RSA 2023 revealed a much-needed change in perception: cloud native security requires one integrated approach. Finally, a consensus.
If you care about cloud security, you care about the lifecycle of your cloud applications. This lifecycle has two fundamental parts: building applications and running them. To secure your applications you need to secure the entire application lifecycle from code to cloud, which means securing the dev environment (dev security) that build your applications and secure the workloads and infrastructure that runs them in production (cloud security).
Now, with those two parts of the application lifecycle there are two actions you will want to take. First, to be able to see what is going on across dev and cloud. How many containers are running, and where are they? How exposed are you to Log4j vulnerabilities? What plugins are supporting your Jenkins build process? Is your cloud account configured properly? These and many other questions can be answered with proper end-to-end visibility.
But security isn’t just about what you can see in dev and cloud. You also want to act on things – known and unknown – happening to your applications, you need the ability to stop those same bad things from happening in real time.
This simple illustration of your cloud native application world is driving consensus around what is predicted to be the largest security category in history: cloud native application protection platforms (CNAPP).
Here’s a visualization:
But these aren’t four disparate boxes. Quite the opposite. All of these pieces have to work together – in one simple cloud native security approach. And for the first time in cloud native security’s history, everyone can agree on the unification and integration. (Hooray!)
Horizontal integration: Dev and cloud are coming together.
You can’t just care about what’s happening in your cloud. In recent years, we’ve seen organizations increasingly adopt tools providing more visibility in the cloud. The market is embracing cloud security posture management tools (CSPM) – great! But what about software supply chain security? What about code and open source components? Organizations must scan the code and the software supply chain from the very left all the way to the cloud on the right.
You need to see the implications of dev decisions on your cloud, and when a problem is in the cloud, you need to be able to connect it in real time to a developer that can fix it. This is security from dev to cloud and back.
Vertical integration: See and stop.
Visibility is good, but it is just a first step. With the growing sophistication of cloud attacks, practitioners are starting to ask the right questions: “Am I protected from bad things happening to my cloud applications? Can I detect and stop an attack in real time if I need to?”
I sat in on dozens of customer meetings at RSA 2023 – enterprise customers across industries and geographies. The feedback was unanimous: cloud security needs to be one unified thing, and you must be able to see and stop attacks.
Driving a Consolidation of Tools
Given market conditions and the realization that cloud native security requires a single integrated approach, we will soon be seeing an increased consolidation of tools by our customers. We are not alone in this belief; Gartner expects customers to consolidate their CNAPP tools from 10 to 3 in a few short years.
Aqua brings to market the only end-to-end CNAPP that addresses all aspects of cloud native application security across all stages of the application delivery lifecycle.
Here’s a simple example: If we see a vulnerability in runtime, we connect the exact line of code where it occurred, pinpoint the developer and make a suggested pull request to fix the problem. We don’t have to wait for a snapshot to identify it tomorrow, instead we identify it immediately, connect the dots and suggest a remediation. It is amazing what you can do with a state-of-the-art sensor supporting agentless scanning. After all, remediation is better with the full application context.
Aqua is the only single security platform that can do this.
Sure, other vendors claim they can do this too. But it’s not the same. For example, traditional EDR vendors lack the software supply chain context and granularity Aqua provides for real time response to attacks. And other cloud native security vendors may be able to see everything happening in your cloud, but they can’t connect it to the code in your repo. We are the pioneers in cloud native security. Seven years ago, we were born in the cloud to protect cloud native applications, and we’ve never strayed from that mission.
We were named the Best Cloud Native Security Solution for a reason. And no, it’s not magic or wizardry. It’s because we are the Top Innovation Leader in CNAPP (as named by Frost & Sullivan Global Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform Report). It’s because we are singularly focused on solving our customers’ greatest challenges by connecting the dots to see and stop cloud native attacks in real time from dev to cloud and back.
