CNAPPs and ASPM are often viewed as distinct security frameworks—but in reality, ASPM capabilities are increasingly embedded within modern CNAPPs. This integration closes critical security gaps that occur when application and infrastructure security operate in isolation.
That’s especially true for platforms like Wiz, which unifies cloud and application security in one integrated solution. This article breaks down the relationship between CNAPPs and ASPM, clarifies how they overlap, and explains why organizations benefit most from a platform that brings both together.
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Understanding CNAPP
What is a CNAPP?
A cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) is an integrated security platform designed to protect cloud applications, workloads, and infrastructure throughout the development lifecycle. Sophisticated CNAPP platforms bring together multiple cloud security solutions to give you an end-to-end view of your cloud security posture. And for proactive and dynamic security management, CNAPPs can be customized according to your organization's needs.
Here are some essential components that make up a CNAPP platform:
Cloud security posture management (CSPM): A CSPM solution ensures that cloud configurations are continuously assessed for policy violations and compliance mismanagement in order to close any security gaps.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM): A CNAPP also needs to manage cloud identities and permissions to prevent cloud security incidents. With a CIEM solution, it can continuously analyze entitlements across cloud services to detect unused, misconfigured, or overly permissive roles.
Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP): With a CWPP, CNAPPs perform runtime monitoring, threat detection, and automated protective steps for cloud workloads in production environments. (Workloads include containerized units, VMs, serverless tools, and more.) CWPP solutions have a wide reach and can protect workloads across all cloud environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud.
Data security posture management: To protect data in the cloud, CNAPPs leverage DSPM capabilities to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data like PII, financial records, and intellectual property. A DSPM solution uses data classification, access pattern analysis, and policy-based enforcement to ensure sensitive data is protected across your cloud estate.
Container and Kubernetes security: Kubernetes is directly or indirectly engaged with many critical cloud workloads. For this reason, CNAPPs aim to protect Kubernetes clusters with container security solutions that offer controls like role-based access, network monitoring, and vulnerability assessment.
Detection and response: Modern CNAPPs also include native threat detection and response to identify active attacks across cloud environments. By combining runtime signals with contextual insights from other CNAPP components, these capabilities help security teams detect, prioritize, and respond to threats before they escalate.
API security: Modern CNAPPs incorporate API security capabilities to discover, catalog, and protect APIs—increasingly critical attack vectors in cloud-native applications. This includes identifying shadow APIs, detecting misconfigurations, and monitoring for abnormal traffic patterns.
The bottom line? CNAPPs offer unified visibility and proactive risk reduction across cloud infrastructure, workloads, data, and applications—providing a comprehensive, context-driven view of security from development through production.
Understanding ASPM
What is ASPM?
Application security posture management (ASPM) is focused on application security best practices rather than cloud security. ASPM secures applications as they move through the software supply chain—from the development process right until they are finally deployed into production. Another benefit? ASPM also helps prioritize security risks based on business context so that remediation efforts are more targeted and issues are remediated early in the pipeline.
Here are some essential ASPM features:
Application security testing integration: ASPM enables continuous vulnerability detection throughout the software development lifecycle by integrating with security testing tools. It ensures seamless integration with SAST, DAST, and SCA tools to test and report vulnerabilities as soon as possible. The goal? To conduct real-time security testing to ensure a secure SDLC.
Software supply chain security: Supply chain attacks pose significant threats to cloud workloads because third-party tools and libraries feature dependencies that can be exploited if their vulnerabilities are left unchecked. ASPM eliminates this threat by scanning open-source libraries, SBOMs, and CI/CD pipelines for potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Security risk correlation: ASPM is effective thanks to its contextual awareness of your application’s security posture across the software supply chain. In other words, it helps identify and prioritize security risks based on application context, employing tools that monitor and report potential security risks and helping security teams identify critical issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. ASPM also helps prioritize the remediation of these risks by offering customized remediation steps.
Runtime security: ASPM offers visibility into metrics for application security best practices in production environments, pinpointing anomalous behavior, unauthorized changes, and unexpected data flows that can signal threats to an application.
Real-time risk assessment: ASPM continuously evaluates application security posture, providing immediate feedback on potential vulnerabilities introduced during development or deployment, rather than waiting for periodic scanning or audits.
To sum it up: Unlike CNAPP, ASPM aims to protect the application rather than the underlying cloud infrastructure that runs the application.
The evolution of CNAPP and ASPM
While we've outlined the traditional definitions of CNAPP and ASPM, it's important to understand that the cloud security market has evolved rapidly. Modern CNAPP platforms natively incorporate ASPM capabilities—eliminating security silos and delivering full lifecycle protection from code to cloud. This integration provides organizations with a single, comprehensive view of their security posture across both cloud infrastructure and applications.
