CNAPP vs. CASB: What’s the difference?

What is a CNAPP? (And Why It’s Replacing Legacy Cloud Security)

What is a CNAPP?

A cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a security solution that unifies many different tools, capabilities, and offerings. Unlike standalone cloud security products, CNAPPs are considered to be all-in-one end-to-end solutions. Basically, a CNAPP is everything that you could possibly need for cloud security in one single platform.

Instead of shoehorning legacy security solutions into cloud environments, organizations have begun to appreciate the need for cloud-native security options or security that was built for the cloud. That’s exactly what a CNAPP offers and why it’s so important today.

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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Gartner says that by 2027, 6 out of 10 businesses without CNAPPs won’t have visibility into their cloud attack surface, which is a serious risk. It’s concerns like this that are driving the surge in CNAPP adoption: By 2027, the global CNAPP market will touch $19.3 billion at a compound annual growth rate of almost 20%. These numbers tell us that more and more companies are working to unlock the cloud advantages that a strong CNAPP can provide.

Figure 1: CNAPP, as anatomized by Gartner

Some examples of the kinds of tools woven into CNAPPs include:

CNAPP tool	Purpose
Cloud security posture management (CSPM)	To tackle cloud misconfigurations
Data security posture management (DSPM)	To provide visibility and fortifications for sensitive enterprise data
Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP)	To secure hosts, virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)	To right-size permissions and access controls across the cloud
AI security posture management (AI-SPM)	To secure AI models, prompts, data pipelines, and APIs used in cloud-native AI workloads
Cloud detection and response (CDR)	To find and fix anomalies and incidents before they become disasters

What are the benefits of CNAPPs?

Next, let’s take a look at four benefits that really stand out:

1. Cloud security under one roof: CNAPPs bring together a wide variety of previously disparate cloud security tools into a unified platform. No more cloud security silos, blind spots, collaboration bottlenecks, and fractured security workflows.

2. Swift cloud incident response: CNAPPs offer more visibility and context than isolated tools, making it easier for security teams to proactively red-flag suspicious behaviors, spot indicators of compromise, and quickly remediate events.

3. Code-to-cloud coverage: CNAPPs can extend your security from codebases and developer environments to runtime environments.

Figure 2: Wiz’s coverage extends from source code to runtime

4. Cloud cost reduction: CNAPPs consolidate multiple tools, and you don’t have to pay for individual capabilities. You’ll also save money by avoiding data breaches and compliance fines.

What is a CASB? And Why It Still Matters for SaaS Security

What is a CASB?

A cloud access security broker (CASB) is a security solution that’s positioned between SaaS users / their devices and cloud services to activate security controls, protect sensitive data, and mitigate dangerous data risks. CASBs can also be used as an intermediary between on-premises and cloud environments, to ensure that sensitive data is ported securely between the two. The policy-driven capabilities of CASBs empower enterprises to enforce strong governance, unveil shadow IT, and address data risks like leakage, loss, and theft.

As of 2024, the global CASB market was worth $9.44 billion, and the projected compound annual growth rate between now and 2030 is 18.3%. The bottom line? As long as businesses keep moving toward cloud services and using a variety of SaaS and IaaS applications, CASB tools will be a part of security stacks.

With CASB solutions, you can filter cloud network traffic between users and cloud services based on predefined rules and policies. For example, you can use a CASB solution to enforce zero-trust security policies and rules including:

Data encryption
User authentication
User authorization
Data tokenization
Malware protection via web application firewalls

What are the benefits of CASBs?

Now that we’ve got a handle on what a CASB is, let’s see how the following benefits—often referred to as CASB’s four pillars—help companies.

Cloud data security: CASBs help keep sensitive data in cloud networks safe by managing access with strong policies and features like data loss prevention (DLP).
Visibility: CASBs provide deep visibility into cloud environments, which is especially important because of the rise of multi-cloud architectures and complex shared responsibility models. CASBs provide visibility through user monitoring mechanisms and access logs.
Compliance: CASBs help satisfy regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA by ensuring that only select users can access sensitive cloud data. CASBs also provide audit trails to find instances of suspicious access requests and activities.
Threat protection: CASBs can pinpoint and intercept dangerous payloads, which often include malware (as seen in the recent Bumblebee malware campaign). They make sure that every single file that’s shared across cloud networks is scanned and vetted for malware and other threats.

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Shifting from CWPP to CNAPP: new standards for cloud security

CNAPP vs. CASB: How do they compare?

CNAPPs were built to solve the growing cloud-native workload and infrastructure security challenge, while CASBs emerged to solve shadow IT and SaaS governance problems. Fundamentally, both solutions protect IT environments from malicious threats and help you establish cloud security best practices, which means there are overlaps in tooling and capabilities.

