
Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) Buyers’ Guide 2025
How to choose the right CNAPP.

State of the market: Cloud native application protection platforms enable teams to build, deploy, and run cloud-native applications securely and compliantly. To achieve this, they provide threat detection, vulnerability management, automated remediation, and compliance management across the entire software development lifecycle.
- The global CNAPP market was estimated at USD 9.79 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.8% by 2030.
- Market growth is being driven by four key trends:
- The shift towards microservices, containerization, and serverless architectures, all of which are too complex to secure using traditional security approaches.
- The increasing integration of security into the development and operations processes (i.e., DevSecOps).
- The increasing demand for organizations to comply with strict data protection regulations.
- Global economic strain that is putting pressure on security teams to “do more with less”, leading to consolidation of tools to save time and money.
Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading application protection platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their DevSecOps challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the CNAPP and wider application security space.
You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best CNAPP products on the market in our DevSecOps Hub.
Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your CNAPP implementation and make sure you’re choosing the right solution for your business:
- For DevSecOps teams: Employ your CNAPP early in the development pipeline to help identify issues early on. This will not only help you develop apps more securely from the outset, but it’ll also save your team time and money when it comes to remediation.
- For security teams: Use your CNAPP to help you implement zero-trust architecture by making use of its identity and access controls.
- For easier implementation: Look for a provider that will help you integrate the tool with your environment. The top CNAPPs integrate natively with the most popular cloud providers, but you’ll likely have some products in your stack that there isn’t a native integration for. In this case, you’ll need to create custom integrations or find a provider that can create them for you.
- For easier management: Use tuning options to fine-tune alerts and enable automatic remediation where possible. This will allow your team to focus on resolving the most critical issues.
How CNAPPs work: CNAPPs provide comprehensive protection for cloud-native apps by combining the capabilities of multiple existing security tools—including Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Information and Events Management (CIEM), and Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP)—in one platform.
They’re typically deployed as a SaaS application that integrates with the cloud solutions that you already have in place. Once deployed, a CNAPP scans your cloud environment to discover all your assets, then creates a visual representation of this architecture to help you identify potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Usually, it’ll indicate which risks are most critical based on their exploitability, impact, and business context, so your team can mitigate the most pressing issues first.
How the CNAPP runs these scans depends on your use case for implementing the solution:
- For developers, CNAPPs integrate with your CI/CD pipeline to scan Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates, container images, and app code for vulnerabilities or compliance issues. They then give you recommendations on how to fix those issues as early as possible in the development lifecycle.
- For security teams, CNAPPs:
- Use ML to monitor your runtime environment for anomalous or malicious activity, then automatically respond to any threats e.g., by revoking access, isolating a container, or notifying your team.
- Analyze your IAM policies to identify excessive permissions, unused privileges, and unusual access patterns.
- Continuously assess your cloud configurations for compliance with data protection standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and CIS Benchmarks.
- For workload protection, CNAPPs scan workloads including VMs, containers, and serverless functions for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and malware. They also apply runtime protection policies to those workloads to help prevent threat actors from exploiting known vulnerabilities.
By combining development and operational security capabilities, CNAPPs help you ensure your cloud apps are secure and compliant throughout their entire lifecycle.
Benefits of CNAPPs: There are three main benefits to implementing a CNAPP:
- Centralize your security management.
- Technical complexity is the biggest challenge that organizations are facing when it comes to cloud migration and expansion.
- By combining the capabilities of CSPM, CIEM, and CWPP tools, CNAPPs give you a complete view of your cloud security posture from one interface.
- “If you have complexity and you have a lot of tools, they’re harder to use, which means you need more people,” says Bob West, Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks, in an interview with Expert Insights. “Simplifying not just the architecture, but the number of tools and vendors that we use, is particularly important to be able to digest everything and manage environments as best we can.”
- Prioritize risks more effectively.
- CNAPPs rank risks in order of severity, which can help you address the most critical risks more quickly.
- This not only helps you reduce the attack surface more effectively but can also help prevent burnout and alert fatigue amongst overburdened teams.
- Comply with data protection requirements.
- Most CNAPPs have automated compliance management functionality built in that can help you keep up with evolving data protection standards.
- “The best way to [adhere to compliance regimes]—in fact, the only good way to do it—is using automation in the cloud,” Avi Shua, Co-Founder of Orca Security, tells Expert Insights. “There’s nothing preventing organizations from automating all of the data collection and verifying compliance continuously—not only when the auditor is coming—and guiding all of these data points in a relatively easy way, using the right tools and techniques.”
