The SANS Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) Buyers Guide gives companies a deep dive into what to look for in a CNAPP solution. As organizations continue to shift towards integrated platform-based solutions for their cloud security needs, it becomes critical to evaluate whether a CNAPP solution meets all the requirements across use cases like posture management, permissions management, vulnerability management, and threat detection and response. Ideally, teams will be able to unify these capabilities within a single, comprehensive platform to manage risk and defend against attacks.
The SANS CNAPP Buyers Guide provides an in-depth look at what criteria to consider when purchasing a CNAPP solution, as well as a checklist of required and desired capabilities for the security platform. By utilizing this guide as a resource to navigate the buying process, you can ensure your security platform provides a unified cloud and container security experience with no blind spots. Download the full guide here.
Why Purchase a CNAPP?
The explosive growth of cloud and containers has created an expanded and dynamic attack surface that security teams need to defend. As more developers deploy containerized microservices and utilize cloud services and infrastructure, monitoring and protecting them becomes more complex. Security teams now have dynamic workloads with 10–100x more containerized compute instances, large volumes of cloud assets with dynamic activity to track, and messy and overly permissive identity and access management (IAM) permissions to manage. This rapid expansion of the attack surface in cloud-native applications has led to many vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security weaknesses to manage, and security teams need a tool that provides full visibility across cloud and containers.
As weaknesses in security posture have increased, security and operations teams have become overwhelmed by the number of alerts and vulnerabilities they face, leaving organizations with long exposure windows to critical vulnerabilities. As the adoption of cloud services and containers/Kubernetes increases the sources of data to analyze, you need a way to process all this data into insights that can be applied to remediating security issues. Without significant additional context on your cloud workloads and infrastructure, it is difficult for teams to prioritize which of these alerts actually present significant risks and which are just noise. An effective CNAPP will use knowledge of which containers and packages are actually running to provide actionable insights that security and DevOps teams can use to prioritize the most critical risks.
The move to the cloud has also led to an evolution in the threat landscape to take advantage of the security gaps in cloud-native applications. Bad actors have adapted their tactics and techniques to quickly compromise cloud environments with valid credentials, find and exploit vulnerabilities, and move laterally across workloads and clouds to extract maximum return from any breach. The changes to the threat landscape call for a complete solution that can detect these modern threats throughout your cloud-native infrastructure.
Traditional Tools Fall Short
Many traditional security tools are not suited to cloud workloads, environments, and the threats that have evolved to take advantage of their weaknesses. Tools like endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions lack critical visibility into cloud services, workloads, and Kubernetes, and create blind spots that can easily be exploited. Traditional tools also often send many alerts and signals, but lack the context needed to rapidly and effectively respond to threats in cloud-based applications and workloads. The dynamic nature of software development and deployment, as well as the ephemeral nature of containerized environments, only add to the complexity, and security and DevOps teams need a security tool specifically designed to handle cloud-native environments.
Further, point solutions don’t work. Often organizations must choose from among multiple solutions, or even choose vendors that stitch together a workflow from multiple acquisitions. These tools don’t communicate with each other or share context, resulting in a reactive approach of dealing with disparate vulnerability findings, posture violations, and threats as they become a problem. This approach leaves teams without the insights they need to prioritize issues based on their impact.
What to Look for in a CNAPP Solution
Security and DevOps teams need comprehensive visibility into workloads, cloud activity, and user behavior in real time. The number of signals that teams have to make sense of is exploding, and a comprehensive CNAPP solution needs to help users focus on the most critical risks in their cloud-native infrastructure.
This is where having deep knowledge of what’s running right now can help you shrink the list of things that need attention first. Simply put, knowledge of what’s running (or simply what’s in use) is the necessary context needed by security and DevOps teams to take action on the most critical risks first. Ultimately, this context can be fed back early in the development lifecycle to make “shift-left” better with actionable prioritization. With all the sources of data that a CNAPP has to ingest and analyze, an effective CNAPP solution needs runtime insights to help teams focus on the risks that really matter. For example, by filtering on vulnerabilities in packages active at runtime, you can reduce vulnerability noise by up to 95%.
With the SANS CNAPP Buyers Guide, you can make sure your organization is focused on the most critical risks in your cloud infrastructure. The guide includes a detailed checklist of important capabilities and features to look for in a CNAPP solution. While there are too many to list here in full, the capabilities of an effective CNAPP solution fall into these areas.
User Experience: Many solutions today are not intuitive and may be difficult to work with. Effective CNAPP solutions should offer unified security and risk dashboards, as well as aggregated security findings and remediation suggestions through simple interfaces. They should also be simple to deploy.
Cloud Workload Protection (CWP): A CNAPP solution should protect workloads across the software lifecycle, with capabilities in vulnerability management, configuration management for containers/Kubernetes, and runtime security/incident response. The ability to prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities or configurations based on in-use risk exposure is key. The tool should integrate with CI/CD tools, provide rich context to investigate alerts, and give suggestions to fix at the source.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Continuous visibility, detection, and remediation of cloud security misconfigurations is key for a CNAPP solution. The solution should offer capabilities in cloud vulnerability management, configuration management, and permissions/entitlement management (e.g., CIEM).
Cloud Detection and Response (CDR): Detection and response capabilities related to cloud-centric threats are critical. Effective CNAPP solutions should expand beyond just workload runtime security and address the cloud control plane to detect suspicious activities across users and services.
Enterprise-grade Platform: Effective CNAPP solutions often have enhancements and additional features that integrate and align with API use, scripting and automation functionality, auditing and logging, and support for large-scale deployments.
Want to see the full list of capabilities? Download the full SANS Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) Buyers Guide now for all the details.