Modern CNAPPs that include ASPM capabilities offer several advantages:
Unified visibility across infrastructure, workloads, and applications
Consistent policy enforcement from code to cloud
Reduced alert fatigue through consolidated risk prioritization
Streamlined workflows for both security and development teams
Comprehensive context for more accurate risk assessment
This evolution reflects the reality that securing cloud environments requires a holistic approach that doesn't create artificial boundaries between infrastructure and application security.
The State of Code Security Report [2025]
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) provides visibility, but are organizations actually securing their repositories? The State of Code Security Report 2025 found that GitHub repositories are three times more likely to be public than those on other VCS platforms, creating a larger attack surface.
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Distinguishing CNAPP’s ASPM capabilities from other CNAPP features
Modern CNAPPs bring together several core capabilities—like CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, DSPM, and now, increasingly, ASPM. While these components all contribute to securing cloud environments, ASPM brings a distinct focus and value to the CNAPP architecture.
Here’s how ASPM capabilities within a CNAPP differ from other core features:
Primary focus
ASPM focuses on the application layer—securing code, dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime behavior specific to the application. ASPM protects the software supply chain, helping secure the application starting from the pre-production stage.
Other CNAPP components like CSPM and CIEM focus on cloud infrastructure risks, such as misconfigured storage, over-permissioned identities, and drift from baseline security policies. These factors are critical in the post-production phase of the application lifecycle.
Integration points
ASPM’s capabilities integrate into developer toolchains—such as Git repos, CI/CD tools, and software composition analysis (SCA) tools—to secure applications early in the software development lifecycle. By operating upstream, ASPM effectively embodies the shift-left methodology.
CSPM, CIEM, and CWPP typically integrate at the cloud platform, workload, or orchestration layer, analyzing runtime environments and cloud configurations. These solutions secure downstream components that are more external-facing.
Risk prioritization
ASPM helps prioritize risks by linking application-level issues (e.g., vulnerable libraries and leaked secrets) to business context—especially when those issues affect production. ASPM takes an inside-out approach to security.
Other CNAPP features prioritize based on infrastructure exposure, identity relationships, and workload reachability—focusing on attack paths and exploitable conditions. CNAPPs take an outside-in approach, bolstering a system that’s already been secured in the early stages by ASPM.
Runtime coverage
ASPM contributes application-layer runtime monitoring—such as detecting unexpected data flows or unauthorized access within applications.
CWPP, in contrast, offers workload-level runtime protection—monitoring containers, VMs, and serverless environments for malware, privilege escalation, and anomalous behavior.
Together, these capabilities give CNAPP platforms end-to-end protection. ASPM fills a critical gap by securing the application itself—not just the infrastructure it runs on.
How modern CNAPPs integrate ASPM capabilities
Modern CNAPPs have evolved to incorporate key ASPM capabilities, creating a unified approach to cloud security. Here's how these integrated platforms address what were once considered separate concerns:
Application security in cloud environments: Today's CNAPPs extend beyond infrastructure to provide deep visibility into application vulnerabilities, with context that connects code-level issues to their potential impact on cloud resources.
Shift-left security: Integrated platforms enable security to move earlier in the development lifecycle by scanning code, identifying vulnerabilities during development, and providing remediation guidance directly to developers.
Runtime security: Modern CNAPPs monitor both infrastructure and applications in production, detecting anomalies and protecting against threats across the entire cloud estate.
Supply chain security: Advanced CNAPPs now include the ability to scan dependencies, analyze SBOMs, and identify risks in third-party components—capabilities traditionally associated with ASPM.
By bringing these capabilities together in a single platform, organizations gain comprehensive protection without the complexity of managing multiple tools.
How Wiz supports cloud and application security
Wiz delivers integrated CNAPP and ASPM capabilities
Wiz's CNAPP exemplifies the evolution of cloud security by providing a unified platform that integrates comprehensive ASPM capabilities with robust cloud infrastructure protection. Unlike traditional siloed approaches that create visibility gaps, Wiz delivers end-to-end security coverage from code to cloud, enabling organizations to identify, prioritize, and remediate risks within a single platform.
Wiz's agentless architecture scans both application code and cloud infrastructure, connecting vulnerabilities to actual attack paths and providing risk context that helps teams focus on what matters most. This unified approach eliminates the need to correlate findings between separate tools, streamlining security operations and accelerating remediation.
Wiz Code enhances Wiz's integrated platform by providing deep code-to-cloud context—connecting vulnerabilities in code directly to exposed risks in cloud environments, and enabling precise, risk-based prioritization. This allows security teams to:
Scan application code and identify vulnerabilities during development
Connect code-level issues to their potential impact on cloud resources
Prioritize remediation based on real-world risks
Provide developers with actionable guidance to fix security issues
With Wiz's integrated approach, you gain unprecedented visibility into your cloud environment—from infrastructure configurations to application code—through a single pane of glass. This eliminates blind spots and ensures that security teams can identify, prioritize, and remediate the most critical risks, regardless of where they originate.
If you're looking for a holistic security approach that aligns with today's evolved understanding of cloud security, schedule a Wiz demo today and see how our integrated CNAPP can protect everything you build and run in the cloud.
