A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a unified security solution to protect cloud-native applications throughout their lifecycle. CNAPP integrates multiple cloud security solutions, such as cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP), and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), under a single architecture. This approach helps organizations address the full spectrum of risks facing applications deployed in modern cloud environments, from development and build to runtime operations.
CNAPP solutions handle the unique security challenges of dynamic and distributed cloud environments. Unlike legacy tools that focus on siloed aspects of cloud security, CNAPP platforms break down barriers between security disciplines. They deliver visibility, risk assessment, threat detection, and automated remediation using contextual intelligence across workloads, identities, configurations, and data. This consolidation reduces complexity, making it easier for security teams to protect applications at cloud scale.
Here are the main reasons CNAPP has become essential for protecting cloud environments:
CSPM is essential for maintaining the security hygiene of cloud resources through continuous assessment of configurations, policies, and access controls. It systematically scans cloud environments for misconfigurations, exposures, and compliance gaps against industry standards and regulatory requirements. CSPM tools identify risky settings in services like storage buckets, virtual machines, networking components, and databases, providing prioritized remediation guidance.
By leveraging automated workflows, CSPM reduces manual effort and enables teams to address security drift as cloud environments evolve. Continuous visibility into cloud resources ensures that deviations from best practices and policy baselines are caught early, minimizing attack surface and supporting proactive risk management. Integrating CSPM into DevOps pipelines further enforces preventive controls, embedding security into the software development lifecycle.
CWPP focuses on securing compute workloads in the cloud, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. These platforms deliver runtime protection, vulnerability scanning, and behavioral monitoring of application workloads, regardless of where they run, whether on public, private, or hybrid clouds. CWPP ensures consistent protection across diverse environments, detecting threats like malware, unauthorized processes, and file integrity violations.
Modern CWPP solutions are built for scalability and automation, integrating seamlessly with cloud orchestration tools to provide workload visibility at the speed of DevOps. They automatically enforce security controls, such as runtime defense rules and exploit prevention, and offer detailed telemetry for incident investigation and response. By covering both legacy and cloud-native workloads, CWPP enables organizations to transition securely to modern architectures.
CIEM addresses the challenge of permissions sprawl and over-privileged identities that can be exploited by attackers. In complex cloud environments with thousands of users, services, and machine identities, managing entitlements by hand becomes impractical. CIEM solutions automate the detection and remediation of excessive or unused permissions, applying the principle of least privilege at scale.
These platforms provide granular visibility into access patterns, privilege escalations, and anomalous activity related to identities and roles. Through continuous monitoring and automated policy enforcement, CIEM reduces the blast radius of compromised accounts and enhances compliance with identity-centric regulations. Effective CIEM is key to ensuring secure access management in the dynamic, API-driven cloud ecosystem.
DSPM provides continuous visibility into where sensitive data resides in the cloud, how it is accessed, and whether it is exposed to risk. It automatically discovers data stores and classifies data according to sensitivity or regulatory requirement, uncovering shadow data and potential exposures that could otherwise go unnoticed. DSPM helps organizations prevent data breaches by enforcing encryption, proper access controls, and monitoring for suspicious activity.
By integrating with CNAPP, DSPM aligns data-centric risk assessments with broader cloud security operations. Teams can identify compliance drift, improper data sharing, or risky data movement in near-real time, receiving actionable insights to prioritize fixes. DSPM’s ability to correlate data risk with identity, workload, and configuration context increases the effectiveness of threat detection and response.
KSPM is specialized for securing Kubernetes clusters, ensuring the orchestration and deployment framework adheres to security best practices. It continuously assesses cluster configurations, network policies, role-based access controls, and workload deployments against security benchmarks. KSPM highlights risks such as exposed dashboards, over-privileged service accounts, or vulnerable container images.
Security teams benefit from the granular visibility KSPM provides into the infrastructure and application layers of cloud-native workloads. Automated remediation and integration with CI/CD pipelines enable organizations to maintain secure Kubernetes environments at the pace of frequent deployments. KSPM closes the gap between application velocity and the need for security in containerized architectures.
CDR delivers threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities optimized for cloud environments. It collects telemetry from workloads, cloud management APIs, network flows, and identity events, enabling real-time monitoring for signs of attacks such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, or data exfiltration. Advanced CDR solutions use analytics and machine learning to detect sophisticated threats that evade traditional tools.
