Until recently, cloud security posture management (CSPM) was the go-to solution in cloud security. And while CSPM is still critical, it doesn’t deliver the dynamic, proactive state of security that can be achieved with a CNAPP. This is because CSPM is limited to static security insights based solely on the security posture of your cloud workloads.

By contrast, CNAPP can integrate your most critical cloud security platforms (including CSPM itself) under a single umbrella. This allows it to cross-reference information across workloads, virtual machines, code scanning, infrastructure, and more to deliver deeper security insights.

For instance, consider the example of two storage accounts that are exposed to the internet. One has confidential company information stored on it, the other contains harmless text files. If you only examine the storage accounts from one dimension, then you’d assume it was equally important to protect both accounts. However, what if you had 200 storage accounts rather than just two? How would you prioritize them then?

For security teams that are already struggling with an ongoing workforce shortage, having an automated way to prioritize security recommendations based on their potential impact on the business could be the difference between remediating a vulnerability before it becomes an incident or overlooking the warning signs for the next big company breach. And because CNAPPs offer end-to-end visibility across your entire cloud estate, they can also proactively identify and disrupt potential attack paths before adversaries ever have a chance to exploit them. This level of insight simply is not possible when you’re operating under a network of siloed security tools.

Why implement a CNAPP in your environment?

In addition to enabling proactive security through prioritized insights and disrupting potential attack paths, CNAPPs serve a number of other functions. For example, CNAPPs act as a guardrail to enforce security best practices during the application development stage and encourage better collaboration between developers and security teams.

Some CNAPPs can even leverage a combination of agentless and agent-based protections to deliver robust, flexible, and immediate protection. As soon as a resource is onboarded, agentless security begins scanning the resource and providing insights. Then, a software agent can be installed at a later date depending on the resource’s potential risk factor to deliver real-time threat protection and more comprehensive monitoring. This ensures that there’s no open window of time when adversaries could compromise a new resource before it’s been fully onboarded. At Microsoft, we also leverage the power of our 65 trillion daily threat signals to equip our CNAPP with the latest attack vectors and threat intelligence.

For CISOs specifically, though, CNAPPs provide a bird’s eye view of their security state across multiple workloads. Not only can CISOs leverage this visibility to monitor their security posture from code all the way to runtime, but they can also identify overarching trends on the types of attacks their company is experiencing, how frequently incidents are occurring, their team’s response time for mitigating threats, and more. In doing so, they ultimately drive a more secure cloud state for all.

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