Why application vulnerability management matters in cloud environments
Cloud environments make application vulnerability management more critical because of how fast you can deploy and scale. When you're using microservices, containers, and serverless functions, your attack surface grows significantly compared to traditional applications. A monolithic app might expose 5-10 endpoints, while a microservices architecture can expose hundreds of service-to-service APIs, each requiring authentication, authorization, and monitoring.
The dynamic nature of cloud resources creates unique challenges. Workloads spin up and down in minutes, which challenges traditional agent-based approaches. Agents require installation on each workload, creating operational overhead—when containers scale from 50 to 500 instances in seconds, agent deployment lags behind, creating visibility gaps. Ephemeral functions that exist for under 60 seconds may terminate before agents can report findings.
AWS Vulnerability Management Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
Tired of chasing hidden vulnerabilities in your AWS environments? Our comprehensive cheat sheet provides actionable steps to identify, assess, and mitigate security risks, ensuring your cloud infrastructure is protected.
Here's what makes cloud application security different:
API proliferation: Your modern applications expose hundreds of APIs between services, and each one is a potential entry point that needs monitoring.
Shared responsibility: Cloud providers secure the infrastructure (security of the cloud), while you secure what runs in the cloud—your applications, data, identity permissions, and configurations. For example, AWS secures the physical servers running EC2, but you must secure the OS patches, application code, IAM roles, and security group rules on those instances.
Multi-cloud complexity: When you're using AWS, Azure, and GCP together, each has different security controls and APIs, making consistent security difficult.
DevOps velocity: Your automated deployment cycles can push vulnerabilities into production faster than security teams can detect them using traditional methods.
Common application vulnerabilities and their cloud-specific risks
Application vulnerabilities take on new dimensions in cloud environments, where they can escalate into critical security incidents. Understanding these vulnerabilities is essential because attackers actively seek "toxic combinations"—scenarios where multiple seemingly minor weaknesses chain together to create exploitable paths to your most sensitive assets.
Code-level vulnerabilities
These flaws exist in the custom code your developers write. Attackers exploit them to manipulate how your application behaves or access underlying systems.
SQL injection and NoSQL injection: In the cloud, these attacks exploit application query logic against managed databases like Amazon RDS or DynamoDB. If the compromised application uses an IAM role with broad permissions—for example, dynamodb:* on all tables—attackers can access any data that role can reach, potentially spanning multiple databases and S3 buckets.
Cross-site scripting (XSS): Attackers use XSS flaws to steal user credentials or session tokens, then use those stolen credentials to access your cloud resources and APIs.
Insecure deserialization: This vulnerability is especially dangerous in microservices and serverless architectures where it can lead to remote code execution across multiple functions or containers.
6 All-Too-Common Code Vulnerabilities
Code vulnerabilities are weaknesses in software that attackers can exploit, potentially compromising security.
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Configuration vulnerabilities
Misconfigurations in your cloud environment can turn a minor application flaw into a major breach by exposing resources that should be private. According to 2025 cloud security research, 23% of cloud incidents stem from misconfigurations—for example, an S3 bucket set to public-read combined with an application vulnerability that leaks bucket names.
Exposed API endpoints: When your APIs are publicly accessible without proper authentication, attackers can directly interact with and manipulate your backend cloud services.
Overly permissive IAM roles: If an attacker compromises an application with excessive permissions, they can move laterally across your cloud environment to access critical data.
Unencrypted data in transit: When sensitive information moves between services or to cloud storage without TLS encryption, a compromised workload in the same VPC or subnet can intercept it through ARP spoofing or packet sniffing. For example, payment data flowing from a web tier to an API gateway over HTTP can be captured by an attacker who has compromised any EC2 instance in that network segment.
Dependency vulnerabilities
Modern applications rely on countless open-source libraries and third-party packages. Each one can introduce vulnerabilities into your application.
Vulnerable open-source libraries: A single vulnerability in a widely used library like Log4j can expose thousands of applications to immediate risk across your entire organization.
Supply chain risks: Attackers inject malicious code into third-party packages that get pulled into your container images or function layers during the build process.
Outdated base images: When you use container or VM images with unpatched operating systems, you create a foundational layer of risk that affects every application built on top.
The application vulnerability management lifecycle
Application vulnerability management works as a continuous cycle that integrates with your DevSecOps workflows. This lifecycle ensures you address security at every stage, from writing code to monitoring production.
Discovery and inventory
You start by creating a comprehensive inventory of all your application assets. This includes microservices, APIs, libraries, and their dependencies. The key output is a software bill of materials (SBOM) that lists every component in your application.
Vulnerability assessment
Once you know what you have, you scan it for weaknesses. Automated tools perform vulnerability scanning across multiple layers: SAST (Static Application Security Testing) analyzes source code, SCA (Software Composition Analysis) checks dependencies and libraries, DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) tests running applications and APIs, and container scanning examines images for OS and package vulnerabilities. You then correlate findings from different tools to get a unified view and reduce false positives.