Integration with incident response playbooks allows CDR to trigger automated or guided remediation actions, stopping attacks in progress and minimizing damage. Centralized detection and response capabilities, orchestrated through CNAPP, ensure that security teams can react faster and more effectively to threats in cloud-native infrastructure. CDR plays a critical role in operationalizing detection and response at the cloud scale.
Containers and Kubernetes orchestrate cloud-native applications at massive scale, increasing both agility and risk. CNAPP solutions secure these environments by scanning container images for vulnerabilities before deployment, enforcing configuration best practices, and monitoring for threats in running pods and clusters. Security controls span from image registries to runtime, ensuring that only trusted code and configurations are promoted through the application lifecycle.
Continuous assessment and automated remediation are key to maintaining a hardened Kubernetes environment. CNAPP provides fine-grained control over network segmentation, RBAC policies, and admission controls, detecting and correcting insecure deployments instantly. By integrating with CI/CD tools and runtime controls, CNAPP helps teams meet security objectives without sacrificing development speed or operational flexibility.
Serverless and microservices architectures increase complexity by distributing logic across many ephemeral functions and APIs. CNAPP addresses this with granular discovery, inventory, and security checks tailored for functions and managed cloud services. These checks uncover misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and hidden dependencies that could become attack entry points, enabling automated risk mitigation.
Runtime monitoring covers serverless invocations, API calls, and data movements, enabling real-time detection of anomalous behavior. Policy enforcement extends to identity and access management for function permissions, reducing exposure to privilege escalation and lateral movement. Automated analysis ensures that even rapidly changing serverless environments remain securely governed and compliant.
Cloud environments generate thousands of permissions assignments and privilege relationships across users, machines, APIs, and SaaS integrations. CNAPP’s CIEM capabilities automate entitlement discovery, analysis, and remediation, allowing organizations to enforce least privilege principles without manual overhead. This prevents privilege creep and closes identity-based attack vectors.
Continuous entitlement reviews and automated policy enforcement mean permissions are right-sized as environments evolve. Suspicious privilege escalations and unused access are detected and remediated before they can be exploited. By making identity management scalable and actionable, CNAPP reduces the risk surface and supports compliance with audit and regulatory requirements.
Cloud misconfigurations are a leading cause of breaches, as attackers quickly exploit accidental exposure of critical resources. CNAPP automates the detection of misconfigured cloud services—whether it’s public storage buckets, open databases, or overly permissive network rules—and triggers real-time remediation workflows. Security teams receive alerts mapped to business risk, enabling rapid response.
Automated remediation scripts or integrations with infrastructure-as-code tools can instantly revert risky changes, close public endpoints, or correct policy violations, often before an attacker can take advantage. Real-time response is essential for modern organizations operating at cloud speed, allowing security to keep up with the pace of DevOps and minimize the impact of human error.
Dima Potekhin, CTO and Co-Founder of CyCognito, is an expert in mass-scale data analysis and security. He is an autodidact who has been coding since the age of nine and holds four patents that include processes for large content delivery networks (CDNs) and internet-scale infrastructure.
In my experience, here are tips that can help you better integrate CNAPP into your security operations and extract maximum value from its architecture:
Join Aviel Tzarfaty, Product Manager at CyCognito, as he explains how your Security team can create a plan to increase visibility into internet-facing cloud environments, run automated and continuous testing across all assets, and be made aware as soon as any security risks arise for any cloud-based assets.
CNAPP’s effectiveness begins at the earliest stage of application development, integrating directly into CI/CD pipelines. Security checks run alongside code builds, container image creation, and infrastructure deployment scripts. This integration ensures that vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and policy violations are identified before workloads even reach production, reducing the cost and risk associated with post-deployment fixes.
By embedding security controls and automated testing into the pipeline, organizations can shift security left and empower developers to own security outcomes. DevSecOps teams receive actionable feedback within their tools, fostering a culture where secure code and infrastructure definitions are the default. This continuous validation accelerates delivery while reducing attack surface across every release.
Once workloads are live in cloud environments, CNAPP provides runtime monitoring to detect anomalous behaviors and active threats. This continuous oversight covers compute instances, containers, serverless functions, and data sources. By analyzing telemetry in real time, CNAPP platforms identify deviations from established baselines, such as unauthorized process execution, privilege escalation, or unexpected network activity.
Sophisticated monitoring correlates signals across both cloud infrastructure and application layers, enhancing accuracy and speed of threat detection. Automated alerting and response workflows enable security teams to contain incidents quickly, reducing mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to remediate (MTTR). Runtime monitoring ensures protection against emerging threats and maintains compliance with internal and regulatory standards.
