What Is a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)?

A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a security solution that unifies multiple security capabilities into a single platform for protecting cloud-native applications throughout their lifecycle. CNAPPs combine features such as vulnerability management, configuration monitoring, access management, workload protection, and automated remediation. 

Unlike legacy security tools, a CNAPP is built for dynamic, containerized, and serverless environments often found in modern multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. This alignment makes CNAPPs crucial for organizations adopting DevOps, rapid delivery practices, and infrastructure-as-code. 

By centralizing visibility and control, a CNAPP helps teams identify misconfigurations, threats, and compliance risks across diverse environments. The platform enables holistic risk assessment and coordinated response.

This is part of a series of articles about cloud security.

Key Challenges in Securing Cloud-Native Environments 

Visibility Gaps and Blind Spots

Visibility gaps are a persistent issue in cloud-native security. Traditional security tools often lack context for ephemeral resources such as temporary containers, serverless functions, and auto-scaling infrastructure. These blind spots make it difficult to assess the current state of environments or pinpoint exposures in real time, allowing threats to go undetected until they escalate.

Blind spots are compounded by the decentralized nature of cloud environments, especially with multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. Without unified visibility, security teams may miss changes in workloads, configuration drift, or unauthorized activities within cloud accounts. Continuous monitoring is fundamental to ensure full coverage and accelerate threat response.

Fragmented Security Tools and Data Silos

Many organizations attempt to secure cloud-native environments using a patchwork of niche security tools, one for container vulnerability scanning, another for threat detection, and yet another for identity management. While each tool may address a specific issue, the collective result is a fragmented toolset that often fails to share intelligence or enable coordinated response. This fragmentation increases management overhead and the potential for missed threats.

Data silos develop when tools operate independently, limiting cross-correlation of security signals. The absence of integration prevents security teams from building a holistic risk profile or tracing lateral movement across environments. A unified platform approach, as provided by CNAPP, breaks down these silos, achieving central correlation and response while reducing operational complexity.

Alert Fatigue and Operational Overload

Alert fatigue threatens security effectiveness as teams are flooded with notifications, many of which are low-priority or false positives. The volume of alerts is amplified by cloud-native architectures, where workloads and resources are transient and can change rapidly. Security practitioners may become desensitized or overwhelmed, leading to missed genuine threats or slow response times.

Operational overload occurs when teams are tasked with managing too many distinct security tools, dashboards, and manual triage tasks. This inefficiency distracts from proactive risk management and root-cause analysis. Automating alert triage, prioritization, and response within a consolidated CNAPP framework helps refocus effort on threats that matter and simplify daily security operations.

Skill Shortages and DevSecOps Alignment Issues

Skill shortages are a persistent barrier for organizations adopting cloud-native and DevSecOps approaches. Specialized knowledge is needed to secure containers, serverless functions, and orchestrators like Kubernetes. However, such expertise is scarce, with many security teams more experienced in legacy systems than in the nuances of cloud-native architectures.

DevSecOps alignment issues occur when security, development, and operations teams fail to collaborate effectively. Miscommunication or unclear ownership can result in security controls being bolted on late in the development process, reducing their effectiveness. CNAPP solutions foster alignment by embedding security into the CI/CD pipeline and providing insight that’s accessible to all stakeholders.

Benefits of CNAPP 

CNAPPs offer a range of integrated capabilities that address the challenges of securing cloud-native environments. By centralizing visibility, automating response, and supporting developer workflows, they enable organizations to improve both security posture and operational efficiency.

Key benefits include:

• Unified visibility across cloud assets: CNAPPs provide centralized visibility across containers, serverless functions, VMs, and infrastructure as code, reducing blind spots and improving situational awareness.
• Context-rich risk prioritization: By correlating data from runtime behavior, vulnerabilities, and configurations, CNAPPs help prioritize risks based on context, not just severity scores.
• Reduced tool sprawl: Combining multiple security functions into one platform eliminates the need for separate tools, reducing integration overhead and simplifying management.
• Faster detection and response: Integrated threat detection and automated response workflows enable faster mitigation of threats across cloud-native environments.
• Support for DevSecOps practices: CNAPPs embed security into CI/CD pipelines, giving developers actionable insights early in the development cycle.
• Improved compliance and audit readiness: Continuous monitoring and policy enforcement across environments help organizations maintain compliance with industry standards and simplify audits.
• Operational efficiency through automation: CNAPPs use automation to triage alerts, enforce policies, and remediate issues, reducing manual workloads and allowing security teams to focus on strategic tasks.

Core Components of a CNAPP 

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) focuses on identifying and remediating risky misconfigurations and compliance violations in public cloud infrastructures. CSPM continuously monitors cloud resources, such as storage buckets, networking, and IAM policies, against established best practices and compliance standards. 

CSPM tools help organizations maintain visibility into cloud asset inventories and conduct continuous assessment for compliance frameworks like SOC2, GDPR, and PCI DSS. Automated detection of risky changes and drift, paired with clear guidance for remediation, enables teams to quickly close exposures. Integration with a CNAPP ensures posture management is aligned with other security controls.

Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) modules are dedicated to securing workloads, such as virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions, regardless of where they run. CWPP provides capabilities like vulnerability monitoring, runtime protection, application whitelisting, and anomaly detection, designed to protect workloads across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

By monitoring workloads for unauthorized activity and policy violations, CWPP helps detect compromise, lateral movement, and privilege escalation. Integration with orchestration tools and DevOps workflows allows for early detection of vulnerabilities during the build and deployment process. 

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) addresses the complexity of managing and securing cloud identities and their permissions. CIEM provides visibility into user, machine, and third-party entitlements, detecting excessive, unused, or risky permissions that can lead to privilege escalation or data exfiltration.

CIEM platforms help organizations enforce the principle of least privilege by continuously auditing identity access and entitlements across cloud accounts. Automated policy recommendations and remediation workflows reduce the risk of accidental exposure. When integrated into CNAPP, CIEM insights inform broader contextual risk analysis.

Kubernetes and Container Security (KSPM)

Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM) focuses on the unique risks of containerized workloads and orchestrators like Kubernetes. This component assesses cluster configurations, network policies, RBAC settings, and best practices for both nodes and control plane. KSPM tools help detect container misconfigurations, vulnerabilities in container images, and insecure privilege or network settings.

By providing runtime monitoring and benchmarking Kubernetes clusters against industry standards like CIS Benchmarks, KSPM helps organizations mitigate attacks before they impact production. Integration into CNAPP enables correlation of container and pod security data with other risk signals, leading to faster threat detection and remediation across the container lifecycle.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Data security posture management (DSPM) is designed to discover, classify, and monitor sensitive data across cloud services. DSPM evaluates where sensitive data resides, how it flows, and whether it is exposed or misused, providing continuous posture assessment for regulatory and internal data security requirements.

By automating the discovery of regulated data (PII, PCI, PHI, etc.) and identifying risky configurations or unaudited access, DSPM reduces the likelihood of inadvertent data leaks or compliance failures. As part of a CNAPP, it informs automated remediation workflows, helps prioritize data-centric risks, and consolidates visibility on data movement across multiple clouds.

Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)

Cloud detection and response (CDR) delivers real-time threat detection, investigation, and response for cloud-native environments. CDR leverages cloud activity logs, threat intelligence, and behavioral analytics to identify suspicious activity, from credential abuse to lateral movement or adversary techniques specific to cloud.

CDR modules within CNAPP respond to threats through automated actions or orchestrated workflows, often integrating with SOAR platforms. By combining signals from posture, workload, and data modules, CDR builds richer context for alert triage and incident investigation, reducing dwell time and limiting damage from attacks that evade preventative controls.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security

IaC security assesses the security and compliance of infrastructure-as-code templates and scripts before resources are deployed in the cloud. By scanning Terraform, CloudFormation, or Azure Resource Manager files for misconfigurations or vulnerabilities, IaC security prevents issues from being introduced in the earliest stages of development.

IaC security best practices integrate directly with DevOps pipelines, enabling teams to remediate risks during code review or CI builds rather than in production. Within a CNAPP, IaC security findings are correlated with runtime and posture data, ensuring code-driven changes are contextualized and prioritized according to their environment and exposure.

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How a CNAPP Works 

Unified Visibility Across Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Unified visibility is a core CNAPP capability that eliminates hidden risks caused by fragmented tooling. The platform ingests and normalizes telemetry from multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) as well as on-premises resources. This allows organizations to inventory assets, monitor configuration drift, and detect anomalous activity across all environments from a single dashboard.

Such visibility aids in risk reduction by enabling cross-environment correlation of threats and exposures. When security teams have continuous, centralized access to posture and workload insights, they can proactively manage attack surfaces, accelerate incident investigation, and ensure compliance with internal or regulatory mandates.

Continuous Risk Assessment and Prioritization

A CNAPP performs ongoing risk assessment by evaluating vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, access controls, and behavioral anomalies in real time. The platform leverages contextual information like asset value, internet exposure, and active threats to rank issues by criticality. This ensures security teams focus on the highest-impact risks rather than generic or low-priority findings.

Automated risk prioritization is vital as cloud environments grow and change rapidly. With thousands of resources spinning up and down each day, manual assessment becomes impossible. By continuously reassessing and reprioritizing risks, CNAPPs drive timely remediation, reduce attacker dwell times, and adapt response strategies as organizational priorities evolve.

Policy Enforcement

In practice, most organizations start by using CNAPPs to guide remediation with policies rather than turning on fully autonomous fixes. Automatically changing cloud configurations, permissions, or workloads in production can introduce instability or break critical applications, so teams typically phase in automation only where the blast radius is low and the rollback path is clear.

A pragmatic CNAPP approach is to use opinionated, guided workflows that tell teams exactly what to fix, why it matters, and how to do it safely. For example, the platform can open tickets with pre-populated context, suggest least-privilege policy changes, or generate infrastructure-as-code patches that owners can approve. This “human-in-the-loop” model reduces mean time to remediate (MTTR) without sacrificing control.

