Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service has become the operational foundation for cloud-native and AI-native applications, including LLM deployments, AI agents, RAG architectures, vector databases, and AI-powered business processes. Although cloud security follows a shared responsibility model, most incidents stem from customer-side issues such as misconfigurations, excessive permissions, insecure development, and weak governance. The rapid adoption of generative AI expands the attack surface further by introducing risks around model deployment, AI identities, sensitive data exposure, AI supply chains, and autonomous agents—pressuring organizations to extend security beyond traditional infrastructure controls.

Cloud security is increasingly identity-centric, spanning human users and non-human identities such as service accounts, workload identities, APIs, machine identities, and AI agents. Governance is complicated by many stakeholders across development, operations, security, AI, data, audit, and legal teams, all needing shared visibility. Traditional vulnerability scanning is inadequate in highly dynamic environments; teams must prioritize vulnerabilities based on reachability, exploitability, and presence in production. Container images amplify risk because a single vulnerable image can be replicated widely, while runtime drift and tampering require continuous management. Supply chain integrity also becomes critical due to reliance on open source, third-party components, container images, and AI-generated code.

CNAPP is presented as the unifying solution: a platform that continuously discovers assets, correlates identities, workloads, networks, data stores, vulnerabilities, runtime activity, AI services, and attack paths, and then prioritizes what is truly exploitable. It integrates security across the lifecycle—code, IaC, CI/CD, deployment, runtime, and SOC—enabling “Code-to-Cloud-to-SOC” feedback. Core capabilities include CIEM, DSPM, network and compute security (including Kubernetes), DevOps and supply chain security (SCA/SBOM), threat detection/response integrations, AI-SPM, and emerging AI security agents that automate multi-step security tasks under governance.