What is Cloud Native Security?

What Is Cloud‑Native Security?

Cloud-native security is a holistic security strategy or practice that bakes security into your entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). It helps developers design products based on cloud-native principles, products that are secure. Every design decision in the cloud-native architecture is accounted for and the goal is to write secure code. However, it’s not just the coding but development, deployment, distribution, and production after that matters as well. Cloud-native security platforms are going to become mainstays in every organization pretty soon.

Cloud-native security bundles technologies, tools, workflows, and practices that address the growing and complex needs of modern cloud environments. And these needs are changing every day as we speak, so these tools also evolve to keep up with them. Implementing cloud-native security should be the first thing any organization should do, especially if they share or collaborate with resources online.

This approach marks a shift from traditional security methods designed for static apps to security techniques tailored for the cloud’s ephemeral environment where resources are spun up, scaled or deleted at the drop of a hat.

Cloud-native applications comprise a variety of loosely connected resources—such as containers, databases, microservices, Kubernetes orchestration platforms, APIs, and serverless architectures—that a single security tool cannot cover. As such, cloud-native cybersecurity unites a broad range of security tools, including CSPM, CWPP, and IaC solutions, into one cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to safeguard cloud resources from threats using cloud-native security measures.

Protecting cloud-native software will include security measures like:

• Implementing secure API gateways between microservices
• Regularly scanning container images for vulnerabilities
• Encrypting data in transit and at rest
• Using runtime protection to detect and respond to threats in real-time

These measures, and more, address the unique security challenges of distributed, containerized architectures, ensuring that each component of the application is protected while maintaining the flexibility and scalability benefits of the cloud-native design.

Importance of Cloud-Native Security

As businesses increasingly depend on cloud-native apps, they are faced with new and complex security concerns ranging from data theft and exposure to DDoS risks and more. Cloud-native security integrates security into the software development process to address these risks. Cloud-native security platforms offer real-time threat and anomaly detection capabilities specifically designed for cloud-native infrastructure, ensuring proactive and adaptive security.

They speed up incident response by providing actionable recommendations for issues detected.  When AI and ML capabilities are integrated into these platforms, they automate security risk prediction and response.

Additionally, cloud-native security platforms enforce strict access control policies, safeguard secrets, and implement encryption, thereby ensuring cloud-native data security and preventing unauthorized access and manipulation. They also help organizations in various industries maintain compliance with the requisite regulatory standards including GDPR, PCI DSS, DORA, and more.

Consider a healthcare organization transitioning to a cloud-native electronic health record (EHR) system. Cloud-native security is critical here for:

• Ensuring patient data confidentiality and integrity
• Maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA
• Protecting against ransomware attacks that could disrupt critical healthcare services
• Enabling secure access for healthcare providers across multiple locations

This example illustrates how cloud-native security is not just about protecting data, but also about ensuring the continuity of essential services and maintaining trust with customers and regulatory bodies.

CNAPP Market Guide

Get key insights on the state of the CNAPP market in this Gartner Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms.

Read Guide

Key Elements of Cloud-Native Security

Before security, operations, and development teams can roll out more effective cloud-native security solutions, they need to first get a handle on the key elements involved. These include:

• Inventory and classification: You can’t protect what you can’t see. Having an accurate inventory and proper classification of all assets is crucial to ensure security teams can identify any potential vulnerabilities across the software stack.
• Compliance management: It’s important that systems are built to consistently meet industry and legal regulations. This means sticking to standard configurations, security best practices, and using trusted registries to stay compliant.
• Network security: Securing assets and network traffic requires analyzing all traffic flows. The goal here is to make sure that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your systems and information stay intact.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) security: Limiting cloud access to the right individuals is a must. This includes activities like access governance, privileged monitoring, and user behavior analytics (UEBA) powered by machine learning.
• Data security: Protecting stored data involves classifying it correctly, preventing data loss, and scanning for malware in cloud storage.
• Vulnerability management: You’ll need to keep an eye on vulnerabilities throughout the entire application lifecycle. This includes continuously monitoring all hosts, images, and functions in the cloud.
• Workload security: Every workload in the cloud needs protection. This improves visibility across workloads and should include vulnerability scanning and runtime security.
• Automated investigation and response: Ideally, your security tools should offer automatic remediation, integrate with your security operations center (SOC), and work with third-party tools when necessary.
• Cloud-native incident response: Given the distributed nature of the cloud and the expansive attack surface due to the presence of numerous microservices, workloads, and shadow IT, a cloud-native incident detection and response system will help you manage and respond to attacks more effectively.