Focus CNAPP on Runtime Risk Reduction in Production

CNAPP delivers the most immediate value when it is anchored in runtime and production environments, where real users, real data, and real attack paths exist. Rather than centering the strategy on shift-left integrations, start by ensuring that your CNAPP has full, accurate coverage of production cloud accounts, critical applications, and business-impacting data stores.

Use the platform’s contextual risk views to identify and reduce the riskiest combinations of misconfigurations, exposed services, overly permissive identities, and vulnerable workloads. Align these findings with clear ownership, SLAs, and operational workflows so application, cloud, and security teams know which issues they are responsible for and how quickly they should respond.

Once runtime visibility and remediation processes are mature, organizations can selectively extend CNAPP insights into earlier stages of the lifecycle for pre-deployment checks and  infrastructure-as-code reviews using production reality to drive which controls matter most. This ensures CNAPP remains focused on tangible risk reduction instead of generating theoretical findings that never translate into action.

CNAPP Implementation Best Practices 

Here are some of the ways that organizations can make the most effective use of their cloud-native application protection platform.

1. Prioritize Risk Based on Context and Exposure

Risk prioritization should go beyond basic vulnerability or misconfiguration counts. CNAPPs enable organizations to assess the context, such as whether a resource is internet-exposed, contains sensitive data, or is business-critical. Addressing high-exposure or high-impact risks first ensures finite security resources are used efficiently.

Continuous reassessment of risk is needed as applications and infrastructures change. Automated risk ranking, informed by actionable context, helps security teams eliminate distractions and focus on what could do real damage. Integrating business context also supports executive reporting and board-level risk governance.

2. Treat Runtime as the Source of Truth for Risk

Runtime behavior should serve as a primary signal for risk prioritization within a CNAPP program. Rather than treating all vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or identity issues as equally urgent, organizations can use runtime insight to identify which resources, code paths, and identities are actually exercised in production. Findings associated with internet-exposed services, business-critical applications, sensitive data stores, or actively used high-privilege roles should be addressed first, as they represent the most realistic opportunities for attackers.

By correlating posture data with runtime telemetry, CNAPP platforms help distinguish theoretical exposure from genuinely exploitable risk. This context allows security teams to focus remediation efforts on issues that materially affect the organization’s security posture, while deprioritizing dormant assets, unused permissions, or unreachable services. Treating runtime as the source of truth supports more efficient use of security resources and provides clearer justification for risk decisions to executive and governance stakeholders.

3. Pair CAPP with In-App Protection

A CNAPP is most effective at providing unified visibility into assets, configurations, identities, and data flows, but not applications. From this vantage point, the platform can reveal exposed services, risky access paths, and high-value targets that might otherwise be overlooked. However, visibility at the infrastructure layer alone does not stop an attack; it must be complemented by controls at the application layer.

To achieve stronger defense-in-depth, organizations can pair CNAPP’s broad infrastructure detection and prioritization capabilities with in-application and runtime protection mechanisms. While CNAPP highlights where the greatest risks exist, in-app shields enforce guardrails closer to workloads, libraries, and APIs, detecting and blocking malicious behavior in real time. This alignment shortens the path from identifying critical exposure to mitigating it in production, reducing dwell time and improving the overall resilience of cloud-native applications.

4. Make Third-Party, OSS, and AI Components First-Class Risk Objects

Modern cloud-native applications rely heavily on external components, including open-source libraries, third-party SDKs, external APIs, and AI or LLM services. If these building blocks are not treated as first-class risk objects, they can introduce significant blind spots into a CNAPP strategy. Inventorying where such components are used, what data they handle, and how they interact with other services is essential to understanding their potential impact on the organization’s risk profile.

CNAPP platforms can enrich this view by correlating posture and runtime data for these dependencies. This includes identifying which libraries or AI integrations are actively used in production, what permissions they have, and whether they process regulated or sensitive data. Prioritizing security controls and monitoring around these components helps address software supply chain, API, and AI-related risks in a systematic way, aligning protection strategies with how applications are actually architected and delivered.

5. Establish Incident Response Playbooks Tied to CNAPP Alerts

Standardized incident response playbooks ensure that alerts generated by CNAPP are handled quickly and effectively. Playbooks should define roles, communication paths, and decision criteria for triage, investigation, remediation, and post-incident analysis. Automated workflows can help initiate or accelerate response actions as soon as critical alerts are triggered.

Integrating CNAPP alerts directly with security orchestration and ticketing systems improves coordination across teams and reduces manual overhead. Periodically testing and updating playbooks ensures they remain relevant as cloud environments, threats, and business processes evolve. 

Extend CNAPP with Oligo Runtime Security

Together, CNAPP and Oligo enable customers to reduce noise, focus on true risk, and protect cloud applications end to end—from posture to live attack prevention. CNAPP platforms provide broad, agentless visibility into cloud environments, identities, and posture so organizations can understand where potential risks exist. Oligo complements this by delivering deep, real-time runtime protection across code, applications, workloads, and AI, pinpointing which vulnerabilities and packages are actually executed and exploitable. Its Deep App Inspection technology detects attacks at their earliest stage and blocks them surgically at runtime without breaking production, turning static CNAPP findings into actionable, in-app defenses.