Introduction
As organizations rapidly transition to cloud computing and modernize their applications, they face numerous challenges in maintaining strong enterprise cloud security. According to Gartner, cloud applications face more threats, including insider attacks and data breaches, making them more vulnerable. Containerization in the cloud can also expose sensitive information. To address these issues, there’s growing investment in cloud-native application performance platforms (CNAPP).
CNAPPs offer comprehensive features such as runtime threat detection, visibility and control, posture management, software composition analysis, and workload security. These tools provide significant value by consolidating security needs, speeding up code delivery, and continuously protecting cloud infrastructure from threats.
CNAPPs are evolving to include data security, generative AI for posture assessment, and multi-cloud configuration monitoring.
Therefore, it’s clear that CNAPP is essential for improving cloud security. In this blog, we will explore the enterprise security threat landscape, various cloud security risks and challenges, the attack journey, and how CNAPP can be used to enhance enterprise cloud security.t Goes Here
Enterprise Cloud Security Risks
Enterprise cloud security faces several significant risks:
- Misconfiguration: When security settings are misconfigured or not implemented, it may allow malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities and easily gain unauthorized access to data, applications, and systems.
- Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks: DoS attacks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are designed to slow down or crash a machine or network. DoS attacks are often a preamble to more devastating attacks.
- Cyberattacks: Cybersecurity threats like ransomware, malware, and data breaches are common and potent, often resulting in millions of dollars of damages for enterprises.
- Unprotected APIs: When APIs that enable software programs to communicate with each other are left unprotected, they make an easy entry point for malicious actors.
- Account Takeover: Threat actors can use stolen credentials to access and hijack a user account, impersonating the user to steal money or access sensitive data.
- Data Leaks: Malicious or inadvertent data leaks can threaten data security and expose sensitive information or customer data stored in the cloud.
- Human Error: Research shows that most cloud security failures are the result of human errors such as visiting a malicious website, sharing login credentials, falling for a phishing scam, or failing to practice good security hygiene.
Safeguarding Enterprises with Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)
A) Understanding (CNAPP)
According to Gartner, Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) are designed to secure and protect cloud-native applications throughout their development and production stages. These platforms unify various security and compliance functions, which were previously separated, into a single, cohesive system. CNAPPs include features such as container scanning, cloud security posture management, infrastructure as code scanning, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, runtime cloud workload protection, and runtime vulnerability and configuration scanning.
CNAPPs provide integrated visibility, configuration, and testing tools across both development and operations, helping to manage the increased complexity and risks associated with modern cloud-native application development. These platforms are generally offered as a service and integrate seamlessly with runtime cloud environments and development pipeline tools used by development teams.
B) Key Capabilities of CNAPP
- They integrate multiple cloud security tools into one platform, making it easier to embed security throughout the application lifecycle while protecting cloud workloads and data.
- They support multicloud environments, ensuring seamless security and compliance across public and private clouds, giving you full visibility of your data.
- By prioritizing critical vulnerabilities with integrated threat intelligence, they reduce risk and offer automated recommendations for remediation.
- CNAPPs centralize compliance and permissions management, continuously monitoring and enforcing least privileged access principles across your cloud setup.
- They facilitate early collaboration between security teams and developers (“shifted left” DevOps security), ensuring security is built into application code from the start.
- Providing comprehensive protection for cloud workloads, they improve visibility and simplify detection of vulnerabilities.
- CNAPPs streamline operations by consolidating vendors, reducing complexity in your toolset and improving overall usability.
- End-to-end solutions from hyperscale cloud providers fill security gaps and eliminate blind spots, offering thorough insights for better protection.
C) Key Components of CNAPP That Enhances Cloud Security
A well-designed CNAPP brings together various capabilities to help security teams effectively manage and prioritize risks across an organization. It includes:
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): This component monitors cloud environments to detect and address compliance risks and misconfigurations, ensuring they are promptly remediated.
- Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): This component plays a pivotal role as a mediator between an organization’s on-premises infrastructure and its cloud services. It ensures secure access to cloud applications by enforcing policies and offering insights into users’ activities.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security: It focuses on identifying and rectifying misconfigurations early in the software development process to prevent vulnerabilities from occurring during application runtime.
