Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2024

Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2024

A Benchmarking System to Spark Companies to Action - Innovation that Fuels New Deal Flow and Growth Pipelines

Cloud computing has become a pivotal element in the modern business paradigm, offering diverse cloud models and services that streamline IT infrastructure and drive digital transformation. The transition to cloud computing introduces a huge number of new cyber risks and attack vectors, leaving organizations susceptible to a variety of cybersecurity risks and threats, including insecure cloud connections, misconfigurations, identity theft, unauthorized access, and attacks on cloud servers, workloads, applications, code, and APIs.

Embracing cloud-native technologies, such as containers/Kubernetes (K8s) and serverless functions, introduces further security challenges due to their inherent complexity and vulnerabilities. Each of these technologies presents potential attack vectors, increasing the cloud environment's susceptibility to infiltration and compromise. Consequently, organizations must manually correlate risks across disparate tools, leading to operational complexity and heightened security challenges. While the use of open-source software in the development process provides benefits such as access to source code, cost savings, flexibility, and community support, it also introduces unique risks, including vulnerabilities in container images, code injection, credential loss, and compliance issues.

The increasing complexity of cloud environments, particularly hybrid and multicloud, characterized by dynamic and distributed architectures involving multiple workload technologies and services, is also prompting organizations to equip their developers with contextual risk information to gain visibility and facilitate quick understanding and remediation of critical security issues. With this cloud boom, companies are changing how they build, run, and manage both internal systems and the applications customers use. This means embracing technologies like infrastructure as code, serverless computing, containers, and tools for automating software development and deployment.

However, using a mix of cloud environments and these modern technologies, along with the expanding attack surfaces and security operational complexities, presents significant security challenges as each technology introduces specific security considerations and vulnerabilities.

This situation is creating more opportunities for cloud security technologies, including cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) because of the need to secure workloads and applications running in these cloud environments. CWPPs offer comprehensive visibility and consistent security policies across different platforms, which is crucial for maintaining security without compromising operational flexibility.

From a ?eld of more than 45 global CWPP industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted in this Frost Radar™ analysis the top 20 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.