Centralized policy management is a cornerstone of CNAPP. Organizations define and enforce security, compliance, and governance policies across all cloud resources through a single interface. CNAPP continuously evaluates resource configurations, identity permissions, and deployment practices against these policies, identifying deviations without manual intervention.
Automated remediation accelerates the closure of security gaps by executing pre-approved fixes in response to policy violations. This can include revoking excessive permissions, correcting misconfigurations, or rolling back insecure changes. By reducing reliance on manual processes, CNAPP ensures a consistent security posture and allows teams to respond rapidly to evolving threats and compliance demands.
CNAPP aggregates data from multiple sources (cloud infrastructure, application workloads, identities, and networks) to provide unified context for risk analysis. This correlation empowers security teams to prioritize actions based not just on isolated alerts but on the full picture: how vulnerabilities, exposures, and suspicious activity intersect in business-critical contexts.
With unified context, teams can link misconfigurations with exposed data stores, trace privilege escalations across workloads, and identify the root cause of complex incidents. Contextual insights drive faster investigation, more accurate remediation, and improved compliance reporting. By breaking down data silos, CNAPP supports a risk-centric approach to securing cloud-native architectures.
Here are some of the important metrics to track to identify if CNAPP is having a positive impact on your organization’s security posture.
To evaluate the effectiveness of a CNAPP deployment, organizations must track posture improvement using quantitative metrics. These may include the reduction in misconfigurations, vulnerabilities closed, or attack surface shrunk over time. Regular posture assessments provide a baseline and highlight trends in security maturity, enabling leadership to measure the return on investment and compliance with industry regulations.
How to measure:
Track the number of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and insecure policies identified and remediated over time. Use CNAPP’s historical reporting to calculate trends across time intervals (e.g., weekly, monthly). Measure the percentage decrease in critical findings or risk scores compared to baseline assessments. Incorporate normalized metrics like risk reduction per 100 assets to account for cloud environment growth.
Policy coverage metrics indicate how thoroughly cloud resources and workloads are protected by defined security controls. High coverage reduces exposure to threats and compliance failures; gaps expose critical assets. CNAPP tracks the percentage of assets under policy, the alignment with benchmarks like CIS, NIST, or PCI DSS, and compliance scores across business units.
How to measure:
Calculate the percentage of cloud resources covered by active policies and rulesets. Use CNAPP dashboards to measure alignment with frameworks such as CIS, NIST, or PCI DSS, tracking pass/fail rates per control category. Monitor compliance drift by assessing the number of policy violations over time. Generate per-account or per-business-unit reports to highlight areas with inadequate policy enforcement.
MTTD and MTTR are critical metrics for evaluating the speed and effectiveness of cloud security operations. MTTD measures how quickly threats and vulnerabilities are detected after they arise, while MTTR quantifies the time taken to contain or remediate those risks. CNAPP platforms optimize these metrics through automation, continuous monitoring, and real-time alerting, reducing dwell time for attackers.
How to measure:
Log timestamps for when a risk (e.g., vulnerability, misconfiguration, or suspicious activity) is detected and when it is resolved or remediated. Calculate MTTD as the average time between risk emergence and detection, and MTTR as the average time between detection and resolution. Use CNAPP’s incident tracking and audit logs to derive these values across different asset types or severity levels.
Automation is a core benefit of CNAPP, but it must be balanced against accuracy. Tracking automation rates, such as the percentage of incidents handled without manual intervention, and false positive rates (alerts that do not represent real risk) provides insight into platform effectiveness. High automation with low false positives increases efficiency and reduces alert fatigue.
How to measure:
Measure the percentage of security findings or incidents resolved through automated workflows without human intervention. Compare this against the total number of security events to determine automation coverage. For false positives, sample a set of alerts and manually verify their validity, or use feedback mechanisms in the CNAPP to track alert dismissals. Calculate the false positive rate as a percentage of total alerts generated.
Successful CNAPP deployments require cultural alignment with DevSecOps principles, fostering shared ownership of security across development, operations, and security teams. Embedding security checks and context-aware feedback into the development process ensures that vulnerabilities are remediated before deployment, shrinking the window of exposure. Early collaboration reduces bottlenecks and leverages the agility of cloud-native workflows.
Continuous training and cross-team communication help drive adoption of CNAPP tools by developers and engineers. Security champions within product squads can advocate for secure coding and infrastructure-as-code practices. By making security visible and actionable throughout the CI/CD pipeline, organizations build a culture where risk is owned and managed at every phase of application delivery.
