Cybersecurity Structures 101: A Guide to Understanding CNAPP

The term Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) was introduced by Gartner in 2021 to describe a previously disparate group of cloud security tools.

At its core, CNAPP is a single solution designed to rapidly detect, prevent and respond to cloud security threats.

Tools within CNAPPs provide visibility, risk management and threat protection to cloud native applications and their users.

A CNAPP’s unified set of security and compliance capabilities aims to simplify the protection of cloud environments, provide visibility, governance and control from code creation and throughout the product life cycle.

One of the key features of CNAPP is how it embeds security into cloud applications and infrastructure from the earliest stages of the development process, ensuring that even infrastructure is significantly scaled, the protections are already built in by design, and any issues can be resolved at speed.

A CNAPP solution serves as a central platform for managing security and compliance requirements around solutions which help teams build, deploy and run secure cloud native applications.

Cybersecurity vendors may include slightly different components in their platforms, but generally, a CNAPP solution will include a combination of the following:

• Cloud security posture management (CSPM): for monitoring, identifying and remediating misconfigurations and compliance risks in cloud environments.
• Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP): for providing visibility and controls around physical machines, virtual machines, containers and serverless workloads in a range of cloud and datacentre environments.
• Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM): for mitigating the potential risk of data breaches involving information stored in public clouds by continuously monitoring permissions and activities around the data.
• DevOps security management and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning: for providing both the DevOps and security teams with a central security control across all pipelines around cloud development, deployment and maintenance, preventing vulnerabilities from entering production environments. IaC automates the process of code scanning to aid with building, testing and deploying applications, including cloud.
• Cloud service network security (CSNS): for deploying security tools such as DDoS protection, web application firewalls and transport layer security. This can complement cloud workload protections by providing additional monitoring and protection of cloud infrastructure in real time.

There are several reasons an organisation with a heavy focus on cloud computing should consider investing in a CNAPP solution. In addition to the core CNAPP use for managing multiple cloud security solutions in a single user interface, making it easier to protect of all cloud ecosystem, benefits include:

• Centralised multi-cloud support. A purposefully built CNAPP makes it simpler to embed security throughout the application lifecycle. This allows for the unification of security and compliance across multiple different public and private cloud infrastructure environments, providing increased visibility of the multi-cloud data environment – all from one place. This reduces the complexity of managing a multi-cloud system, providing more efficient support.
• Centralised compliance and permissions management. This allows organisations to continuously and thoroughly manage data governance and compliance around cloud-based systems. By automatically enforcing the principle of least privileged access across the cloud ecosystem, it ensures that only users who absolutely have to access cloud databases can do so. This helps protect cloud systems from unauthorised access, be it by an insider threat or an external source.
• Security at speed. By integrating processes like DevOps and IaC scanning, it can help both development and security teams identify potential misconfigurations or compliance issues during any stage of the process. By automatically triggering alerts on these, it allows the issues to be examined and potentially fixed immediately.
• Guardrails ensure responsible security measures. Applying CNAPP makes it easier to take a secure DevOps approach to cloud development, allowing guardrails and checkpoints to be applied throughout the development process. This also helps to prevent future issues, as potential security problems can be detected during the development process, rather than after the cloud solution has been distributed across the network.
• More effective security operations. Deploying a unified set of tools with increased visibility and prioritised alerts for the wider cloud environment can make it easier for the security team to protect the cloud-estate, no matter how large it and gets and no-matter if it contains multiple different cloud providers. This can help to improve the efficiency of managing cloud, as well as potentially reducing cost.

When Gartner coined the term CNAPP, it concluded that the most significant benefit of a CNAPP approach is better visibility and control of cloud-native application risk.

Visibility into the network is vital, providing security and monitoring capabilities at scale, especially in an era where employees and users can access cloud-based applications from practically anywhere.

The CNAPP concept is still relatively new and evolving, but by deploying a CNAPP solution correctly, it can go a long way to help the cloud stay protected against cyber threats.

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