Gartner’s 2023 “Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms” (CNAPP) caused some security leaders to question whether they need yet another tool to protect the complex beast that is the cloud. Procuring yet another shiny security product is probably not how you earn the envy of your peers, but if your organization relies on shipping secure applications fast, then CNAPP should be on your radar. What exactly is CNAPP?

The adoption of cloud native applications has become a necessity for organizations to run their businesses efficiently. As per Gartner, more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025, which will rely on adopting cloud native applications for complete execution. The massive increase in adoption of cloud native applications has given rise to more security challenges such as container image vulnerabilities, configuration errors and a larger runtime attack surface.

As containerized applications become increasingly complex, it can be challenging to design and execute an effective container security strategy. With the growing trend towards cloud-based applications and services, cyber criminals are also evolving their attack techniques, making container security solutions more critical than ever. Calico provides robust detection capabilities to detect known and zero-day container and network-based attacks.

In today’s fast-paced software development environment, developers often use common public libraries and modules to quickly build applications. However, this presents a significant challenge for DevOps teams who must ensure that these applications are safe to use.

Kubescape is an open-source, CNCF sandbox, end-to-end Kubernetes security tool designed to assess the security posture of Kubernetes clusters created by ARMO. It helps identify security risks and misconfigurations that could potentially be exploited by attackers, and provides automatic assistance to remediate them. Kubescape was launched less than two years ago, in August 2021, and already has more than 8.3K stars on GitHub, and over 100 open-source contributors.

Kubernetes, and containerization in general, has a wealth of benefits for many teams operating cloud-native applications. From a threat detection standpoint, however, it is often difficult for newcomers to this space to gain the relevant hands-on experience without trampling over production environments. The Sumo Logic team has previously authored articles on Kubernetes DevSecOps vulnerabilities and best practices as well as Kubernetes logging and monitoring.

Organizations can reduce security risks in containerized applications by actively managing vulnerabilities through scanning, automated image deployment, tracking runtime risk and deploying mitigating controls to reduce risk Kubernetes and containers have become de facto standards for cloud-native application development due to their ability to accelerate the pace of innovation and codify best practices for production deployments, but such acceleration can introduce risk if not operationalized properly.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform that enables the management of containerized applications with ease. The platform is portable and flexible, working across various environments, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows.