This blog explores CNAPP, how it works and the different components in CNAPP.
With the massive adoption of cloud platforms by organisations especially during the pandemic, organisations just wanted to ‘make things work at any cost. While many businesses already had plans to embrace cloud and containers, this disruptive pandemic catalysed them and even empowered them to accelerate the cloud journey.
This ended up with a complex hybrid or multi-cloud setup and a mix of cloud-native and traditional applications and complex security postures, so enterprises started looking to bring efficiency and speed to cloud-native security by adopting multiple tools like Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Service Network Security, and the evolution of managing these various tools by consolidating them led to Cloud-Native Application Platform (CNAPP).
CNAPP approach helps achieve visibility over multi-cloud and control over your application’s security risk.
What is a Cloud-Native Application?
A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is a security solution that’s specifically designed to support modern cloud-native applications. CNAPP combines various technologies and security best practices into a single system so that you can protect and monitor your cloud-based applications.
A Cloud-Native Application is designed to run across multiple servers in a distributed cloud environment. This distributed cloud environment is designed to be fail-safe, scalable, and highly available.
How does a Cloud-Native App Protection Platform work?
The best way to understand how a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform works is to break it down into the following three key components – scanning, monitoring, and protection.
Scanning: A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform will perform virtual scans of your cloud-native environment to identify any potential threats that could compromise your applications. These scans could consist of port scanning, vulnerability scanning, and even code analysis.
Monitoring: Once you’ve identified threats, you’ll want to know if or when they occur. A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform will monitor your cloud environment to see if any threats occur. It will do this by scanning your cloud environment once again and keeping track of any threats that are identified.
Protection: If a threat is detected, a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform can take action to reduce the risk of that threat. This action could involve terminating a malicious process, alerting you of the threat, or removing the threat entirely. Protection could also involve rerouting traffic to another server in the event of a server failure.
Which Components are Included in a CNAPP?
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms consist of the following three components – Security Gateway, Gateway, and Agents.
Security Gateway: Security gateway is the core component of a cloud-native application protection platform. It performs all the critical functions of this platform – including routing traffic, scanning content, detecting threats, and acting against these threats.
Gateway: Gateway is a critical component of a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform. It’s responsible for accepting incoming application traffic and routing it to the security gateway for inspection. In addition to routing traffic, the gateway also performs other critical functions – including compression, transformation, and decryption.
Agents: Agents are responsible for collecting and transmitting data from monitored Cloud-Native Applications to the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform. They do this by acting as a proxy between the two systems.
How to Implement the Principles of a CNAPP?
There are three key principles that every Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform should follow to be truly effective in protecting modern cloud-native applications. Security, Agility, and Automation.
Security: An effective Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform will use threat intelligence, anomaly detection, and machine learning to identify threats and take appropriate actions against them.
Agility: Agility is the ability of a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform to respond quickly to threats. This means that your security solution should be able to detect a threat, analyse the threat, and respond to it in a short amount of time.
Automation: Automation is the ability of a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform to respond to threats without human intervention. This means that your security solution should be able to detect threats and then automatically respond to them without anybody having to manually intervene.
Conclusion:
A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform is a security solution that’s designed to protect modern cloud-native applications. It’s composed of the following three key components – Security Gateway, Gateway, and Agents. It follows three key principles – Security, Agility, and Automation. It’s important for organizations to implement a true Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform to protect their Cloud-Native Applications from security threats.
