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CNAPP vs. CSPM: What’s the Difference?

As organizations scale in the cloud, managing security across complex, dynamic, and distributed environments is challenging, making it crucial to select the ideal cloud security tool.

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Cloud-native security tools comparison

Organizations have their choice of cloud security tools, with two popular options being cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP).

CSPM protects cloud environments by continuously monitoring for risks like misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, while CNAPP is an end-to-end solution that secures applications across their entire lifecycle. CNAPP includes CSPM, alongside additional technologies like cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), vulnerability management, threat detection, and risk prioritization.

Let’s look at CNAPP vs. CSPM, how they differ, and how to choose the right cloud security solution for your organization.

What is CSPM?

Cloud security posture management continuously monitors for risks, misconfigurations, compliance issues, and vulnerabilities in cloud environments. With CSPM, organizations can identify and then manually address risks to improve their cloud hygiene.

CSPM tools help security teams speed up and automate security workflows to find and remediate cloud security risks. As organizations expand their cloud environment to include more complex deployments like multi-cloud and hybrid, CSPM tools can create a comprehensive risk assessment inventory. This provides real-time visibility into all cloud environments so risks are discovered and remediated quickly.

A CSPM solution works by creating rules to discover risks and vulnerabilities. It can continuously scan all cloud environments for risks depending on the rules, and then assign each one a level of prioritization. Modern CSPMs can use runtime insights to understand the context behind each risk, so security teams aren’t inundated with alerts. CSPMs can remediate some risks automatically, but will need security team assistance with others.

CSPM features include pre-developed policies (with the ability to create custom ones), agentless scanning and detection, multi-domain correlation, attack path analysis, and vulnerability prioritization.

Organizations of all sizes should consider CSPM solutions as a way to monitor and manage maturing cloud environments.

What is CNAPP?

Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) are a comprehensive cloud security solution for the entire application lifecycle. It integrates top cloud tools into one end-to-end platform.

Rather than adopting several disparate cloud security tools, CNAPP solutions integrate them into one platform, including CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, vulnerability management, and threat detection.

CNAPP helps organizations secure complex cloud environments that include containers, serverless computing, multi-cloud, and more. These platforms often include artificial intelligence capabilities to speed up risk and threat detection and response.

Adopting this cloud security solution helps limit tool sprawl, visibility gaps, and compliance challenges. With CNAPP, organizations can shift security left, introducing security measures and controls earlier into the software development lifecycle.

CNAPP solutions can utilize an agentless or agent-based approach to monitor and discover risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Some solutions use a combination of the two approaches to get real-time information of cloud workloads while collecting telemetry to provide context around suspicious or malicious behavior.

Some CNAPP offerings have additional capabilities alongside CSPM, CWPP, and others, including:

What are the key differences between CNAPP and CSPM?

To better quickly understand the key differences between CSPM and CNAPP solutions, use the following table.

Feature CSPM CNAPP
Monitor and remediate cloud configuration, and compliance risks and issues. Comprehensive cloud security platform for the entire application lifecycle.
Primary scope Automates security workflows for configuration and risk discovery, while providing gap visibility in cloud infrastructure. Provides an end-to-end cloud security solution that protects cloud-native environments and application workloads, like containers, serverless, etc.
Key capabilities Continuous security posture visibility into cloud environments for risks, misconfigurations, and compliance issues. CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, KSPM, runtime protection, IaC, container scanning, and vulnerability management.
Integration with cloud security tools Stand-alone tool that can integrate with other cloud security tools for visibility into security posture, and find risk and compliance gaps. Incorporates CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, and more into one security platform to protect the applications and ephemeral workloads.
Ideal deployment scenario Any organization requiring configuration and risk management. Mature organizations that require cloud and application security.
Primary users Cloud security and compliance teams DevSecOps, security, compliance, and platform engineering teams

Which to choose: CNAPP vs. CSPM

CSPM and CNAPP both help organizations secure their cloud environments, with CSPM focusing on visibility into risks and misconfigurations, while CNAPP protects workloads and applications with a shift-left mindset.

Since CNAPP includes CSPM capabilities, it may seem like the cloud security platform is the best tool to adopt. But there’s more to it than that. Organizations need to understand their security needs and CNAPP might be more than is initially needed.

To determine which cloud security tool is the ideal fit, organizations should determine their needs, challenges, and cloud maturity. 

CSPM works best for organizations earlier in their cloud journey that need to ensure risks, compliance issues, and misconfigurations are discovered and remediated quickly. Continuous monitoring for these enables organizations to maintain security posture and protect their cloud infrastructure as it matures.

CNAPP is ideal for more cloud-mature organizations that run workloads in the cloud through containers, Kubernetes orchestration tools, and serverless computing. This platform embeds security into the development process early to keep applications secure during their entire lifecycle. The dynamic and ephemeral nature of cloud workloads requires organizations to be able to quickly identify and remediate risks, misconfigurations, and threats.

CSPM is a good first cloud security tool for an organization still determining its cloud infrastructure and workload usage. Meanwhile, CNAPP can be thought of as an evolution of CSPM for organizations ready to use more cloud-native applications and workloads.

CSPM or CNAPP: Sysdig has you covered

No matter your organization’s current cloud maturity and cloud security needs, Sysdig has an option for you. It’s time to do cloud security the right way. Learn about agentic cloud security here.

Sysdig’s CSPM solution helps organizations fix what matters most. You get a cloud security tool that identifies and prioritizes risks in the cloud. Understand exactly where potential exposures exist within your cloud environment to maintain compliance and reduce your attack surface.

Sysdig’s CNAPP solution helps reduce the operational burden, high costs, and potential attack surface gaps that develop when using multiple disparate cloud security tools. Our CNAPP offering enables organizations to break down data siloes to understand the entire cloud environment, keep business-critical data and applications secure, and outpace threat actors.

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