The Best Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs )

As more organizations are increasingly leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, they are also recognizing the importance of securing their cloud-native applications and the data they generate. This is where Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) have emerged as a powerful solution to address this security requirement.

Here is our list of the best CNAPPs:

1. Cyscale A comprehensive solution that provides complete visibility and control over your entire cloud infrastructure and comes with many advanced features like continuous security testing, threat detection, and compliance monitoring.
2. Check Point CloudGuard A fully automated solution for protecting your cloud-native apps, workloads, and networks while managing posture at cloud scale and speed.
3. Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud A comprehensive CNAPP that secures applications from design to deployment and enables DevOps teams to monitor and maintain the security of your critical cloud-native apps.
4. CrowdStrike Cloud Security A CNAPP that helps organizations maintain a high level of security across their cloud infrastructure while providing the control they need to quickly remediate issues.
5. Aqua Security Platform An end-to-end platform for securing containerized applications and cloud-native environments, as well as providing insights for rapid troubleshooting.

What are Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs)?

Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) are comprehensive security platforms that protect cloud-native applications through the entire software development lifecycle, from development to deployment and beyond. It combines the capabilities of four key cloud security products, namely,

• A Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Manager (CIEM) for managing access controls and risk management.
• A Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) to secure the code of cloud-native apps and provide runtime protection.
• A Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) handles authentication and encryption.
• A Cloud Security Posture Manager (CSPM) to take care of threat detection and remediation.

Combining the capabilities of these different tools, CNAPPs address the unique security challenges that come with cloud-native applications. Cloud-native applications, as opposed to traditional on-premises applications, are highly distributed, dynamic, and frequently incorporate microservices architecture. This makes them more complex to secure, as they require protection against a wide range of threats, including those that target individual microservices or containers.

Furthermore, CNAPPs come with many advanced security features like automated threat detection, real-time monitoring, continuous security testing, and vulnerability management. Some CNAPPs even come with compliance monitoring and reporting features, to help your organization meet regulatory requirements.

Why Use CNAPPs?

The key benefit of CNAPPs is that they help your organization secure cloud-native applications against a multitude of threats while minimizing operational overhead. Also, they are designed to integrate seamlessly with cloud-native infrastructure and tooling, so they can work well with most existing DevOps workflows. Such a built-in design also focuses on security throughout the application lifecycle without adding unnecessary complexity or delays.

Besides security, CNAPPs automate many security tasks to improve operational efficiency and reduce the risk of vulnerabilities. More importantly, continuous testing is incorporated into the process, ensuring that your cloud-native apps are better designed and deployed. Plus, CNAPP platforms help you meet regulatory requirements.

Now that you know the benefit of integrating a CNAPP into the lifecycle of cloud-native applications, let's look at some of the best CNAPP platforms available for you to choose from.

The Best CNAPPs

Let's take a more detailed look at each of these tools.

1. Cyscale

Cyscale is a CNAPP that provides end-to-end protection for your cloud-native apps. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and respond to security threats in real-time while providing the context needed for a quick and efficient response.

Key Features:

Below are some important features of this tool.

• Works in Multi-Cloud Environments: Cyscale works well across multiple cloud environments to provide contextual information in real-time, so you can always stay on top of your cloud inventory. It also automatically discovers applications across different cloud environments and maps them to give you an idea of their dependencies and information workflows. Above everything, it leaves an audit trail of its discovery and mapping process to help with compliance.
• Manages Critical Data: This CNAPP automatically identifies which applications handle critical data and checks if the access is as per the established security policy. In other words, Cyscale brings down the chances for unauthorized access to those cloud assets that hold your organization's critical and sensitive data. It also identifies any risky behavior related to these cloud-native applications.
• Mapping the Cloud: Security Knowledge Graphs are a proprietary feature of Cyscale that enables you to stay on top of who has access to cloud applications and data. It also maps out the complex relationship between cloud apps and users in a visual form to help with troubleshooting. In this sense, Cyscale helps implement strong Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies.
• Ensures Compliance: Cyscale comes with more than 500 out-of-the-box security controls and policies, using which you can monitor misconfigurations and other potential security threats. It also monitors the key metrics, and in case of major deviations from the established baseline values, it sends alerts to the concerned employees. Due to these measures, Cyscale makes it easy for your organization to comply with many leading laws and standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more.

Overall, Cyscale is a good choice for organizations looking for a comprehensive security solution that can help minimize the risk of security incidents and ensure that cloud-native applications are secure and compliant with regulatory requirements.

Cyscale offers three pricing plans to cater to different needs. The Pro plan is designed for organizations with less than 1,000 cloud assets. For medium-sized enterprises with 1,000 to 5,000 cloud assets, the Scale plan provides a suitable option. Larger organizations with over 5,000 assets and those requiring custom features can opt for the Enterprise plan. Each plan is tailored to ensure that businesses of all sizes can effectively manage and secure their cloud infrastructure. Click here to get a quote for any of the plans.  In the meantime, start a free trial or request a demo.

2. Check Point CloudGuard

CloudGuard is a unified CNAPP that automates the security of your cloud-native applications and workloads. Additionally, it provides visibility and control across all cloud environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, so you can enforce consistent security policies across all environments.

Key Features:

Here's a look at the important features of CloudGuard.

