Cloud security isn’t just about checking posture anymore. It’s about staying ahead of attackers in environments that are constantly changing—new services, new identities, new code.
Traditional tools can’t keep up with ephemeral infrastructure, growing identity sprawl, and the speed of DevOps. Security teams need a platform that unifies signals, understands real exposure, and enables fast remediation—without slowing down engineering.
That’s why CNAPPs were born: to unify cloud security from dev to prod, across infrastructure, workloads, identities, and data. But not all CNAPPs are equal. Many are stitched together from acquired tools. Others surface too much noise without context.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to choose a CNAPP that cuts through complexity and gives your team a real path to security: with full-stack visibility, runtime protection, and developer-friendly workflows.
We’ll also show you what modern CNAPP leaders are doing differently—like graph-based risk analysis, agentless scanning, and code-to-cloud traceability.
Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report, Gartner offers insights and recommendations to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
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Core features of a CNAPP
Modern cloud native application protection platforms must move beyond isolated security tools and adopt a unified, intelligent approach to defense. Unlike legacy CNAPPs that rely on manual correlation or agents, modern platforms use contextual analysis and unified risk graphs to surface the small percentage of issues that actually matter—and block active threats in real time.
The most advanced CNAPPs use a graph-based risk model to connect signals across identity, data, and infrastructure. This allows you to identify true attack paths—like a vulnerable container that can be accessed via an over-permissioned IAM role and reaches sensitive data—so you can prioritize what matters instead of chasing alerts.
Here’s a closer look at the core features of a CNAPP:
1. Secure cloud development (shift-left security)
Securing cloud development is an essential capability of a CNAPP. This means continuously identifying and addressing application risks from code to production and prioritizing them based on severity. Application security posture management (ASPM) scans everything from application code and infrastructure as code (IaC) to third-party components and CI/CD pipelines—then ties risks together to show which issues actually impact your business.
Another core component of shift-left security? Securing the software supply chain. An ironclad approach to supply chain security prevents attacks, like breaches that stem from compromised build artifacts. Key steps include scanning code repositories for hard-coded secrets, implementing infrastructure as code (IaC), and checking dependencies for known vulnerabilities in third-party libraries to ensure they're secure before deployment.
2. Secure cloud infrastructure (preventive controls)
Any CNAPP worth its salt secures cloud infrastructure, giving you peace of mind that your configurations are impenetrable. Here’s how:
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and corrects any areas that don’t align with required policies, reducing the risk of drift over time and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) flags unusual user behavior, provides visibility into all entitlements across multiple cloud platforms, and finds exposed secrets that could put cloud systems at risk.
To protect what's running in the cloud, cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) focus on securing containers and virtual machines by combining vulnerability checks with real-time monitoring, making it easier to catch attempts to access resources that shouldn’t be touched.
Data security posture management (DSPM) is all about keeping sensitive data safe. It locates where important information is stored, watches how it moves within the cloud, and makes sure storage settings are correctly applied. It also identifies how attackers might try to reach that data, giving dev teams a chance to close any gaps before trouble starts.
Finally, API security is another area where CNAPPs shine. APIs are often the connection point between services, and if they’re not properly secured, they can become an easy way in for attackers. CNAPPs help spot issues with APIs early, making sure they’re not a hidden weakness in your cloud setup.
3. Runtime protection (cloud detection & response)
Cloud detection and response provides real-time threat detection with automated responses for attacks on your cloud environment, such as malware, crypto-mining, and remote code execution. CDR offers comprehensive visibility and gathers information from cloud activity, audit logs, and signals to track attacker movements, visualize attack paths, and ensure rapid response from security teams.
Across the categories we’ve discussed (secure development, preventive controls, and runtime protections), there are also integrated compliance features that simplify cloud governance and policy enforcement for standards including PCI DSS, GDPR, and NIST. These features reduce audit overhead and manual effort while maintaining continuous compliance.
A step-by-step approach to identifying your organization's CNAPP needs
The process of choosing the right CNAPP for your organization starts with developing a clear understanding of where you are now. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Assess your cloud environment
Before selecting a CNAPP, make sure you understand your cloud architecture and all workload dependencies. Ask yourself:
Do we operate in AWS, Azure, GCP, or a blend of providers (multi-cloud)?
Do our applications run on virtual machines, serverless functions, or containers?
Is our infrastructure provisioned using IaC tools?
Are our teams using CI/CD tools for application and infrastructure deployment?
A proper assessment provides a clear map of your cloud footprint and helps determine which CNAPP features are most important.
Step 2: Evaluate existing security gaps
During this step, evaluate your current security strategy and identify where it falls short when it comes to protecting cloud-native applications.
Examine the following key areas:
Visibility gaps: Do you need real-time insights into misconfigurations or exposed APIs?
Identify and access risks: Are there unused credentials or weak or overly privileged IAM policies within your cloud environment?
Disconnected multiple-point solutions: Are you using CSPM, CWPP, and CIEM solutions that are creating blind spots because they aren’t connected well?
Assessing your security weaknesses will expose your system's gaps and help you identify the best CNAPP to gain full coverage.
Step 3: Define business priorities
To choose the right CNAPP, align it with your organization's security and operational needs. Evaluate your priorities using this criteria:
Compliance: Is your main focus meeting compliance requirements, or are you only focused on real-time attack prevention?
DevSecOps integration: Do you need IaC scanning features to prevent vulnerabilities before pushing to production?