Common CNAPP challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a CNAPP. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:
- Integrating the CNAPP with an entire cloud environment is complex and can be time-consuming. We recommend looking for a solution that offers API integrations with as many of your existing cloud products as possible. Even then, there will likely still be some elements of manual configuration, so if your team doesn’t have the resource to do that themselves, make sure your vendor offers strong implementation support.
- CNAPPs require specialized expertise and ongoing maintenance. Make sure that you have a dedicated security team available to manage a CNAPP tool long-term before you start your implementation
- As with most alerting tools, there’s the possibility that your CNAPP might generate false positives or large numbers of minor alerts. We recommend that you take time to tune the platform to your environment to help reduce the number of false positives, and to regularly review your filters and tuning to make sure they stay relevant as your environment evolves.
Best CNAPP providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of CNAPPs, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:
- The Top 9 Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs)
- The Top 11 Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Solutions
- The Top 8 Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Tools
- The Top 10 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools
- The Top 10 Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) Platforms
Features checklist: When comparing CNAPPs, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:
- Multi-cloud support: The CNAPP should seamlessly integrate with both public and private cloud services, including major providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Centralized view of cloud operations: You should be able to access a complete and unified view of your cloud operations from a single interface.
- Continuous monitoring: The platform should continuously monitor workloads, containers, serverless functions, access permissions and attempts, Kubernetes clusters, and VMs for vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, and anomalous behaviors.
- Real-time alerting: When the platform identifies any of the above issues, it should alert your team in real-time. Alerts should be prioritized and delivered clearly and automatically to the relevant team member.
- Compliance management: The solution should automate compliance checks and reporting for common data protection standards such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, CDPR, CCPA, and CIS Benchmarks.
- Misconfiguration checks: The platform should assess your cloud configurations and alert you to any misconfigurations, deviations, or blind spots.
- Automated remediation: Most CNAPPs offer remediation suggestions or recommendations. The best tools are able to remediate certain issues without manual intervention (e.g., isolating infected or vulnerable containers).
- SIEM/SOAR integration: The platform should integrate with your existing SIEM and/or SOAR tools to improve visibility and automate incident response.
- DevOps tool integration: If you’re a development team looking for a CNAPP to secure apps that you’re building, make sure it integrates with other tools in your CI/CD pipeline (e.g., Teraform, Jenkins, Kubernetes) to avoid disrupting your team’s workflows.
- “Shift left” security integrations: Similarly, for development teams, the platform should scan IaC templates, container images, and app code within your CI/CD pipeline to help you fix security and compliance issues within your projects.
Future trends: There are two key trends that we expect to see in the CNAPP space in the near future.
The first of these is that CNAPPs will expand their capabilities to become a truly all-in-one cloud security platform. This includes offering other cloud security capabilities outside of CSPM, CIEM, and CWPP, as well as broadening their integration capabilities with other cloud security tools for more streamlined management.
“Most organizations want one place to look at everything,” Bob West, Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks told Expert Insights in an exclusive interview. “Being able to integrate with these other tools becomes important to understanding the broad clinical ecosystem and the different tools that organizations use, and integrate things as tightly as possible.”
Second, we expect CNAPPs to embrace advancements in AI and ML to move towards fully automated remediation. While many CNAPPs currently offer automatic remediation for some issues, and some have begun to embrace AI to streamline the threat hunting and investigation process, most CNAPPs typically still require manual intervention to resolve most risks.
“There is a trend in the market towards automated remediation, and helping teams defend against vulnerabilities more effectively,” Ely Kahn, VP of Product Management, Cloud at SentinelOne, told Expert Insights.
“There’s a number of startups we are tracking that are using AI to bring automated remediation to other areas as well. A great example is in the application security space, which is oftentimes the root cause of the threats that we have to go in, detect, and help fix up. The more that we can bring security left and fix insecure code as it’s being developed, the less attack surface there is, and ultimately the fewer threats we’re going to face downstream.”
Further reading: You can find all our articles on CNAPPs in our DevSecOps Hub.
No time to browse? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:
- Shortlist: The Top 9 Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs)
- Interview: SentinelOne’s VP Product Management On CNAPP, Autonomous Threat Remediation
- Interview: Bob West On “Shift Left” Security, The Challenges Of Cloud Migration, And How Palo Alto Networks Is Supporting Security Consolidation
- Blog: Expert CISO Advice On Building An Effective DevSecOps Team