• Centralized Visualization: CloudGuard provides a unified view of security across multiple service providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, and more. You can even combine this information with data from on-premises applications to gain a better understanding of your infrastructure's overall security.
• Automated DevSecOps: This CNAPP integrates with popular DevOps tools such as Terraform and Ansible, making it easy to incorporate security into the development and deployment processes, as a part of the CI/CD pipeline. It also helps to easily define the boundaries for applications and enforce zero trust security across the workloads.
• Security and Posture Management: CloudGuard automates governance across all cloud environments, giving you insights into your security posture, misconfigurations, and other potential vulnerabilities. At the same time, it simplifies the process of implementing security controls and policies across the entire cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud API Protection: Moving security closer to an application can provide more granular control over its operations and vulnerabilities, and CloudGuard provides this feature through its APIs. Also, it helps you automate many security features, so you can save time and effort while securing your cloud assets.

In all,  CloudGuard is a comprehensive security solution that can minimize the risk of security incidents and ensure that your cloud infrastructure is secure and compliant.

Contact the sales team for a custom quote. You can also book a demo or start a free trial to learn more about this CNAPP.

3. Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud

Prisma Cloud offers a range of features, including vulnerability management, compliance monitoring, and workload protection, helping organizations secure their cloud-native applications from all angles. It is also highly scalable and integrates seamlessly with existing DevOps workflows.

Key Features:

The important features of Prism Cloud are:

• Comprehensive Visibility A standout feature of Prisma Cloud is the in-depth visibility it provides into the security posture of every resource deployed on the cloud. You gain this continuous visibility through a unified console that can support more than 2.5 billion assets.
• Configuration Assessment Misconfigurations are a potential security weakness, and Prisma Cloud detects them for you. Guardrails can even be enforced for 120 cloud services, allowing them to automatically correct configuration mismatches before they cause security issues. With this tool, you can also build and enforce custom policies across multiple cloud environments.
• Manages Compliance Prisma Cloud helps you manage compliance with leading standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. Also, it generates compliance reports that can help with internal auditing as well. Using this report, you can analyze the violations and remediate them quickly.
• Threat Detection This CNAPP uses machine learning and AI to analyze patterns and behavior, and point out possible threats, so you can fix them before they impact your wider organization. It also leverages User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to monitor unusual activities, which can help detect insider threats.

Overall, Prisma Cloud is a good choice for organizations looking for a comprehensive cloud-native security platform that provides end-to-end security coverage and compliance monitoring.

4. CrowdStrike Cloud Security

CrowdStrike Cloud Security is an advanced CNAPP that provides actionable insights into security vulnerabilities like misconfigurations, insider attacks, and more. It leverages AI and ML to identify deviations, remediate automatically when possible, and provide context for troubleshooting.

Key Features:

Below are the key features of CrowdStrike Cloud Security.

• Protects Cloud Resources:  Cloud Security protects not just your cloud-native apps, but also workloads, hosts, containers, and almost every resource you've deployed on any cloud. It comes with many features like automated discovery and mapping of resources, runtime protection, threat hunting, and more. All of these features can make cloud resource deployment more secure.
• Unified Approach: This CNAPP takes a unified approach to cloud security as it brings together information and insights from different cloud environments into a single pane. Such a view can help you better detect threats and their underlying causes, and it can also help with scaling and planning.
• Simplified Management: Cloud resources multiply quickly, and before you know it, you have a sprawling cloud on your hands, making management difficult and complex. In particular, it's hard to keep track of access, thereby increasing the rates of insider theft and attacks. Cloud Security's Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) simplifies privilege access management and the uniform enforcement of security policies.

In all, CrowdStrike Cloud Security is a comprehensive cloud-native security platform that provides advanced threat protection like CIEM and real-time visibility into cloud activity.

Click here for a free trial or schedule a demo with CrowdStrike.

5. Aqua Security Platform

Aqua Security Platform is a robust CNAPP that provides end-to-end security for your containerized and cloud-native applications across different cloud environments. More importantly, it provides the context and insights you need to prevent attacks before they happen.

Key Features:

Here's a look at the important features of Aqua Cloud security.

• Identifies Vulnerabilities: Aqua discovers and remediates vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, security loopholes in code, and insecure delivery pipelines, and notifies you of the issue along with the contextual information you need for troubleshooting. Needless to say, this information greatly reduces the chances of security attacks.
• Enables Collaboration: This CNAPP enables collaboration among different teams to reduce cloud blindspots. More importantly, it acts as the single source of truth for the entire SDLC of cloud-native apps, and can help to easily identify risks across different containers and cloud environments, so you can easily prioritize them.
• Manages Compliance: With Aqua's compliance reporting, you can continuously stay on top of your security and compliance with standards like SOC2, PCI DSS, and more. Based on the reports and internal auditing processes, you can address the shortcomings before they adversely impact your organization.

In all, the Aqua Security Platform provides real-time visibility and control over cloud activity, allowing organizations to quickly detect and respond to security incidents.

Conclusion

In conclusion, use a comprehensive approach to securing cloud-native applications that include end-to-end security coverage, real-time threat detection, continuous security testing, and compliance monitoring and reporting. CNAPPs can meet these security requirements and hence, they have been growing rapidly in recent years. Among the best CNAPPs available today are Cyscale, Prisma Cloud, Aqua Security, CloudGuard, and CrowdStrike Cloud Security.  Each of these solutions provides a comprehensive security framework that protects cloud-native applications throughout their entire lifecycle.

When choosing a CNAPP, consider the specific security requirements of your organization and choose a scalable solution that integrates with your existing workflows and provides the features you need to meet your security goals. With the right CNAPP in place, you can minimize the risk of security incidents and ensure that your cloud-native applications are secure and compliant with regulatory requirements.