With the aim of enhancing flexibility, scalability, and rate of innovation, contemporary enterprises are constructing and embracing cloud native applications and procedures. Nevertheless, the broadly distributed, microservice-based design of these applications poses a distinctive array of obstacles, particularly concerning security. Introducing Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs).
As specified in the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection report, “Until recently, comprehensively ensuring cloud-native applications necessitated the deployment of various tools from diverse providers that are seldom well-linked and typically tailored solely for security experts, rather than collaborating with developers. This absence of integration generates isolated risk perspectives with inadequate context individually, making it challenging to prioritize the actual risk. As a consequence, scattered tools generate numerous alerts, squandering developers’ time and causing remediation efforts to be perplexing for target positions.”
CNAPPs cater to the complete life cycle protection requisites of cloud native applications from development to production. They combine numerous security and protection capabilities to recognize and prioritize exaggerated risks of the complete cloud native application and its related infrastructure.
A substantial portion of their fundamental value is rooted in early risk identification in the software development process, facilitating prompt remediation. This unified, coherent, and continual stance strengthens overall cloud security and policy conformity.
A recent white paper from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), Enhance Security and Obtain Comprehensive Visibility with Cloud-native Application Protection Platform (October 2023), explains the significance of CNAPPs for companies that require to advance efficiency, security, and compliance throughout their software development lifecycle (SLDC) and cloud estate.
The white paper discloses that close to half of the surveyed developers admit to routinely deploying code to production containing known vulnerabilities. With 97% of organizations encountering a cybersecurity incident related to internally developed cloud native applications in the past year, the risks and stakes are too high to persist with a disjointed approach to security.
Enterprises necessitate a contemporary security solution to back the developer-centric, intricate infrastructure required for application development. They necessitate unified observability, automated security, compliance monitoring and reporting, and centralized management that solely a CNAPP can offer.
Mounting Requirement for Unified End-to-End Security
The ESG white paper highlights three primary advantages of CNAPPs which are multicloud visibility, acceleration of “shift left” protection, and proactive cloud-security governance. In combination, these capabilities are fostering a novel and unified strategy to securing the cloud native application estate.
• Comprehensive visibility across multicloud infrastructures
Drafted for cloud scale, CNAPPs grant insights into the security of multicloud environments. This permits security teams to streamline security management and coordination of public and private cloud resources.
As laid out by Enterprise Strategy Group, “A CNAPP should operate across all applications, microservices, APIs, and cloud resources deployed and offer the necessary level of artifact and exposure scanning. It should present a singular dashboard encompassing all public cloud service providers. The platform should additionally prioritize mitigation, reporting on the automated steps available, and the actions that should be tackled manually.”
• Genuine “shift left” DevSecOps
Enterprises are still under considerable pressure to refine and release code swiftly. As per ESG, close to half (48%) of those surveyed recurrently deploy code with known vulnerabilities to production and almost one-third (31%) do so occasionally. Consequently, 97% experienced a cybersecurity incident in the preceding year related to internally developed applications.
CNAPPs enable streamlined security testing integrated into contemporary DevOps practices. This equipoises security and velocity in a manner that won’t hinder innovation. With swift testing, risk identification, and remediation, enterprises can harvest the benefits of reduced developer expenses and faster time-to-market.
• Facilitation of end-to-end cloud security governance
CNAPPs provide a comprehensive view encompassing application development, deployment, and runtime. This enables proactive risk evaluation and compliance monitoring, and consistent enforcement of security governance policies across multi-cloud environments.
They also offer the potential to automatically detect and, in some cases, rectify misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats in real time. Additionally, by integrating with or in certain cases integrating threat feeds and analytics, CNAPPs boost detection capabilities so security teams can promptly react to emerging threats.
CNAPPs are gaining favor among security teams. They surmount the obstacles of isolated point solutions, and safeguard organizations from the expenses of financial, reputational, and intellectual property damages.
Cisco Cloud Application Security is Revolutionary
Cisco Cloud Application Security is a cohesive security solution. It furnishes all-encompassing visibility and protection across the application lifecycle. It fuses cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection (CWPP), API security, and infrastructure as code (IaC) security.
Therefore, organizations can supervise, prioritize, and rectify a broad range of security threats while also accomplishing precise governance and compliance obligations. It provides code-to-cloud protection from development to runtime, and empowers organizations to defend their APIs, serverless functions, containers, and Kubernetes environments.
Security teams can shield all their cloud assets utilizing a non-agent approach to scan cloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or any amalgamation of these. Inventory and mapping of assets and their connections utilizing an advanced graph database enables thorough visualization of the entire cloud estate.
Cisco Cloud Application Security also supports organizations in prioritizing risks. It features an attack path engine with advanced attack path analysis capabilities that help security teams view their environment from an attacker’s standpoint. For example, teams can assess and comprehend misconfigurations and overly lenient roles that could be exploited to attain unauthorized access to a system or network.
The analysis surpasses superficial insights with root cause identification and step-by-step, guided command line remediation. Furthermore, the solution incorporates with development-routed workflow and ticketing tools for expedited resolution.
The groundbreaking benefits of Cisco Cloud Application Security are unmistakable: Enhanced visibility, superior risk prioritization, decreased expenses, and increased productivity. As an element of Cisco’s matchless portfolio of security solutions, it provides a distinctive code-to-cloud experience for thorough cloud security accessible as an independent service or as a segment of the Cisco Cloud Protection Suite.
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Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, By Neil MacDonald, Charlie Winckless, Dale Koeppen, 14 March 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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