Key Components of Cloud‑Native Security

Here are the key components of a cloud-native security architecture:

CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, CASB

CSPM is cloud security posture management and it’s a practice that involves monitoring, detecting, and resolving key cloud security issues, risks, and misconfigurations. It addresses problems found in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments. CSPM provides deeper visibility into your cloud security status and also makes it easier to maintain compliance with the latest security standards. It can integrate with your DevSecOps workflows to improve overall cloud security.

CWPP is cloud workload protection and it secures your cloud-based apps, services, and protects workloads at runtime. CWPP solutions can be used to apply patches, remediate vulnerabilities, and reduce dependencies.

CIEM manages your cloud entitlements, identities, and permissions. It reduces attack surfaces by enforcing the principle of least privilege access. It can be used to continually monitor and manage access rights for both machine and human identities. CIEM is useful for building a zero trust security architecture and addresses many cloud-native security challenges.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) sits between your users and cloud applications. It monitors all data flowing to SaaS platforms like Office 365 or Salesforce. CASB prevents sensitive information from being shared inappropriately and blocks unauthorized cloud apps. It also enforces data loss prevention policies and applies conditional access based on user location and device security. CASB’s advanced threat protection can be used to stop account takeovers and insider threats that target your cloud data.

Secret leakage & IaC scanning

Secrets leakage prevention in cloud-native security involves protecting your API keys, passwords, and preventing accidental exposures. You use a platform to secure sensitive credentials and automatically rotate secrets to ensure their continued security. You also have to apply encryption and strict access controls to safeguard secrets throughout their lifecycle.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) in cloud-native security involves managing IAM policies. IaC scanning tools can automate the review of IaC templates and identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your code. They can enforce IaC security policies before deployment and ensure that these policies align with the best IaC security practices.

Container/Kubernetes & serverless protection

Kubernetes security is a key component of every cloud-native security architecture. It protects your clusters, pods, Kubernetes workloads, configurations, and containers. It provides visibility into your configurations and deployments, not just containers. You get to know how your workloads are isolated and how they interact with each other. This goes beyond namespaces and you get deep visibility into your network policy settings. Kubernetes security will also treat Kubernetes as the source of truth for all security operations, policies, DevOps, and site reliability engineering teams.

In serverless protection, we focus on implementing granular access controls and scan dependencies and configurations for code vulnerabilities. We monitor suspicious runtime behaviors and use techniques like API gateway security and continuous observability across cloud environments. Serverless protection also includes vulnerability scanning, configuration auditing, data security, and shift-left security. It is also a part of every Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) and protects the entire cloud-native lifecycle.

API & microservices security

Cloud-native API and microservices security cover key aspects like distributed security, API protection, and securing inter-service communications. Decentralized IAM solutions can be used to manage access to individual microservices and handle interactions. These key components also involve protecting sensitive data at rest and in transit. There is an emphasis on logging, monitoring, and generating the right alerts to teams that manage distributed microservices environments. Every organization should integrate these components into their entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) from design to deployment and operations.

The 4 Cs of Cloud-Native Security

To develop an effective cloud-native security strategy, you must understand the four layers of the cloud-native infrastructure—code, container, cluster, and cloud—and how to secure them.

1. Code: The code or application layer has the largest attack surface and requires the highest level of security controls. Typical security issues at the code layer include insecure code, insufficient risk assessments, cyber threats targeting app-to-server communication, and vulnerabilities in third-party software dependencies.

To minimize these security threats, adopt secure coding practices, and use static code analysis (SCA) tools to identify and eliminate vulnerable third-party components. Additionally, scan first and third-party software regularly to detect code vulnerabilities and software supply chain risks early. Adopt transport layer security (TLS), and restrict exposed API endpoints, ports, and services to prevent malicious traffic from accessing your apps. This will ensure resilience against man-in-the-middle (MITM), cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.

