Frost Radar™: Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, 2023

Frost Radar™: Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, 2023

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Cloud computing is the new norm in the business landscape, offering a range of cloud models and services that simplify IT infrastructure and drive digital transformation. However, cloud migration brings along a host of new attack vectors and cyber risks, leaving organizations vulnerable to insecure cloud connections, misconfigurations, identity theft, unauthorized access, and attacks targeting cloud servers, workloads, applications, code, and APIs. Zero-day vulnerabilities, exploits, and sophisticated malware amplify the risks.

Open-cloud environments present lucrative opportunities for attackers to exploit traditional techniques such as phishing, business email compromise, and zero-day vulnerabilities. Cloud servers, container images, and serverless applications frequently become targets of such attacks, impacting industries including finance, healthcare, education, retail, technology, manufacturing, energy, real estate, and transportation.

Adopting modern cloud-native technologies, such as containers/Kubernetes and serverless functions, introduces additional security challenges due to their inherent complexity and vulnerabilities. Each of these technologies can serve as a potential attack vector, increasing the susceptibility of the cloud environment to infiltration and compromise. Consequently, customers are compelled to manually correlate risks across disparate tools, which leads to operational complexity and increased security challenges. While using open-source software in the development process offers benefits like source code access, cost savings, flexibility, and community support, it also introduces unique risks, such as container image vulnerabilities, code injection, credential loss, and compliance issues.

The complexity of cloud environments, with dynamic and distributed architectures involving multiple workload technologies and services, underlines the critical drivers for the adoption of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP). As the cloud becomes a hub for rapid innovation, organizations are empowering developers with contextual risk information, enabling quick understanding and remediation of critical security issues. Multi-cloud architectures amplify security concerns, while compliance mandates remain a strong motivator for adopting CNAPPs that provide comprehensive coverage and compliance capabilities.

Consolidation and convergence will become mainstream in the next few years as organizations focus more on streamlining security operations to reduce the total cost of ownership and increase efficiency. Organizations seek broader capabilities to provide them with visibility and security from build to production and across DevOps, DevSecOps, and cloud infrastructure.

This creates more requirements for CNAPP solutions covering the entire stack (code, application, workload, and infrastructure) to help them achieve a holistic security strategy and reach a zero-trust security state across different cloud environments.

Organizations are now seeking to streamline their toolsets and simplify security operations. They recognize the value of the contextual risk assessment that CNAPPs provide. Customers are increasingly interested in harnessing the full capabilities of CNAPPs instead of focusing solely on basic functionalities such as cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection platform, infrastructure as code scanning, and container security. A comprehensive CNAPP offers a proactive approach to tackling emerging threats and securing cloud-native applications against various vulnerabilities. This includes addressing misconfigurations, network and identity exposures, lateral movement paths, app and host misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure.

In a ?eld of more than 30 global CNAPP industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted in this Frost Radar™ analysis the top 17 companies that excelled in growth and ability to drive visionary innovation in the past year. Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to reveal their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™, considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.