The importance of Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) solutions
Organizations can only take full advantage of the cloud if they build applications that leverage its full capabilities. A shift-left approach to cloud adoption – where applications designed to run on-premises are simply copied to the cloud – can result in an expensive and low-performing cloud deployment.
As developers leverage cloud workloads as part of DevOps development cycles, applications are built and deployed quickly with little regard for security. At the same time, these applications are often public-facing and deployed over multiple cloud environments, making them difficult to monitor and secure.
CWPP is important because it provides a scalable, low-friction solution for implementing cloud workload protection. CWPP solutions can help to mitigate the impacts of poor security practices during the rapid development cycles common in DevOps.
How does Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) work?
A Cloud Workload Protection Platform solution discovers workloads that exist within an organization’s cloud-based deployments and on-premises infrastructure. Once these workloads have been discovered, the solution will perform a vulnerability assessment to identify any potentially exploitable security issues with the workload based on defined security policies and known vulnerabilities.
Based on the results of the vulnerability scan, the CWPP solution should provide the option to implement security controls to fix the identified issues. This can include solutions such as implementing allowlists, integrity protection, and similar solutions.
In addition to addressing the security issues identified in vulnerability assessments, Cloud Workload Protection Platform solutions should also provide protection against common security threats to cloud and on-premises workloads. This includes runtime protection, malware detection and remediation, and network segmentation.
Benefits of Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)
As CWPP solutions are designed to meet the security requirements of cloud-based and on-prem workloads, they provide a number of benefits to organizations using them to secure their applications, including:
- Agility: Cloud Workload Protection Platform solutions are designed to integrate into DevOps CI/CD pipelines, allowing them to be automatically configured to secure applications developed using workloads. This allows developers to integrate security into DevOps practices without adding unnecessary overhead.
- Flexibility: One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is the ability to scale resources up and down on demand. CWPPs are cloud-based, enabling organizations to achieve the same level of flexibility with regard to application and workload security.
- Cost: Cloud solution flexibility and usage-based billing enables significant cost savings compared to physical appliances in on-prem environments. As a cloud-based solution, CWPP offers similar levels of cost savings.
- Security: Workloads differ from traditional on-prem applications, meaning that they also have unique security requirements and concerns. Cloud Workload Protection Platform solutions enable an organization to easily deploy tailored security controls that provide the level of visibility that these cloud workloads require and protect them against common security threats.
- Visibility: Multi-cloud deployments can be complex and difficult to monitor and manage due to the variety of vendor-specific environments that they contain. With CWPP, an organization can implement a single solution across all environments and use network segmentation to achieve deeper visibility into traffic flows across its cloud-based and on-prem infrastructure.
- Compliance: Data protection regulations mandate that organizations implement certain security controls to properly protect the sensitive data in their possession. CWPP solutions will automatically scan for vulnerabilities and compliance violations that place this protected data at risk and will implement security controls to meet compliance requirements.
CWPP and CSPM
CWPP and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions are both designed to improve the cybersecurity of cloud environments. In fact, CSPM is a critical part of CWPP.
A CSPM is designed to address the widespread issue of cloud security misconfigurations. It scans cloud environments for improperly configured security settings or ones that violate corporate security policies or regulatory compliance requirements.
CWPP is designed to provide comprehensive and targeted protection for workloads on-prem or in the cloud. CSPM fits into this because securing the workload means securing the application, and ensuring correct configuration is an essential part of application security.
Implementing Cloud Workload Protection with Check Point
As organizations increasingly embrace cloud computing, cloud workload security solutions become a vital component of a corporate security strategy. Companies need tools that provide automated, end-to-end protection for their workloads, which simplify the process of achieving and maintaining compliance in the cloud, and also offers complete security from development to runtime.
CloudGuard Workload Protection provides an end-to-end solution for securing an organization’s serverless and containerized cloud native applications. To learn more about CloudGuard Workload Protection’s capabilities, sign up for a free demo of Check Point’s serverless security solutions. You’re also welcome to try it out for yourself with a free trial.
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