioritize CNAPP programs that support this transformation by offering native integrations with platforms that secure cloud and on-premises workloads. AI regulations, in particular, may require local data processing, making local integration a critical requirement.
#5 Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and AI Security
Data security is fundamental to the safety of AI systems. CNAPP's DSPM capabilities allow organizations to discover, classify, and categorize sensitive data, helping ensure compliance with security and privacy regulations. DSPM prevents sensitive information from leaking via AI models or cloud-native applications by identifying unauthorized access and data flows. This is especially important because AI systems increasingly rely on large data sets for training and inference purposes.
#6 Ease of presentation and dissemination
For medium-sized organizations, resource constraints can present significant obstacles to adopting new security technologies. A quick-to-deploy and easy-to-configure CNAPP is essential to ensuring a smooth implementation process without overwhelming your IT and security teams.
Platforms designed with ease of rollout in mind reduce operational expenses by offering:
Intuitive user interfaces: Streamlined dashboards and workflows that reduce the learning curve for administrators. Innovative integrations: Pre-built connectors to major cloud providers, on-premises security technologies, and existing security tools reduce deployment time and customization efforts. Automatic discovery and configuration: Features such as automatic asset discovery, policy enforcement, and creation of a basic configuration template reduce the need for manual setup. Minimal downtime: Deployment with minimal disruption to existing workloads and infrastructure ensures business continuity during rollout.
CNAPPs with these key drivers allow mid-sized organizations to realize faster time value, enabling security teams to focus on strategic activities rather than troubleshooting implementation issues.
Move towards exposure management
Modern threats require organizations to adopt a unified approach to risk management across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. CNAPPs should be seamlessly integrated into a broader exposure management strategy, allowing centralized visibility and response to vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats.
Why Tenable Cloud Security and Tenable One are ideal for mid-sized organizations
Tenable Cloud Security and Tenable One Exposure Management Platform address these challenges head-on by providing:
Ease of introduction and dissemination: Focus on efficiency of dissemination and ease of use. Integrated Functionality: Seamless feature development and integration for a streamlined user experience. The power of CIEM: Powerful identity-centric capabilities to reduce access-related risks. Flexibility and scalability: Modular pricing that adapts to your business needs and grows. Support hybrid and on-premises environments: Secure workloads wherever they exist, meeting organizational and operational needs. Comprehensive exposure management: centralized visibility and management across all environments. Advanced DSPM for AI Security: Comprehensive data classification and monitoring to protect sensitive information in AI workflows.
Tenable offers a future-ready platform designed specifically to meet the needs of mid-sized organizations, providing the tools and confidence needed to meet today's cloud security challenges no matter where you are in your cloud security journey.
Learn more about Tenable Cloud Security and Tenable One.
