What Is a Cloud Native Security Platform?
Application development methodologies are moving away from the traditional “waterfall” model toward more agile continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes with end-to-end automation. This new approach brings a multitude of benefits, such as shorter time to market and faster delivery, but it also introduces security challenges since traditional security methodologies weren’t designed to address these modern application workflows. As developer teams embrace cloud native technologies, security teams find themselves scrambling to keep up. Limited prevention controls, poor visibility and tools that lack automation yield incomplete security analytics—all of these things increase the risk of compromise and the likelihood of successful breaches in cloud environments. Meanwhile, the demand for an entirely new approach to security emerges. Enter cloud native security platforms (CNSPs).
Before we dive into what a CNSP is, let’s first understand what “cloud native” refers to.
What Does ‘Cloud Native’ Mean?
The term “cloud native” refers to an approach to building and running applications that takes full advantage of a cloud computing delivery model instead of an on-premises data center. This approach takes the best of what cloud has to offer – scalability, deployability, manageability and limitless on-demand compute power – and applies these principles to software development, combined with CI/CD automation, to radically increase productivity, business agility and cost savings.
Cloud native architectures are made up of cloud services, such as containers, serverless security, platform as a service (PaaS) and microservices. These services are loosely coupled, meaning they are not hardwired to any infrastructure components, allowing developers to make changes frequently without affecting other pieces of the application or other team members’ projects – all across technology boundaries, such as public, private and multi-cloud deployments.
In short, “cloud native” refers to a methodology of software development that is essentially designed for cloud delivery and exemplifies all the benefits of the cloud by nature.
The Beginnings of Cloud Native Security
As more organizations have embraced DevOps and developer teams have begun to update their application development pipelines, Security teams quickly realized their tools were ill-suited for the developer-driven, API-centric, infrastructure-agnostic patterns of cloud native security. As a result, cloud native security point products began to hit the market. These products were each engineered to address one part of the problem or one segment of the software stack, but on their own, they could not collect enough information to accurately understand or report on the risks across cloud native environments. This forced security teams to juggle multiple tools and vendors, which increased cost, complexity and risk in addition to creating blind spots where the tools overlapped but didn’t integrate.
Enter Cloud Native Security Platforms
Solving this problem requires a unified platform approach that can envelop the entire CI/CD lifecycle and integrate with the DevOps workflow. This platform approach, which Gartner calls Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), provides total visibility across silos, and ensures security, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps teams can deliver full-stack security. With CNSPs (the term can be used interchangeably with CNAPP), a single platform can protect applications at runtime while also integrating security into development workflows to identify and fix flaws early in the application lifecycle. Just as cloud native approaches have fundamentally changed how the cloud is used, CNSPs are fundamentally restructuring how the cloud is secured.
CNSPs share context about infrastructure, PaaS, users, development platforms, data and application workloads across platform components to enhance security. They also:
Provide unified visibility for SecOps and DevOps teams.
Deliver an integrated set of capabilities to respond to threats and protect cloud native applications.
Automate the remediation of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations consistently across the entire build-deploy-run lifecycle.
To dive deeper into the properties that define a CNSP, read Core Tenets of a Cloud Native Security Platform.
CNSPs and the Future
In the past, organizations that wanted to embrace new compute options were stifled by the need to buy more security products to support those options. Stitching together disparate solutions in an attempt to enforce consistent policies across technology boundaries became more of a problem than a solution. CNSPs, however, provide coverage across the continuum of compute options, multi-cloud and the application development lifecycle. This allows organizations to choose the right compute options for any given workload, granting them freedom without worry over how to integrate solutions for security. CNSPs epitomize the benefits of a cloud native strategy, enabling agility, flexibility and digital transformation.
Click here to learn more about the evolution of cloud native security and see how Prisma Cloud delivers the industry’s only comprehensive protection platform for cloud native applications.
