Understanding CNAPP: Evolution, Components & Evaluation Criteria

What Is a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)?

A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is an integrated security solution to safeguard cloud-native applications, including multiple security tools like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Service Network Security (CSNS), and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP). Unlike traditional cloud security tools, CNAPP offers protection by unifying security across different layers of cloud environments, from infrastructure to applications.

CNAPP addresses security needs in dynamic and ephemeral cloud environments, ensuring defense mechanisms that evolve with applications and workloads. It emphasizes end-to-end security, offering capabilities like threat detection, vulnerability management, and risk assessment tailored for cloud architectures.

The Evolution of CNAPP 

Before CNAPP emerged, securing cloud environments was a fragmented and challenging process. In the early 2000s, when cloud computing started to grow, security vendors attempted to adapt traditional tools like firewalls and intrusion detection systems to protect cloud infrastructure. 

However, as cloud applications became more complex, these solutions proved inadequate. They couldn’t keep up with the dynamic, distributed nature of cloud environments, leading to visibility gaps, inconsistent policy enforcement, and an incomplete approach to cloud security. Security functions were often siloed, with separate tools for cloud operations and application development security, creating further challenges. As organizations adopted more tools, they found it harder to manage security effectively, resulting in a lack of visibility and control.

By the mid-2010s, cloud security risks grew as cybercriminals targeted vulnerable cloud infrastructure, exploiting the blind spots created by fragmented security solutions. In response, cloud service providers introduced the shared responsibility model, making organizations responsible for safeguarding their own cloud data and workloads. This shift led to a demand for more unified security solutions.

CNAPP was born out of this need for a unified approach to cloud security. It integrates previously separate tools into a single platform, allowing organizations to close visibility gaps and manage cloud security more effectively. By combining various security functions, CNAPP provides a cohesive solution to the challenges of cloud-native environments.

What Problems Does a CNAPP Solve? 

Enhanced Visibility and Risk Quantification

CNAPP enhances visibility by providing a consolidated view of the security landscape, allowing companies to identify potential risks across their cloud environments. This visibility aids in making informed decisions about threat management and prioritizing security measures.

Risk quantification is vital for understanding the potential impact of security threats. CNAPP offers tools to assess these risks accurately, enabling organizations to allocate resources effectively. By quantifying risk, companies can focus on critical areas and mitigate potential issues before they escalate.

Unified Cloud Security Solution

Unlike standalone solutions, CNAPP combines various security functionalities into one platform. This approach simplifies security management, reduces operational overhead, and enhances overall effectiveness by providing a holistic view of the security posture.

Integrated security solutions eliminate the need to juggle multiple tools, enabling more efficient processes and unified threat detection and response. This synergy ensures that all aspects of cloud security work together, providing protection against evolving threats.

Secure Software Development

CNAPP supports secure software development by integrating security throughout the software lifecycle. It emphasizes the “shift left” approach, incorporating security practices early in the development process to identify and resolve vulnerabilities before deployment.

By embedding security into software development, CNAPP helps teams adhere to best practices and compliance requirements such as PCI DSS. This proactive strategy reduces the likelihood of post-deployment security issues, ensuring safer applications and a more secure development pipeline.

Tips from the expert

Steve Moore is Vice President and Chief Security Strategist at Exabeam, helping drive solutions for threat detection and advising customers on security programs and breach response. He is the host of the “The New CISO Podcast,” a Forbes Tech Council member, and Co-founder of TEN18 at Exabeam.

In my experience, here are tips that can help you better leverage CNAPP effectively:

Leverage CIEM for Dynamic Role Assignments:  Rather than simply focusing on static entitlement policies, use CNAPP’s CIEM capabilities to dynamically adjust permissions based on real-time behavior and workload needs. This helps prevent “permission creep” over time and reduces the attack surface.

Implement Contextual Threat Detection: Make sure to configure CNAPP’s threat detection to use contextual, environment-specific data. Cloud threats often look different from traditional threats, and CNAPPs can provide higher fidelity alerts by understanding the unique context of each cloud service and workload.

Use Behavior Analytics for Anomaly Detection: Go beyond signature-based threat detection and utilize CNAPP’s machine learning-powered behavior analytics to detect anomalous behavior at both the application and infrastructure levels. This is especially useful for identifying insider threats and subtle attacks like lateral movement.

Automate Compliance with Self-Healing Policies: Take advantage of CNAPP’s ability to automatically remediate misconfigurations. When compliance violations or vulnerabilities are detected, automate policy enforcement to self-heal cloud resources, reducing the time to remediation and decreasing reliance on manual processes.

Incorporate Threat Intelligence Feeds: Enhance CNAPP’s threat detection capabilities by integrating it with external threat intelligence feeds. This provides up-to-date data on emerging threats specific to cloud environments and enables faster detection and mitigation of novel attack techniques.

Key Components and Features of CNAPP 

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

CSPM continuously evaluates cloud environments to ensure security configurations align with best practices and policies. It helps detect misconfigurations and compliance violations, reducing the risk of security breaches. By providing real-time insights, CSPM enables proactive management of cloud security posture.

Automated checks and policy enforcement are core to CSPM, promoting consistent security across clouds. This feature reduces manual oversight, streamlines security management, and ensures adherence to regulatory requirements, enhancing the security of cloud resources.

Cloud Service Network Security (CSNS)

CSNS aims to protect network communications within the cloud and between cloud services. It employs tools like encryption, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to secure data in transit and prevent unauthorized access. By safeguarding network pathways, CSNS ensures confidentiality and data integrity.

Maintaining a secure network is essential for preventing breaches and data exfiltration. CSNS addresses these challenges by leveraging network security mechanisms, providing a secure foundation for cloud operations and mitigating the risks associated with network-based threats.

Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

CWPP focuses on safeguarding workloads running in cloud environments, providing capabilities like intrusion detection, vulnerability assessment, and runtime protection. It offers insights into workload security, ensuring that protections keep pace with dynamic cloud architectures.

The workload focus encompasses containers, virtual machines, and serverless functions, each with specific security requirements. CWPP ensures these components are protected, regardless of their location, offering consistent security coverage across all operational workloads.

Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM)

KSPM targets security within Kubernetes environments, managing cluster configurations and workloads. It ensures adherence to security policies, detecting and remediating misconfigurations that could lead to vulnerabilities within containerized applications.

Effective KSPM is critical as Kubernetes usage grows. By enforcing security control and monitoring, KSPM assists in maintaining secure deployments, ensuring that configurations align with best practices and that unauthorized changes do not compromise cluster security.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

CIEM manages identities and access entitlements across cloud infrastructures, ensuring users have appropriate access levels according to their roles. It prevents excessive privileges and secures identity management processes to reduce the attack surface.

Access control is a significant aspect of cloud security, and CIEM provides the tools to implement it effectively. By automating entitlement management, organizations can enforce least privilege policies, reducing the likelihood of insider threats and unauthorized access.

Key Considerations for Choosing a CNAPP Tool 

Complete Visibility Across Multi-Cloud Infrastructures

A CNAPP tool should offer visibility across all cloud environments, including multi-cloud and hybrid setups. This ensures that organizations can monitor their entire cloud ecosystem from a single platform, reducing blind spots. Full visibility allows for real-time detection of security risks and provides actionable insights to mitigate potential threats before they escalate.

With the increasing complexity of cloud infrastructures, particularly in multi-cloud scenarios, centralized visibility is essential for maintaining control over security policies and configurations. CNAPP tools should support integrations across various cloud providers, enabling consistent monitoring and enforcement of security standards, regardless of the cloud service in use.

Enable True Shift-Left DevSecOps

To fully implement DevSecOps, a CNAPP tool must facilitate the “shift-left” approach, integrating security checks early in the software development lifecycle. This includes continuous security testing, code analysis, and vulnerability scanning within development pipelines. By embedding security from the start, CNAPP helps development teams detect and resolve issues before they reach production, reducing the cost and complexity of addressing security flaws later.

A CNAPP that supports shift-left practices should be easy to integrate with CI/CD tools, ensuring that security is not an afterthought but a core part of the development process. This proactive approach minimizes security risks and accelerates secure application delivery.

Facilitate End-to-End Cloud Security Governance

End-to-end governance is critical for managing the compliance and security requirements of cloud-native applications. A CNAPP tool should provide centralized governance capabilities, ensuring that security policies are consistently applied across all environments, from development to production. This includes enforcing regulatory compliance, maintaining audit trails, and managing incident responses.

By offering governance features that span the entire lifecycle of cloud-native applications, CNAPP ensures that security policies are not only enforced but also adaptable to evolving cloud infrastructure and regulatory demands. This unified approach reduces the risk of security gaps and ensures that organizations remain compliant with industry standards.

Advanced Analytics

A CNAPP tool should leverage analytics to identify trends, predict potential security threats, and optimize security responses. These analytics go beyond basic threat detection, using machine learning and AI to correlate data across different layers of the cloud infrastructure, providing deeper insights into security vulnerabilities and emerging risks.

With analytics, CNAPP tools can prioritize security alerts based on severity and context, enabling security teams to focus on critical issues. This capability improves incident response times and reduces the operational burden of managing security in dynamic cloud environments.

Templates for Common Compliance Frameworks

CNAPP tools should include pre-built templates for widely used compliance frameworks such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR. These templates simplify the process of aligning cloud security practices with regulatory requirements, helping organizations achieve and maintain compliance more efficiently.

By offering these templates, CNAPP tools allow for quick deployment of compliance policies and automated audits, ensuring continuous compliance monitoring. This reduces the manual effort required for compliance management, while also ensuring that organizations remain up to date with the latest regulatory standards.

Exabeam: Enhancing Threat Detection with Advanced Security Analytics

The Exabeam Security Operations Platform delivers a powerful combination of SIEM, behavioral analytics, automation, and network visibility to transform how organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats. By correlating firewall logs with data from endpoints, cloud environments, identity systems, and other security sources, Exabeam provides deeper insights into evolving threats that would otherwise go undetected.

Behavior-driven analytics enable Exabeam to go beyond static rules and signatures, identifying anomalous activity that indicates credential misuse, insider threats, or lateral movement across the network. By analyzing normal user and entity behavior over time, Exabeam surfaces high-risk activities that traditional security tools may overlook.

Automated investigations streamline security operations by linking disparate data points into comprehensive threat timelines, reducing the time analysts spend piecing together incidents manually. This allows teams to quickly identify the root cause of an attack and respond with precision.

Learn more about Exabeam SIEM