In the grand scheme of things, the cloud is primarily a developer-driven invention. The numerous opportunities for scalability, performance, speed, and time to market define cloud technology. Security, while essential, is often a secondary consideration. The cloud primarily serves as a catalyst for innovation and business growth.
When we focus on application development and operations in the cloud, a similar pattern emerges. At the business’s initiative, developers optimize products and processes, leveraging cloud technology and off-the-shelf solutions that best accelerate development. Only afterward is security considered. This trend has left many security teams facing an almost impossible task. In trying to keep up with business and digitalization efforts, these teams have invested in isolated security solutions over the years, resulting in a fragmented patchwork of technologies that fail to consistently protect the entire application portfolio—the crown jewels of the business.
This challenge becomes even more pronounced in the increasingly common multicloud setup, where workloads are distributed across multiple platforms and providers in pursuit of greater efficiency and optimization. From a security perspective, protecting the application portfolio with outdated tools is like trying to illuminate a dark building with a match—connections are missed, and threats remain hidden. This is an untenable situation for any security department.
This whitepaper argues that the solution to this complex security challenge is a platform approach to cloud-native application security. This approach must embrace the automation of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and the deployment lifecycle while integrating seamlessly into the DevOps process. These characteristics are at the core of Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP).
CNAPP solutions provide a unified security overview across hybrid and multicloud environments, fostering stronger collaboration between security, infrastructure, and development teams. Instead of treating security as an expensive afterthought, welded on late in the application development process, CNAPP solutions integrate security and governance mechanisms early, ensuring bugs are fixed before they reach production. This is music to the ears of financial and business managers, who know that cost-effective time-to-market is crucial for competitiveness. It also helps security managers sleep better at night, knowing they finally have an up-to-date, all-in-one security solution. Meanwhile, developers can work freely and quickly with their preferred tools and technologies.
This whitepaper begins by providing a conceptual overview of CNAPP solutions, including the range of security functionalities they offer in a single dashboard. It then outlines the key IT and business benefits of CNAPP before concluding with a brief introduction to Palo Alto Networks’ CNAPP solution, Prisma Cloud.
