More and more, we see companies shifting their operations to the cloud. While the pandemic has accelerated migration rates as companies sought to better support remote workers, the cloud has gained popularity for years thanks to its speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness advantages. Today, 94% of companies around the world use some form of cloud services.
However, moving to the cloud and establishing a mature security posture is no easy task. While the cloud enables companies to scale quickly and easily spin up new workloads, it can also create complex, multi-layered security environments where alerts and risks come from all angles. Addressing this dynamic threat landscape requires a proactive and unified approach.
The Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) serves as a unified platform that simplifies cloud native application and infrastructure security by integrating multiple solutions to embed security from initial code development to provisioning and runtime to help mitigate risks across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This provides several key benefits to organizations, including:
End-to-end visibility: CNAPP provides end-to-end visibility across all cloud resources, enabling organizations to monitor and protect their environments through a single pane of glass. Streamlined Operations: By integrating security tools, CNAPP reduces the complexity of managing multipoint solutions, resulting in more efficient and effective security operations. Proactive Threat Management: CNAPP enhances threat exposure capabilities by connecting data from disparate sources, allowing security teams to more accurately identify and prioritize risks. Improve Compliance: Through integrated compliance management, CNAPP helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and adhere to industry standards more effectively. Rapid incident response: A unified platform enables faster identification and remediation of security findings, reducing the potential impact of threats.
By enabling CNAPP within their cloud environment, organizations can use these benefits to achieve a more mature cloud security posture. Here's how.
Dealing with cloud threats at all stages of the life cycle
When organizations first move to the cloud, they often choose to deploy single point solutions to manage different aspects of their cloud security. Also known as a best-in-class approach, this strategy can lead to decentralized visibility and security blind spots across cloud architecture because these siled tools often fail to communicate with each other. It can also create highly manual workflows to address security concerns, leading to risky misconfigurations and even inappropriate data classification.
In contrast, a mature cloud security posture is characterized by a comprehensive, strategic approach that includes proactive threat hunting, advanced compliance engagement, rapid incident response, and accelerated time to remediation. Organizations at this level often have centralized, unified control over their cloud security tools, helping to streamline workflow and achieve greater visibility across all resources.
CNAPP helps organizations reach this mature state of cloud security by integrating multiple cloud security solutions under one umbrella to protect cloud-native applications and infrastructure. These include, but are not limited to, cloud security posture management (CSPM), multi-pipeline DevOps security, cloud workload protection, cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM), and cloud service mesh security (CSNS).
At the development level, CNAPP can inspect code for secrets or vulnerabilities that may have been inadvertently left out, report misconfigurations, and help unify security teams and developers by enforcing security best practices throughout the development process. This provides more proactive security by addressing common risks before they are deployed.
At runtime, CNAPP correlates insights from different aspects of cloud security to contextualize and prioritize alerts based on their potential risk to the business. For example, instead of identifying 1,000 containers that have been exposed to the Internet, CNAPP can provide detailed information about vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations within each container image and allow your team to assess the risks of each, helping them decide which ones to address first. CNAPP can also use CSPM to proactively identify attack paths that lead to compromised or exposed assets within your environment. This allows security teams to address attack paths before they are compromised.
CNAPP continuously scans cloud environments for new vulnerabilities or suspicious signals, protecting your cloud environment from new and emerging threats. It can also help with compliance and automate repetitive workflows to free up your defenders' time for more dynamic security work. Likewise, some CNAPPs are using generative AI to provide next steps for targeted remediation and improve the skills of existing cyber defenders. These AI-based capabilities are particularly useful in accelerating detection and response time as they can either automatically block suspicious activity or help defenders remediate faster based on internal security guidelines or industry best practices.
Expand your cloud security with CNAPP
Securing cloud environments is a dynamic task that often requires a change in mindset for security teams. Instead of addressing individual alerts on their company's private network or addressing incidents as they arise, defenders must adopt a more proactive mindset that can match the speed and sophistication of today's attacks.
Adopting CNAPP is not just about the speed of your defense. It's about intelligently navigating complex cloud environments with dexterity and insight. From automating compliance checks to enhancing data protection, reducing code vulnerabilities, and accelerating incident response, CNAPP serves as a comprehensive toolset that not only meets your organization's security needs, but anticipates them.
By integrating CNAPP into their cloud environment, organizations can secure their existing cloud infrastructure while also laying the foundation for an agile approach that ensures it remains resilient, compliant, and secure as their cloud applications continue to grow and evolve.
Click here to learn more about the latest innovations in cloud security.
