CNAPP — What, why and how
Why is CNAPP required?
In today’s cloud-native environments, ensuring the security of applications distributed across public, private, and hybrid clouds is getting complicated and time consuming. Traditionally, security teams have had to rely on multiple tools that often lack interoperability.
The usage of multiple security tools creates siloed perspectives on application risk, leading to increased exposure to threats and added complexity for security operations.The activities like correlating data from multiple sources to identify an actionable data delays the threat response time.
To address these challenges, organizations seek solutions which offers
- a unified view of application risk,
- correlation and streamlining the information ,
- and enable efficient response mechanisms.
CNAPP breaks down these silos and enhance collaboration among security tools, so that SecOps teams can effectively mitigate risks and safeguard cloud-native applications.
Ideally, a CNAPP should seamlessly integrate the functionalities of four essential security tools:
- Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) for system integrity protection, application control, behavioral monitoring, intrusion prevention, and anti-malware protection
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to ensure proper cloud configuration by identifying, monitoring, and remediating misconfigurations and compliance issues
- Cloud Application Security Brokers (CASB)to manage cloud usage by enforcing security policies, including authentication, authorization, single sign-on (SSO), encryption, logging, and malware detection/prevention
- and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) to manage cloud identities and privileges by identifying and fixing unnecessary access entitlements and adhering to the least-privilege principle.
CNAPP platform should also offer scanning capabilities for containers and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), empowering organizations to fortify security throughout the development lifecycle and post-deployment stages.
But , In Reality, CNAPP solutions are still evolving and not all CNAPPs are fully integrated, some may require additional add-ons to support diverse cloud platforms, particularly those beyond AWS, Azure, and GCP.
However, organizations can still benefit from these evolving CNAPPs who offer robust CSPM and CWPP capabilities, allowing for effective cloud application protection.
Why do organizations need CNAPP?
Streamlines Security Operations: Implementing a CNAPP solution streamlines security operations by providing broad visibility in a single tool, simplifying monitoring and remediation processes for increased efficiency and productivity.
- Better Visibility into Risks: A CNAPP offers better visibility into security risks associated with cloud infrastructure, enabling security teams to identify and address security gaps effectively.
- Simplified compliance management: CNAPP offers necessary security controls that ensures organizations compliance needs like HIPAA, PCI, GDPR,etc.
- Real time threat detection: Automation in CNAPPs automates risk detection, vulnerability management, and advanced analytics, resulting in improved security, reduced human error, and rapid threat response.
- Reduces the Number of Bug Fixes: A CNAPP detects threats and errors in the CI/CD pipeline, minimizing vulnerabilities at runtime and reducing the number of post-deployment bug fixes, enhancing DevOps team productivity.
- Reduces Overhead Costs: Choosing a CNAPP over standalone cloud security tools like CSPM reduces overhead costs by eliminating the need to operate and maintain multiple solutions, optimizing operational expenses.
How does it work:
Like many other tools, CNAPP’s also offer agent based and agent-less solutions for correlating the data from various workloads. It integrates with CI/CD, Cloud providers, Infrastructure as Code tools and also it integrates with Key management systems.
Thus, Implementing a CNAPP solution enables organizations to consolidate cloud-native security tools, optimize operations, and strengthen their security posture.
CNAPP Vendors Overview:
By leveraging CNAPP, organizations can prioritize risks, enable continuous and real-time detection, visualize environment configuration gaps through Attack Path Analysis, and achieve end-to-end detection across their entire cloud environments.
The progress on converging the cloud protection capabilities into CNAPP, is a ray of hope where organizations can improvise their operational efficiencies by saving costs and to utilize the people skills more optimally.