Let’s see how they differ:

Focus

CNAPPs tackle the entire spectrum of cloud-native security across the application development lifecycle and beyond, including cloud workloads, data, AI, entitlements, configuration settings, policies, and compliance.
CASBs zero in on access to cloud environments and data. These solutions are like sentinels stationed in front of cloud entry points, making sure that nothing malicious comes through. The main focus is data security, access management, and threat detection.

Core capabilities

Not all CNAPPs are equal, but high-end CNAPPs feature capabilities like CIEM, CSPM, AI-SPM, vulnerability management, API protection, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning, container and Kubernetes security, and DSPM. CNAPPs are often highly integrable, so you can easily attach extra tools and capabilities, including CI/CD, SAST/DAST, MDR, SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing.
Homing in on SaaS security, specifically access protection and data security, CASBs feature capabilities like user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), URL filtering, cloud asset discovery, data security tools, and compliance guardrails.

Operationalization

CNAPPs are purpose-built for the cloud, meaning that they’re deployed straight into cloud environments.
Unlike CNAPPs, CASBs are positioned between cloud environments and the outside world. They are checkpoints that police who accesses cloud environments; what they do there; and whether their behaviors are safe, compliant, and in line with cloud security best practices. Many CASBs operate using API-based or proxy-based architectures, which impacts how they integrate into cloud environments.

CNAPP vs. CASB: A quick reference guide

	CNAPP	CASB
Definition	CNAPPs are cloud-native security solutions that businesses can use to protect every part of their cloud estate.	CASBs are gateways between users and devices and cloud environments.
Objective	These cloud-native security solutions are designed to secure IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services; strengthen the overall cloud security posture; and keep threats at bay.	These intermediary security solutions are designed to secure the adoption of SaaS services via governance, visibility, and data security.
Focus	Workloads Data AI resources Entitlements Configurations Compliance Containers and Kubernetes	Data security Access management Threat detection Compliance Cloud visibility and asset discovery
Core capabilities	CIEM CSPM AI-SPM Vulnerability management API security IaC scanning Container and Kubernetes security DSPM	UEBA URL filtering Cloud asset discovery DLP Data encryption Compliance policies
Operationalization	CNAPPs are installed directly into enterprise cloud estates.	CASBs operate as intermediaries—deployed via APIs for sanctioned apps or inline proxies for real-time control—positioned between users and cloud services.

Do you need a CNAPP, a CASB, or both?

Most modern organizations benefit from a CNAPP, a CASB, or both—but which you need depends on where your cloud risks live.

If you're securing cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications, a CNAPP should be your foundation. It offers deeper context, broader coverage, and tighter integration across the cloud development lifecycle. It’s built for environments where workloads, permissions, and infrastructure scale rapidly—and where misconfigurations or exposed assets can lead to high-impact breaches.

CASBs, meanwhile, remain valuable in SaaS-heavy environments where shadow IT, data sharing, and user behavior are harder to control. They’re especially useful for enforcing DLP policies and monitoring risky activity across apps like Google Workspace, Salesforce, or Microsoft 365.

In many cases, the two tools are complementary. If your CNAPP includes capabilities like CIEM and DSPM, you may find it covers a growing share of traditional CASB use cases—particularly around entitlement mapping, sensitive data detection, and compliance tracking—even within major SaaS platforms.

The bottom line: start with what aligns to your biggest risks, then fill the remaining gaps. For many cloud-first orgs, CNAPPs now provide the clearest path to unified, scalable security.

While CNAPPs like Wiz primarily focus on cloud-native workloads and infrastructure, they also offer overlapping capabilities with CASBs—especially in areas like entitlement visibility, sensitive data protection, and compliance monitoring across SaaS platforms. This overlap can help reduce the need for multiple siloed tools.

Why Wiz Is the Only CNAPP You’ll Need for Cloud-Native Security

Wiz CNAPP sums up what’s important about cloud-native security. It's a unified and comprehensive solution that includes everything from CSPM and DSPM to vulnerability management and AI-SPM.

Figure 3: Wiz CNAPP: As all-in-one as you can get

Wiz CNAPP makes the mitigation of today’s cloud-native security issues a whole lot easier. Whether you need to identify and remediate new threats, enforce cloud security best practices, or achieve code-to-cloud coverage, Wiz provides simple and easy fixes to complex problems.

Ready to see for yourself? Get a demo to explore the game-changing capabilities of Wiz CNAPP.

Main takeaways from CNAPP vs CASB: