What are the top CNAPP benefits you should know about in 2025?
As cloud-native apps explode in scale and complexity, with containers, microservices, APIs, and more, even the most trusted security tools struggle to keep pace.
That’s why many organizations are adopting a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP). A CNAPP offers streamlined protection for a sprawling cloud environment while simplifying configuration and compliance. Offering razor-sharp visibility and built-in automation across the development lifecycle, a CNAPP is key to staying ahead in a cloud-first world.
Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
In this report, Gartner offers insights and recommendations to analyze and evaluate emerging CNAPP offerings.
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While CNAPP solutions vary greatly by vendor, most aim to integrate core capabilities like CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, and IaC scanning. However, the true value of a CNAPP lies in how deeply these capabilities are unified, correlated, and built to secure the entire cloud-native application lifecycle—from development through runtime.
But far beyond simplified code-to-cloud configuration and maintenance, organizations that adopt a CNAPP are discovering a range of benefits they hadn’t quite anticipated. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits you might not be expecting from a CNAPP solution.
Top 5 CNAPP benefits
By integrating critical functions like vulnerability scanning, configuration management, and identity security into a unified solution, a CNAPP provides holistic coverage of application risks, ensuring comprehensive protection across the entire cloud lifecycle and simplifying security management.
Let’s look at a few additional benefits…
1. Operational efficiency and tool consolidation
A CNAPP brings disparate cloud security tools—CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, and more—together in a unified platform. Managing all these functionalities from a single dashboard means security teams don’t have to switch between multiple interfaces and reduces the complexity of managing diverse security policies. It also lets them enforce uniform policies across different cloud providers.
But let’s not underestimate the operational efficiency you can gain simply by cutting tool sprawl.
Reducing tool sprawl simplifies security workflows, minimizes training needs, and lowers operational overhead. This frees up security teams to focus on strategic initiatives like risk prioritization, rather than juggling alerts from multiple point solutions.
The result? Faster incident response, improved security posture, more streamlined use of resources, and potential cost savings as well.
2. Shift-left security practices
With non-CNAPP enabled development workflows, vulnerabilities are often discovered late in the development cycle or even in production. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and container configuration scanning tools are “bolted on” to the process almost as an afterthought. This approach makes vulnerabilities costly and time-consuming to fix, while also driving up the risk of breaches (or product release delays).
A CNAPP embeds security throughout the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), from pre-deployment checks like IaC scanning to runtime workload protection after deployment. It’s built seamlessly into the tech stack your developers are already using, like Git repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and IDEs.
In this way, CNAPP shrinks the attack surface and minimizes rework, such as by detecting Kubernetes misconfigurations or vulnerable dependencies during the build process. This proactive approach not only improves security posture but also accelerates development cycles by avoiding delays caused by late-stage fixes.
3. Real-time threat detection and response
Cloud detection and response (CDR) is a set of security practices and technologies designed to identify and mitigate threats within cloud environments in real time.
Advanced CNAPPs extend their protection into real-time runtime monitoring and cloud-native detection and response capabilities, adding agentless, real-time visibility into complex cloud environments. This enables your security teams to monitor workloads, configurations, and network traffic with minimal performance impact. Advanced CNAPPs also include runtime protection capabilities, helping security teams detect lateral movement, suspicious runtime behavior, and zero-day exploits in cloud workloads—without adding agents or degrading performance.
And by combining behavioral analytics with correlated data from identities, networks, and workloads, a CNAPP provides context-rich, real-time insights into threats and attack paths.
That means you get faster response times, stopping threats in their tracks. For example, a CNAPP can instantly alert on unauthorized access attempts or unusual data exfiltration. And with response playbooks in place, a CNAPP can trigger automated response actions to cut the blast radius and safeguard sensitive data while maintaining business continuity.
4. Contextual risk prioritization
For many users, the greatest benefit of using a CNAPP is its contextual risk prioritization. Instead of offering isolated data points from siloed security tools, CNAPP tools combine identity, network, and workload context into a unified analysis.
With a CNAPP correlating data from these diverse sources, you get a holistic view of any potential threats. And when your security teams understand the relationships between users, applications, and infrastructure, they have everything they need to assess the true impact and likelihood of a security incident and focus on the most critical security issues while avoiding the noise of low-priority alerts.
This is truly an example of the whole being far more than the sum of its parts. You’re not just adding up the protection from one tool with the protection from another tool—you’re multiplying their effects together for a deeper, more resilient approach. You’ll usually wind up with fewer alerts, and more meaningful alerts too.
For example, a CNAPP can prioritize a vulnerability based on the sensitivity of the data it affects, the user's access level, and the network segment it resides in.
When your security teams are addressing the most pressing threats, they can minimize risk and make security operations more effective.
5. Compliance and governance
Compliance and governance can be a big headache. A CNAPP can minimize the risk of misconfigurations that can lead to costly breaches and regulatory penalties.
How can a CNAPP simplify compliance and governance?
First, by enforcing standardized policies and cloud security best practices across diverse cloud environments. This lets you take a proactive approach and…
Establish a strong security baseline
Ensure consistent security configurations
Enforce internal standards
Streamline audit processes
But the CNAPP approach doesn’t stop there. You’ll also get continuous compliance monitoring with a range of standard and custom regulatory standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR. This ongoing assessment will alert you to any deviations and guide compliance teams to restore compliance as quickly as possible—which also helps maintain a strong security and compliance posture.
Get a handle on your complex, evolving cloud—with Wiz Cloud
To fully realize these CNAPP benefits, you need a platform that was purpose-built for cloud-native security—one that unifies visibility, prioritization, and automation. That’s where Wiz Cloud comes in."
Designed for cloud-native application protection, Wiz Cloud is built for the complex and continually changing nature of modern cloud environments.
With agentless scanning and the Wiz Security Graph, Wiz Cloud quickly and comprehensively shows you interconnections between various cloud components so you can home in on complex attack paths and toxic risk combinations that traditional solutions may miss.
Wiz also integrates directly with developer tools and workflows, promoting shift-left security practices and allowing for automated remediation, which is essential for handling the speed and scale of cloud-native applications.
Wiz Cloud is consistently ranked as a leader in the CNAPP space thanks to its ability to help your security and development teams hurdle a wide range of security challenges. Here’s what Wiz Cloud gives you, all from a single, easy-to-manage dashboard:
Unified, agentless visibility: Wiz Cloud bridges the complexity of multi-cloud, rapidly mapping your entire cloud environment and its interconnections, eliminating blind spots with API-driven scanning.
Contextual risk prioritization: To tame the flood of alerts and prioritize all your security efforts, Wiz Cloud correlates diverse risk factors and provides visual attack path mapping.
Integrated security platform: Cut tool sprawl and operational overhead by consolidating CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, DSPM, and ASPM for streamlined security management.
Automated remediation & developer-friendly security: Wiz Cloud shifts security left, empowering developers with self-service risk management and automated workflows that work with their existing tech stack.
Real-time threat detection & data protection: Slash your window of exposure to threats and protect sensitive data with runtime workload protection and continuous sensitive data discovery and protection.
Don’t let cloud complexity slow you down. See how Wiz Cloud helps you simplify cloud security while scaling your DevSecOps maturity—get your personalized demo now.
