The Top 9 Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs)

Wiz is a comprehensive cloud security platform that provides complete visibility and context across cloud environments, allowing teams to proactively address potential risks. As part of their flagship platform, Wiz offers an agentless, graph-based CNAPP approach that provides extensive visibility into all layers of the cloud environment. Wiz connects via APIs to platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. This enables all organizations, regardless of their scale, to obtain a full view of their cloud infrastructure in just minutes.

Wiz enables teams to ‘shift left’ and proactively fix issues without slowing down business development or deployment. The platform helps teams to break down operational silos, and enables teams to proactively assess, fix, and prevent issues across the development lifecycle. Wiz delivers project-base workflows and detailed remediation guidance to help teams to quickly fix misconfigurations or policy breaches.

Wiz continuously identifies and ranks critical risks across cloud-native applications using deep cloud analysis. This identifies misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, malware, and exposed sensitive data. The Wiz Security Graph delivers contextual insights that spot high-risk combinations, thus enabling businesses to minimize potential attack vectors.

Wiz also provides forensic visibility, risk prioritization, and remediation playbooks, helping development teams address risks efficiently and improve the security of their deployments. By integrating with the development pipeline, Wiz ensures potential issues are identified and resolved before deployment. In addition, Wiz supports compliance, with over 100 pre-built frameworks for ensuring compliance for GDPR NIST, HIPAA, CIS, HiTrust, SOC2, and more.

In addition to its CNAPP capabilities, Wiz offers a complete cloud protection platform, with key features including Continuous Security Posture Management (CSPM), vulnerability management, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and container security. The platform can also scan Infrastructure as Code (IaC) configurations and supports over 35 built-in compliance frameworks like CIS, NIST, and GDPR. Additionally, their Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) capabilities proactively scan for sensitive data exposures, ensuring proactive cloud data protection. Wiz is trusted by 40% of Fortune 100 companies, and currently protects over 5 million cloud workloads.

Check Point CloudGuard is a cloud security platform that detects and prevents risks in cloud applications, network, and workloads. It uses AI technologies and multiple layers of security solutions to protect cloud services. This includes cloud native application protection, web application firewall, and network security capabilities delivered in a single platform. Check Point is one of the world’s largest global cybersecurity providers, and CloudGuard is used to protect 50% of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500.

CloudGuard’s CNAPP component provides cloud security ‘from code-to-cloud’. It unifies multiple cloud application security components, including secure application security testing, code scanning, cloud security posture management, data security posture management, cloud workload protection, detection, and response, into a single admin console. It enforces security policies from initial application development through to deployment and runtime.

Incidents and vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations are detected in real-time. The platform also flags unencrypted data and CVEs in entities connected to storage assets, flags over privileged entities, and alerts admins to unusual access behaviors. It can scan all codes and scripts in seconds to identify exposed secrets, malware, and CVEs. The platform enables you to configure automated remediation capabilities to help solve issues quickly and efficiently in a single click, reducing admin overheads investigating and triaging alerts.

CloudGuard offers a comprehensive compliance and security engine which pre-empts security misconfigurations and ensures alignment with over 50 compliance frameworks. CloudGuard also offers Web App & API Protection, moving application security closer to workload edges and offering protection superior to conventional web application firewalls using AI.

A key benefit of the CloudGuard platform is that it is a unified platform for your cloud environment. It helps teams enforce compliance frameworks, provides deep runtime protection including malware scanning, supports real-time cloud threat detection and response and delivers developer friendly code security with a code scanner.

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security offers a CNAPP that integrates both agent and agentless approaches to cloud security, aiming for comprehensive visibility and protection. The platform is designed to prevent cloud breaches and consolidate the security tools present in many IT ecosystems.

Falcon Cloud Security stands out with its proven cloud detection and response capabilities. It aids security teams with continuous threat intelligence on over 200 adversaries, ensuring rapid and accurate cloud detection and can facilitate swift remediation by security operations centers. The platform distinguishes itself by being both an agent and agentless solution, covering the cloud spectrum with Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and Cloud Identity Entitlement Management (CIEM).

Falcon Cloud Security uniquely features Indicators of Attack (IoAs) monitoring, designed to identify and counter breaches originating from either the endpoint or the cloud. The platform ensures comprehensive visibility for multi-cloud and hybrid setups, aiming to minimize risks linked to misconfigurations, human errors, or accidental exposures. Additionally, CrowdStrike offers Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for cloud environments, a service that encompasses cloud incident response, threat hunting, and platform deployment. This enables organizations to implement enterprise-grade security even if they don’t have the technical resource in-house.

Lacework offers a CNAPP solution designed to enhance cloud security through the various stages of the software development lifecycle. By empowering developers, Lacework aims to rectify potential risks in Infrastructure as code (IaC) security and perform inline vulnerability scans, among other features, ensuring threats are addressed even before reaching the production stage.

Key attributes of Lacework’s platform include its Polygraph technology, which learns from your standard operational behavior to accurately detect anomalies, including unforeseen threats such as zero-day vulnerabilities. Lacework streamlines compliance by automating reporting and evidence collection, supporting a range of standards including PCI, HIPAA, and NIST. Their CNAPP emphasizes a holistic perspective by connecting data from both build time and runtime, giving users a comprehensive context regarding potential risks. This approach allows for behavior-based threat detection, visualizing cloud relationships and establishing behavioral baselines to detect significant changes.

Lacework focuses on integrating security throughout the development process. It fosters collaboration between security and development teams, ensuring early detection of vulnerabilities by embedding security into code repositories and CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, the platform actively monitors cloud accounts and services to identify misconfigurations, while also continuously watching over workloads to spot and counteract active threats. With its user-friendly setup, Lacework integrates seamlessly into existing cloud accounts, services, and pipelines, offering businesses a straightforward approach to securing their cloud environment.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is designed to guard multi-cloud and hybrid environments throughout the entire lifecycle, from the development phase to runtime. This platform grants users extensive visibility and continuous surveillance over these environments. With its contextual security posture management feature, it allows for the identification and prioritization of crucial risks using data-aware insights, streamlining the remediation process through integrated workflows.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud delivers broad multi-cloud defenses covering cloud applications, infrastructure, and data. This protection is reinforced with native threat detection and rapid response capabilities. The platform offers both agentless and agent-based vulnerability scans, merging agility with comprehensive protection. It then highlights vital risks through its attack-path analysis and extracts relevant threat data from cloud security graph queries. Defender for Cloud also focuses on unifying security management within the DevOps sphere, promoting security from the onset of cloud application development. This aids in maintaining the security of configurations throughout the development process, ensuring infrastructure-as-code templates and container images are resilient to misconfigurations. It also emphasizes speedy remediation of pressing code issues by embedding remediation guidance directly within developer tools.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud aligns its controls with significant regulatory industry standards, ensuring multi-cloud security adherence. Finally, it provides a clear visualization of security posture, offering free ongoing assessments, can set benchmarks, and suggests how to enhance cloud security posture in major platforms like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

Orca Security is a prominent cloud security platform that provides a range of security and compliance solutions for multiple cloud environments including AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. The platform merges essential capabilities like vulnerability management, multi-cloud compliance, container security into a single, cohesive system. This enables heightened visibility and a more efficient response to cloud security challenges, without juggling multiple standalone tools.

Orca gives users a comprehensive understanding of their cloud risks, spanning from misconfigurations to advanced threats. With Orca’s unique attack path analysis, users can discern and prioritize significant risks without sifting through extensive alert lists, and can automatically pinpoint Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other critical assets. Orca’s features also extend to API security, vulnerability management, and detection of security and compliance risks in data stores, as well as “Shift Left Security” to ensure that vulnerabilities are detected early in the development process.

Orca’s approach to risk remediation is streamlined. It allows security teams to directly link risks to the originating code line, making the resolution process faster and more efficient. The platform also emphasizes continuous monitoring, remediation of cloud misconfigurations, protection of cloud applications, and ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks.

Prisma Cloud is a CNAPP platform that secures applications from their inception as code, all the way to their deployment in the cloud. Designed for collaboration, it bridges the gap between security and DevOps teams, fostering swift, secure, cloud-native application development and deployment. Prisma Cloud allows customers to initiate security measures during their cloud migration phase, then expand usage as their digital journey evolves.

Prisma Cloud’s integrated nature reduces the challenges of managing multiple security tools from various vendors. With a focus on bridging the security-development divide, Prisma Cloud facilitates smoother application delivery by providing protection from the coding phase, to cloud deployment. It emphasizes a prevention-first approach, utilizing machine learning and threat intelligence to identify and halt attacks, thereby guarding against zero-day vulnerabilities.

One of Prisma Cloud’s key features is its real-time monitoring of cloud resources and workloads; this allows it to identify potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they are exploited. Its machine learning capabilities identify regular patterns, alerting users to any unusual deviations in behavior that may indicate a breach. Finally, the platform ensures consistent security across diverse cloud environments, scaling in tandem with the growth of a company’s cloud infrastructure.

PingSafe offers a unified platform that is designed to bolster the security of multi-cloud environments. With its unique “single pane of glass” approach, users gain an expansive view of their entire cloud estate, streamlining cloud compliance monitoring. The platform’s built-in gap analysis aligns with various standards, including SOC2, PCI, and HIPAA. The platform’s agentless system makes vulnerability management for Cloud Workloads straightforward and efficient.

PingSafe integrates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring comprehensive coverage. Emphasizing early testing, PingSafe assists businesses in managing vulnerabilities from the onset of the development cycle. This “shift left” approach facilitates proactive vulnerability management that helps reduce the mean time to identify and respond to threats. Once potential vulnerabilities are found, PingSafe’s Offensive Security Engine analyzes and prioritizes them, ensuring the team zeroes in only on genuine threats. The platform also detects leaked credentials across public developer forums, thereby reducing the risks posed by secret leakages.

In terms of specific offerings, PingSafe covers cloud misconfiguration detection, attacker intelligence-based security, source code secret scanning, and comprehensive security for cloud virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. The platform also provides security for containers throughout their lifecycle and offers in-depth monitoring from the development phase through to deployment.

Sysdig Secure offers a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that harnesses runtime insights for comprehensive security. The platform provides security from the source to the runtime phase, enabling businesses to identify vulnerabilities, manage configurations, and maintain compliance. This enables it to offer real-time threat detection spanning containers, hosts, and the cloud, ensuring timely responses to potential breaches.

Sysdig Secure offers automated risk prioritization, where runtime insights streamline the identification of key security findings to address risk efficiently. With Sysdig Secure, companies gain 360-degree visibility across workloads, cloud services, and third-party applications, ensuring an end-to-end detection and response framework. This visibility extends to activities within apps and services across various platforms, ensuring that potential risks and blind spots are highlighted and addressed.

Utilizing its Risk Spotlight feature, Sysdig Secure helps reduce vulnerability noise, allowing for the prioritization of fixes with the most significant impact, and its understanding of live infrastructure and relationships between workloads facilitates quick remediation. Built on open standards like Falco for threat detection and OPA for configurations, the platform supports community-sourced detection rules that can be customized. Finally, Sysdig Secure seamlessly integrates with a variety of platforms and tools crucial to modern application infrastructures, enabling it to support multi-cloud environments.