Risk prioritization
Not every vulnerability deserves immediate attention—60% of security professionals identify prioritization as a top obstacle. You move beyond CVSS scores by incorporating CISA's KEV catalog for active threats, EPSS scores for exploitation probability, runtime reachability analysis to confirm if vulnerable code is actually loaded, and VEX data to suppress unexploitable vulnerabilities in your configuration. The goal is finding toxic combinations and validated exploit paths that represent real risk.
Remediation and mitigation
After prioritizing risks, you fix them. This can mean automating patch deployment through your CI/CD pipelines or applying configuration fixes. When you can't patch immediately, you implement compensating controls like web application firewall rules.
Verification and validation
Once you apply a fix, you verify it worked. You automatically rescan the affected asset to confirm the vulnerability is gone. You also validate that your fix didn't introduce new vulnerabilities or break application functionality.
Continuous monitoring
The lifecycle doesn't end after remediation. You continuously monitor production environments to detect new vulnerabilities as they emerge. Runtime protection tools can also detect and block exploitation attempts on unpatched vulnerabilities.
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Application vulnerabilities are security weaknesses in software code, design, or configuration that attackers can exploit to compromise systems or data.
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Key capabilities of modern application vulnerability management platforms
Traditional vulnerability scanners can't keep up with cloud-native development. Modern platforms provide unified, context-aware security that integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows.
Unified vulnerability detection across the stack
You need visibility into everything without creating friction for your developers.
Agentless scanning: Connects to cloud provider APIs (AWS EC2 DescribeInstances, Azure Resource Graph, GCP Asset Inventory) and container registries (ECR, ACR, GCR) for broad visibility across VMs, containers, and serverless functions without installing agents on each workload, eliminating performance overhead and deployment complexity.
Multi-layer analysis: Scans source code, containers, infrastructure as code, and runtime environments simultaneously for a complete view of risk.
Cross-cloud support: Delivers consistent vulnerability detection across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments.
Intelligent risk prioritization
The biggest challenge is cutting through thousands of alerts to find the handful that pose real threats.
Graph-based context: Maps relationships between vulnerabilities, identities, data, and cloud resources to understand how different risks connect.
Attack path analysis: Identifies complex chains of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that create exploitable paths to critical assets.
Business impact scoring: Prioritizes vulnerabilities based on the criticality of affected applications and the sensitivity of data they access.
Developer-centric workflows
Security works best when it empowers developers instead of blocking them.
IDE integration: Provides real-time vulnerability detection directly in your developer's integrated development environment.
Pull request scanning: Automatically scans code changes for vulnerabilities before they merge into the main branch.
Actionable remediation guidance: Offers clear, specific fix recommendations with code examples to help developers resolve issues quickly.
Automation and orchestration
Manual security processes can't keep up with cloud development speed.
Auto-remediation: Automatically generates safe fixes for common vulnerability patterns—such as creating pull requests to update dependency versions, proposing security group rule changes, or suggesting IAM policy restrictions—with mandatory review gates and rollback capabilities before production deployment.
Workflow integration: Connects natively with Jira, ServiceNow, and Slack to route alerts to the right teams.
Policy as code: Define security requirements as code using frameworks like Open Policy Agent (OPA), HashiCorp Sentinel, or AWS Config Rules that are automatically enforced during build and deployment. For example, a policy can block container images with critical CVEs or prevent deployment of services with overly permissive IAM roles.
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Application vulnerability management challenges in cloud-native environments
Implementing application vulnerability management in cloud-native environments presents unique challenges. Traditional security approaches often fail because they can't handle the dynamic, distributed nature of the cloud.
Scale and velocity challenges
The sheer scale and speed of cloud operations can overwhelm legacy security processes.
Ephemeral workloads: Containers and serverless functions may exist for only minutes, making traditional periodic scanning impossible.
Continuous deployment: When teams push code to production multiple times daily, manual security reviews become bottlenecks. Research shows only 54% of major code changes undergo a full security review before deployment, meaning nearly half of production releases skip comprehensive security validation, increasing the risk of deploying exploitable vulnerabilities.
Microservices complexity: A single application may consist of hundreds of interconnected microservices, each with its own vulnerabilities.
Visibility and context gaps
In the cloud, you can easily lose track of what's running and how it connects.
Shadow IT and shadow APIs: Developers can spin up applications or expose APIs without security team knowledge, creating unmonitored assets. 57% of teams struggle to gain full visibility into their applications and APIs—for example, a developer might deploy a Lambda function with an API Gateway endpoint for testing that remains publicly accessible months later, unknown to security teams.
Third-party dependencies: You often have limited visibility into vulnerabilities hidden within external services and open-source libraries.
Multi-cloud blind spots: Using different security tools for each cloud provider results in inconsistent coverage.
Operational challenges
Security teams get flooded with data but lack actionable insights.
Alert fatigue: Traditional scanners generate thousands of alerts, most low-risk, overwhelming teams and causing them to miss critical issues.