- Compliance and Governance: This feature manages compliance status across multiple cloud environments, addressing configuration drift and policy violations to maintain regulatory adherence.
- Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM): CIEM continuously monitors permissions and activities within public cloud infrastructures to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
- Data Protection: This component monitors, classifies, and inspects data to prevent unauthorized access and data exfiltration caused by cyber threats like phishing or insider breaches.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): IAM ensures that users have appropriate access permissions to internal resources, enhancing security by controlling who can access systems and data.
- Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP): CWPP provides visibility and control over various types of workloads, including physical machines, virtual machines, containers, and serverless environments across hybrid and multicloud setups.
These components collectively strengthen cloud security by integrating advanced monitoring, compliance management, data protection, and access control measures into a unified platform, supporting organizations in safeguarding their critical assets and operations.
Top Cloud Security Challenges Solved By CNAPP
CNAPP Benefits
Enterprises benefit significantly from CNAPP by:
- Enhancing Collaboration: CNAPP fosters seamless collaboration among security, development, infrastructure, and operations teams, ensuring unified efforts to secure cloud environments and applications effectively.
- Runtime Threat Detection: CNAPPs provide real-time monitoring and threat detection, which is crucial for identifying and combatting advanced threats quickly.
- Streamlining Operations: By consolidating multiple security tools into a single platform, CNAPP provides comprehensive visibility into critical risks across configurations, assets, code, and workloads. This integration reduces complexity, optimizes operations, and lowers costs associated with maintaining disparate security solutions.
- Ensuring Multi-Cloud Security: CNAPP offers consistent security across diverse cloud environments, encompassing IaaS, PaaS, VMs, containers, and serverless workloads. It monitors for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues, enforcing unified security policies and mitigating risks across all cloud resources.
- Accelerating Deployment: Integrated with IDEs and DevOps tools, CNAPP identifies and resolves security issues early in the development lifecycle and CI/CD pipelines. This capability accelerates secure application deployment, aligning with agile DevOps practices while maintaining robust security measures.
- Promoting DevOps Efficiency: CNAPP integrates security controls throughout the DevOps cycle, empowering developers to adopt security best practices seamlessly. This integration supports innovation and operational efficiency, fostering collaboration between security and DevOps teams while ensuring compliance with enterprise security policies.
Gartner’s Recommendations for Security Leaders on Selecting CNAPP Solutions:
- Simplify and Enhance Developer Experience: Opt for integrated CNAPP solutions that offer comprehensive lifecycle visibility and protection for cloud-native applications from development to runtime.
- Assign Proper Remediation Responsibilities: Ensure CNAPP solutions can track ownership and history of development artifacts, including details on the creator, scan dates, deployment times, and subsequent modifications.
- Build a Skilled Evaluation Team: Assemble a team with expertise in cloud security, workload security (including containers), application and middleware security, and development security for the assessment and selection of CNAPP solutions.
- Prioritize CNAPP Requirements: Identify and rank the essential features needed in a CNAPP solution, recognizing that no single vendor excels in all areas.
- Select Vendors with Diverse Runtime Visibility Techniques: Choose CNAPP vendors that offer various runtime visibility methods, such as traditional agents, Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) support, snapshotting, privileged containers, and Kubernetes (K8s) integration for flexible deployment.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving cloud landscape, robust enterprise cloud security is more important than ever. Traditional security methods are no longer sufficient to address the complex threats posed by cloud environments. CNAPP play a crucial role in providing a comprehensive and integrated approach to cloud security, specifically designed to tackle the challenges unique to cloud-native applications.
Choosing the right provider for CNAPP solutions is paramount. Aptly Technology, a leader in cloud security, offers CNAPP solutions that enhance visibility, improve incident response and streamline compliance for organizations. Our CNAPPs are designed to protect against the ever-evolving threats in the cloud, ensuring that sensitive data and valuable assets remain secure.
Contact us to learn more about how Aptly Technology’s CNAPP solution can safeguard your organization’s cloud infrastructure and applications.
