Frost & Sullivan’s Cloud User Survey 2022 shows that companies globally are increasingly moving to the cloud as part of their digital transformation journey. Companies see cloud and cloud-native technologies as vital tools to facilitate this transformation. Ongoing pandemic-related challenges include supply chain issues, worker shortages, and the continued need to respond to changing regulatory health and safety mandates. Businesses across industries, however, are moving forward, leveraging technology to rebuild customer relationships, automate and streamline business processes, and grow revenue. The cloud is an essential part of their strategies.
With the increase in cloud adoption, organizations are transforming how they build, operate, and manage back-end infrastructure and front-end customer-facing applications. In the cloud environment, organizations are increasingly using new technologies, such as infrastructure as code (IaC), serverless computing, functions-as-a-service, and containers and other continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms for cloud management application development and deployment. The CNCF Annual Survey shows that 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes (K8s), and 93% are either using or plan to use containers in production.
The increasing adoption of containers and K8s means that organizations are shifting from traditional monolithic application development to a microservice architecture and containerized approach, thereby leading to the increased use of open-source dependencies and libraries for application development.
The use of open-source software, libraries/dependencies, and registries, however, have introduced more security threats and concerns because these application artifacts remain vulnerable to cybersecurity issues, such as container image vulnerability, host security, code injection for serverless applications, and compliance issues.
In other words, the growing adoption of cloud-native application development platforms introduces new security challenges, making traditional security solutions obsolete and inadequate. This issue is driving organizations to seek cloud-native security solutions that can offer visibility into the cloud environment and workload behaviors and provide protection across the lifecycle, from designing and testing to runtime protection. As a result, organizations are now adopting cloud workload protection (CWP) solutions to gain visibility, manage vulnerabilities, and protect cloud workload runtime while increasing cloud services’ operational efficiency and complying with industry regulations.
Palo Alto Networks is a pioneer in the network security market. Over the last 5 years, the company has increased its cloud security offerings with several vital acquisitions, including Evident.io, Redlock, PureSec, Twistlock, and Aporeto. These acquisitions allow the company to broaden its Prisma Cloud security offerings that include container workload protection (CWPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), shift-left security, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), and cloud network security, to protect applications on hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Prisma Cloud provides vulnerability management and security for cloud applications and workloads throughout the development lifecycle and maintains compliance for containers. Prisma Cloud is powered by machine learning (ML) technology, enabling organizations to monitor and detect abnormal behaviors for runtime threats on any cloud-native stack for any cloud.
Furthermore, Prisma Cloud enables customers to build and maintain secure and reliable serverless applications with end-to-end security protection across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. The CWP module offers a full capability set for cloud host monitoring and protection, such as vulnerability assessment, compliance, access control, file integrity monitoring (FIM), application control, access control, and network visualization. Moreover, this module offers web application and to application programming interface (API) security, container image sandboxing, serverless security, and host security auto-protect, among others. Organizations, therefore, can protect container runtime, serverless functions, and other host compute resources against Layer 7 and Open Web Application Security Project® (OWASP) Top 10 threats in any public or private cloud. In addition, with built-in scanning capabilities, policy enforcement, and predictive and threat-based protection, Prisma Cloud shifts security left and delivers the assurance that cloud applications are highly secured.
Traditional CWP solutions mainly rely on an agent-based approach to provide protection to workloads. This approach, on one hand, provides many advantages in protecting hybrid workloads, hosts, VMs, and containers; however, agent-based CWP may not be suitable for the serverless environment and is not suitable for rapidly changing environments where scalability and flexible management are prioritized. As such, organizations are increasingly using both agent-based and agent-less solutions to maximize security and operation efficiency.
Palo Alto Networks has improved its platform by introducing agentless CWP capabilities to help organizations address challenges in serverless security while still leveraging agents to gain full visibility and enforce security policies in all workloads in different environments.
Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud offers a complete cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) built on any technology stack and any cloud platform and environment, such as public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud. Prisma Cloud provides customers with all the capabilities to manage cyber threats, from virtual machines and serverless applications to containers, containers-as-a-service, and containers on-demand, all delivered and managed from a single platform with unified management.
With the increasing popularity in its cloud security, Palo Alto Networks has maintained its robust growth momentum over the last few years for its Prisma Cloud platform and has gradually become the preferred choice for cloud-native security among global companies that have cloud deployments at scale, such as banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI); government agencies; telcos; and technology companies.
As a result, Palo Alto Networks has been named a leader in the Frost Radar: Cloud-native Application Protection Platforms 2022 and as Company of the Year Award for the Cloud Workload Protection category.
