Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native strategies to enhance agility and scalability. As cloud environments dynamically evolve, they’re becoming more difficult to maintain and even more challenging to monitor, especially for potential threats. But cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) can help. CNAPP is a comprehensive security solution that unites various cloud security capabilities to protect applications across their entire lifecycle.
What is CNAPP?
Gartner® coined the term “CNAPP” in 2021. According to the research Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, "Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. CNAPPs incorporate an integrated set of proactive and reactive security capabilities, including artifact scanning, security guardrails, configuration and compliance management, risk detection and prioritization, and behavioral analytics, providing visibility, governance, and control from code creation to production runtime. CNAPP solutions use a combination of API integrations with leading cloud platform providers, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline integrations, and agent and agentless workload integration to offer combined development and runtime security coverage."
CNAPPs encompass integrated solutions, such as the following:
- Cloud security posture management (CSPM)
- Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM)
- Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP)
- Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)
- CI/CD security and container scanning
By consolidating these functions, CNAPPs provide a single source of truth that enables organizations to effectively manage and mitigate risks in cloud environments.
Why do organizations need CNAPPs?
Organizations working towards DevSecOps maturity face challenges that piecemeal security tools struggle to address.
The need for faster release cycles
With more organizations releasing software weekly or daily, a traditional application security approach that gates releases before going into production for security testing decreases the speed and agility of digital transformation.
The cost of security breaches and noncompliance
Organizations can incur significant costs due to noncompliance or in the event of a security breach. Robust solutions like CNAPP help organizations mitigate risks and ensure compliance. CNAPPs automate checks and audits, ensuring continuous compliance and providing comprehensive threat detection and response capabilities to effectively manage and secure their growing attack surface.
The cost of multiple solutions within an environment
As they grow, organizations often accumulate diverse technologies with varying security controls across cloud environments. Security teams using stand-alone tools for container security posture management (CSPM), CIEM, and CWPP encounter visibility gaps, conflicting data sources, alert fatigue, and high operational complexity. Managing these disparate tools demands significant time and effort, complicating the ability to meet security demands. Moreover, using multiple tools in the software development lifecycle can lead to visibility gaps, inefficiency, and increased risk.
The need to manage application security complexity
As modern clouds become more complex and distributed, application security becomes a significant challenge. Modern enterprises struggle to respond to the need for broader security workflows that can address different security issues—including vulnerability management and compliance—across various platforms and applications. CNAPP provides centralized security management and visibility across on-prem and cloud platforms, simplifying management by consolidating multiple security functions into a single platform, addressing the limitations and blind spots of traditional tools.
Benefits of CNAPPs
CNAPPs improve organizational efficiency and the efficacy of security compliance by providing the following benefits:
Enhanced observability
CNAPPs close visibility gaps by providing a comprehensive view of configurations, assets, and workloads. This ensures that potential security issues can be identified and addressed proactively.
Integrated DevSecOps
By embedding security checks into the development pipeline, CNAPPs facilitate early detection and resolution of vulnerabilities, enabling secure and efficient software delivery.
Automation
Automating response and remediation processes early in the software development lifecycle reduces operational complexity and costs, allowing organizations to focus resources on innovation and growth.
Secure applications
Early identification of security issues in the development cycle ensures that critical vulnerabilities are resolved before reaching production, enhancing overall security posture.
Shared responsibility
CNAPPs help distribute security responsibility, enabling developers to be in control of security at each level of the development cycle, reducing the friction between security, DevOps, and IT Ops teams.
How Dynatrace facilitates CNAPP integration
As you consider the next step in your CNAPP journey, look for the best solution that incorporates all your teams’ needs. As a unified, AI-driven observability and security platform, Dynatrace provides comprehensive CNAPP capabilities, including the following:
Security posture management
With capabilities such as CSPM and Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM), Dynatrace helps maintain a robust security posture proactively.
Application security
Dynatrace also helps teams protect against zero-day attacks, detect third-party and code-level vulnerabilities across all layers of any cloud application, without false positives in real time.
Threat observability
Dynatrace conducts threat hunts, quickly detecting, investigating, and automatically responding to threats. The platform prioritizes threat hunts for the most critical zero-day vulnerabilities with Davis® hypermodal AI.
DevSecOps at scale to ship secure code faster
Dynatrace automatically validates that no new critical vulnerabilities were deployed by leveraging security gates.
Ultimately, CNAPPs play a critical role in protecting cloud-native applications by providing comprehensive, integrated security solutions. With the support of platforms like Dynatrace, organizations can effectively integrate CNAPP practices into their daily workflows, ensuring comprehensive security and compliance while driving innovation and efficiency in cloud environments.