Cost: Can the solution scale affordably with your cloud footprint?
The Board-Ready CISO Report Deck [Template]
This editable template helps you communicate risk, impact, and priorities in language your board will understand—so you can gain buy-in and drive action.
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What truly differentiates CNAPPs in 2025?
As cloud environments become more complex, CNAPPs are a necessity both for security and overall platform protection. In 2025, leading CNAPPs distinguish themselves by delivering native, agentless, and developer-friendly solutions that not only surface real risks but also trace them back to their source—across the entire development lifecycle.
Here are the key differentiators:
Unified platform: The most effective CNAPPs are not a patch of acquired tools.Native integrations eliminate the gaps between posture, workload, identity, and data security. A good CNAPP creates a unified system where security teams get seamless visibility, faster detection, and simpler workflows.
Agentless-first architecture that scans everything and deploys instantly: CNAPPs with an agentless-first approach enable instant onboarding, installation, and visibility without installing or managing agents. With this approach, security teams can identify misconfigurations, exposed APIs, identity risks, and vulnerable workloads. More upsides? This architecture supports continuous scanning of IaC, containers, and APIs in real time without sacrificing performance or causing bottlenecks for security teams.
Code-to-cloud correlation: The top CNAPPs in 2025 trace active threats and vulnerabilities back to their source—whether it’s a misconfigured IaC template, an exposed secret in a Git commit, or an insecure CI/CD pipeline job. This lets developers fix issues early, and security teams pinpoint root causes fast.
Contextual risk prioritization: Most cloud environments generate a lot of alerts. That's why a good CNAPP doesn’t just list vulnerabilities; it connects the dots by analyzing the relationships between data sensitivity, identity privileges, and network exposure, before prioritizing the small percentage of issues that pose real business risks. The CNAPP you pick should also show potential attack paths and lateral movement, helping your security teams focus more on making better security decisions, rather than chasing noise.
Developer-first workflows that integrate with IDEs, PRs, and CI jobs: A great CNAPP should seamlessly integrate security into all developer workflows without slowing them down. It should provide native integrations with IDEs, SCMs, and CI/CD workflows, and should also scan IaC templates in real time, flag all security flaws in pull requests, and enforce strict policies in CI pipelines.
Cloud-native coverage: Look for a CNAPP that provides thorough and comprehensive protection across different compute types, including virtual machines, containers, serverless workloads, and Kubernetes clusters.
Remember: It’s not comprehensive protection without runtime monitoring, policy enforcement, API discovery and protection, data sensitivity mapping with DSPM, and permissions/role analysis with CIEM.
Real-time detection and response: A great CNAPP should detect and respond in real time, catching active attacks, misconfigurations, and suspicious behaviors as they happen. Better yet? They should block lateral movement automatically and seal exploitation paths before attackers compromise sensitive data or workloads.
Policy as code: Manual compliance methods aren’t scalable, especially with how dynamic a cloud environment can be. That’s why modern CNAPPs offer policy-as-code support, allowing you to automate compliance using tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), which lets you define and enforce policies as code across your environment. A good CNAPP should also provide out-of-the-box policies for CIS benchmarks, HIPAA, GDPR and more, plus drift detection in real time.
Common CNAPP selection pitfalls to avoid
Stitched-together CNAPPs
Most vendors claim to offer a complete CNAPP, but instead of a unified platform, they combine acquired tools, creating siloed Frankenstein solutions. Due to poor integration, these solutions create gaps in visibility where threats can hide. Security teams are left juggling multiple dashboards with inconsistent data flow, leading to alert fatigue and critical insights falling through the cracks.
Always look for a unified CNAPP that integrates CSPM, CWPP, and CIEM, providing visibility across your entire cloud environment.
CNAPPs with no runtime visibility
Most CNAPPs neglect runtime protection, leaving workloads exposed to live attacks. Without real-time workload monitoring, automated response, or threat detection, security teams are blind to exploitation and lateral movement. Another downside? Inadequate runtime security means you have no enforcement mechanisms to contain or block malicious behavior once an attacker breaches your systems.
When choosing a CNAPP, select one that offers real-time workload monitoring and threat detection while providing automated response capabilities to prevent attacks before they cause serious damage.
When security slows down developers (and how the right CNAPP avoids that)
Modern engineering teams move fast—and if security tools aren’t built to keep up, they get sidelined or ignored. So when security tools disrupt developers' workflows, they will most likely bypass or disable them. In this situation, security becomes a post-deployment audit rather than a built-in feature. Unfortunately, tacking on security at the end of the SDLC means that critical vulnerabilities can reach production before being caught.
The solution? A CNAPP that’s developer-friendly and provides native IDE/CLI integration so developers won’t bypass it during development.
Secure everything you build and run in the cloud—with Wiz
Wiz is the CNAPP built for how cloud actually works. Unified from day one. Agentless by design. Context-aware by default.
🧠 Prioritize what matters: Wiz's Security Graph connects misconfigurations, identity risks, vulnerabilities, and data exposure—so you can fix real attack paths, not just scan results.
⚡ Secure at cloud speed: Instantly scan across multi-cloud environments without agents. No slowdowns, no missed assets.
🛠 Empower developers: Remediate directly from pull requests, CI jobs, and IDEs.
🔒 Stop threats in real time: Get runtime detection and prevention that closes the loop.
👉 Ready to unify your cloud security and cut through the noise? Request a demo to see how Wiz can help you secure everything you build and run in the cloud.