False positive overload: You waste significant time investigating vulnerabilities that aren't actually exploitable in your specific environment.
Tool sprawl: Managing multiple disconnected scanning tools creates data silos and operational overhead.
Organizational challenges
Technology alone isn't enough—you need cultural and process changes too.
DevSecOps maturity: When security is seen as a separate gatekeeper, developers resist controls they perceive as slowing them down.
Skills gap: There's a shortage of security professionals with deep expertise in both application security and cloud architectures.
Ownership ambiguity: It's often unclear who should fix a vulnerability—security, development, or cloud teams.
See Wiz in action
Learn about the full power of the Wiz cloud security platform. Built to protect your cloud environment from code to runtime.
Best practices for effective application vulnerability management
A successful application vulnerability management program requires strategic thinking that combines technology, process, and collaboration.
Shift security left in the development pipeline
The earlier you find a vulnerability, the easier and cheaper it is to fix.
Pre-commit scanning: Use IDE plugins to scan code for vulnerabilities before developers commit it to version control.
Infrastructure as code security: Scan Terraform and CloudFormation templates for misconfigurations that could create security holes.
Container image hardening: Start with minimal, cryptographically signed base images from trusted registries (such as Docker Official Images or distroless images), verify signatures using tools like cosign or Notary, scan images during the build process with tools like Trivy or Grype, and remove unnecessary packages to minimize attack surface.
Implement risk-based prioritization
Focus on vulnerabilities that pose the greatest actual risk to your organization.
Context-aware scoring: Enhance CVSS scores with runtime context like internet exposure or access to sensitive data.
Attack path validation: Prioritize vulnerabilities that are part of validated attack paths leading to critical assets.
Business impact assessment: Factor in application criticality and compliance requirements when deciding which vulnerabilities to fix first.
Automate remediation workflows
Manual remediation is slow and error-prone. Automation streamlines the fix process.
Automated patching: Use patch management tools to automate updates to dependencies and base images with staged rollouts—first deploying to dev environments, then staging, then production with canary deployments (5% of traffic initially)—and maintain rollback plans to revert within minutes if patches cause application failures.
Self-service remediation: Empower developers to fix their own issues with clear guidance and automated workflows.
Rollback capabilities: Ensure any automated changes can be quickly rolled back if a patch causes unexpected issues.
Foster security collaboration
Security is a shared responsibility across teams.
Shared dashboards: Provide all teams with a unified view of security posture, with data tailored to their roles.
Clear ownership: Use code-to-cloud traceability to define who owns remediation for different vulnerability types.
Security champions: Embed security-minded developers within development teams to act as advocates and resources.
Establish continuous improvement
Application vulnerability management requires constant measurement and refinement.
Track key metrics: Monitor mean time to identify (under 24 hours for critical vulnerabilities) and mean time to remediate (critical within 7 days, high within 30 days, medium within 90 days).
Measure actual risk: Calculate what percentage of vulnerabilities are exploitable in your environment (typically 2-5% based on reachability and exposure).
Conduct regular reviews: Perform periodic assessments to identify improvement areas and adapt to emerging threats.
What is Continuous Vulnerability Management?
Continuous vulnerability management (CVM) is a non-stop, iterative cycle that involves finding, prioritizing, and fixing vulnerabilities.
Read moreHow Wiz strengthens application vulnerability management across code to cloud
Wiz provides a unified platform that transforms application vulnerability management from reactive to proactive. By correlating vulnerabilities with cloud configuration, identity permissions, and runtime behavior, you can focus on vulnerabilities that actually matter.
Wiz Code detects vulnerabilities in dependencies, infrastructure as code templates, and secrets before deployment through comprehensive scanning and IDE integration. The Wiz Security Graph correlates application vulnerabilities with network exposure, identity permissions, and sensitive data access to prioritize real attack paths over CVSS scores alone.
Agentless scanning provides broad vulnerability coverage across VMs, containers, and serverless functions by connecting to cloud APIs and registries—scanning disk snapshots, container images, and function packages—without performance impact on running workloads or the operational complexity of deploying and managing agents across thousands of ephemeral resources. Attack path analysis reveals how application vulnerabilities combine with misconfigurations and excessive permissions to create exploitable routes to critical assets.
Code-to-cloud correlation traces production vulnerabilities directly back to source repositories and specific developers for streamlined remediation workflows. Wiz Defend's runtime sensor helps validate which vulnerabilities are actually reachable in running applications by monitoring loaded libraries, executed code paths, and active network connections, providing evidence to inform prioritization decisions—for example, confirming that a vulnerable Log4j version is loaded but the specific vulnerable JNDI lookup code path is never executed.
Request a demo to see how Wiz makes application vulnerability management both comprehensive and manageable with full code-to-cloud context.
Identify and Prioritize Vulnerabilities
Wiz analyzes your entire cloud environment to find vulnerable resources, making prioritization possible at a glance.