Automation is essential for maintaining a secure cloud posture at scale. CNAPP enables continuous policy enforcement by monitoring and correcting misconfigurations, entitlement drift, and compliance deviations automatically. This reduces manual workload and ensures swift correction of insecure states, limiting opportunities for attackers.
Drift detection highlights unauthorized or unintentional changes to critical assets, triggering automated rollback or alert workflows. Integrating these capabilities into both runtime and CI/CD environments supports consistency and auditability. Automated policy enforcement allows teams to maintain security standards as environments and architectures evolve rapidly.
Enhancing CNAPP with threat intelligence and SIEM integration expands visibility and context for incident detection and response. Real-time threat feeds enable proactive identification of campaigns targeting cloud infrastructure, while SIEM ingests and correlates events from cloud workloads alongside traditional assets, providing centralized visibility for security operations centers (SOCs).
Bi-directional integration automates the enrichment of cloud alerts with external threat context and speeds up incident triage. Aggregated insights from CNAPP, threat intelligence, and SIEM tools support faster, more accurate response and forensics. This holistic approach consolidates cloud and enterprise security data under one operational roof.
Resource constraints often require prioritization in cloud security operations. CNAPP recommends risk-based prioritization, focusing efforts on workloads and assets with the highest impact or likelihood of exploitation. This includes internet-facing applications, data stores with sensitive information, or assets supporting critical business processes.
Risk scoring, context-aware reporting, and attack path analysis enable teams to deploy scarce resources where they will have the most significant impact. Regular reviews and dynamic reprioritization ensure evolving threats and business changes are factored into remediation schedules. Prioritizing high-risk workloads accelerates risk reduction across the most crucial parts of the cloud estate.
No security control is effective unless continuously validated against real-world threats. CNAPP encourages organizations to regularly test security policies, incident response playbooks, and automated remediations through tabletop exercises, simulated attacks, and red/blue team operations. This ensures that technical controls work as intended and that processes are ready for actual incidents.
Automated chaos engineering for security or breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools integrated with CNAPP provide scalable, low-cost methods for ongoing control validation. Feedback from testing cycles can be used to tune detection logic, response workflows, and policy definitions, driving iterative improvement and maintaining high security standards as environments evolve.
CNAPP platforms provide deep visibility into managed cloud environments through cloud provider APIs, agent data, and code to runtime correlation. CyCognito extends that visibility by discovering externally exposed cloud services that sit outside CNAPP inventory and validating their exploitability with continuous DAST and active testing. Together, they deliver coverage across both known and unknown cloud assets.
Discover externally exposed cloud services CNAPP does not ingest
Operating without cloud credentials, CyCognito performs seedless outside-in black box discovery across public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. It identifies cloud resources that never appear in CNAPP because they reside in unsanctioned accounts, misconfigured regions, forgotten environments, or cloud footprints created outside standard provisioning workflows. This closes deployment gaps where real exposure exists but CNAPP has no visibility.
Validate real world exploitability with active testing
CyCognito runs 90,000+ non intrusive active tests, including DAST for web applications and APIs, and exercises the services that front cloud workloads. The platform validates OWASP class vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, authentication weaknesses, and sensitive data exposures that CNAPP tools cannot detect through version checks or metadata alone. The result is a confirmed set of reachable and exploitable risks rather than theoretical findings.
Correlate external reachability with CNAPP internal context
Once externally exposed cloud assets are identified and validated, CyCognito findings enrich CNAPP data. CNAPP now sees which misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, or identity issues are tied to internet reachable services and which exposures form viable attack paths. This reduces noise and directs teams to the small subset of cloud risks that are truly exploitable.
Quantify CNAPP coverage gaps with actionable metrics
By comparing its external asset graph to the CNAPP inventory, CyCognito highlights unmonitored cloud services, unmanaged accounts with exposed endpoints, and externally exploitable vulnerabilities CNAPP did not detect. Cloud security teams gain concrete coverage metrics and a focused backlog for onboarding and policy refinement.
CyCognito and CNAPP address opposite sides of the same cloud security problem. CNAPP secures managed cloud resources with deep internal visibility. CyCognito discovers externally exposed resources CNAPP misses and validates their exploitability with active testing. Combined, they enable complete cloud exposure management and more accurate prioritization of the risks that matter.
Join Aviel Tzarfaty, Product Manager at CyCognito, as he explains how your Security team can create a plan to increase visibility into internet-facing cloud environments, run automated and continuous testing across all assets, and be made aware as soon as any security risks arise for any cloud-based assets.
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