2. Container: At this stage, secure code (that is if security has been successfully implemented at the code layer) is containerized. Common vulnerabilities associated with this layer include using container images from unverified sources, weak privilege setups, and others discussed under container security above. Container risks can be handled by scanning containers and hosts for known vulnerabilities and enforcing IAM and least privilege.

3. Cluster: The cluster layer manages your container orchestration platform’s state. In Kubernetes, cluster security comprises protecting the control plane and worker nodes, and their components, e.g. the kube-api-server —the primary Kubernetes interface, and kubeadm join—responsible for adding nodes to existing clusters.

Common cluster security risks include misconfiguring clusters, using default configuration, and not encrypting communication. Improve cluster security by implementing TLS to encrypt communication between Kubernetes components. Additionally, enforce cluster authentication and authorization via RBAC, and implement pod and network security policies.

4. Cloud: The cloud layer is where applications run. Due to the cloud’s borderlessness, it is also the most complex to secure. When you set up a server with a cloud service provider (CSP), most of the infrastructure security responsibilities are your provider’s. However, you are responsible for configuring the services, protecting your information, and managing security within your cloud environment.

Typical cloud layer security vulnerabilities include automated assaults and misconfigurations. Misconfigurations, including unmodified default settings or lax access controls to the management console, can be exploited by attackers. Leverage security information and event management (SIEM) and CSPM tools embedded within CNAPPs to automate vulnerability detection in your cloud.

Cloud-Native Security Strategies

A few cloud-native security strategies have gained traction recently, each offering varying levels of effectiveness:

• Shared Responsibility Models: In this model, cloud providers are in charge of securing the infrastructure, while customers are responsible for securing their own applications, data, and access. It’s the foundation for most modern cloud-native security strategies.
• Multi-Layered Security: Cloud services generally consist of seven layers: facility, network, hardware, OS, middleware, application, and user. Multi-layered security monitors all these layers to detect risks and mitigate vulnerabilities. While this approach uses various tools like cloud-aware firewalls and end-to-end encryption, managing so many tools can become a hassle.
• Cloud-Agnostic Security Platforms: The most effective strategy is to use cloud-agnostic security platforms. These platforms offer visibility across multiple ecosystems, reducing dependency on specific cloud vendors, and helping overburdened security teams streamline alerts and tools.

Implementing a Cloud-Native Security

To safeguard cloud-native environments, enterprises must develop a cloud-native security strategy that prioritizes security best practices (discussed below) and adopts a myriad of tactics, including the following :

• Security by Design: This strategy bakes software security into the software development life cycle (SDLC), rather than making it an afterthought. It involves using only secure software components, adopting security best practices, and implementing DevSecOps to make IT teams more accountable and focused on building resilient, vulnerability-free apps.
• Shift-Left Security: Shifting security to the left of the SDLC involves securing apps from the outset of the project, and represents a shift from models where security tests were run after apps had been fully built. Shift-left security typically requires adopting cloud-native security tools equipped with the ability to scan app code for vulnerabilities before the code is shipped. This technique catches vulnerabilities early, improves the cloud-native environment’s overall security posture, and reduces the cost of remediating risks.
• Zero-Trust Security: This model assumes that no entity—whether coming from within or outside your network—is inherently trustworthy. It verifies every user and service access request and ensures that even if one part of your system gets compromised, the attack does not lead to the complete breakdown of your entire stack. This way, zero trust minimizes the cost of attacks and improves customer trust.
• Cloud-native security tools: The best cloud-native security tools provide a comprehensive solution for monitoring, automated vulnerability scanning and reporting, compliance, and governance. Leveraging these tools can help you automate many aspects of cloud security such as log analysis, vulnerability scanning, reporting, and compliance policy enforcement. CNAPP solutions like SentinelOne provide a holistically integrated solution ensuring cost-effective and resilient cloud security.

Top Security Concerns for Cloud-Native Systems

Cloud-native environments pose a number of  security risks:

• Increased attack surface: As more microservices and components exist, there are also more potential security gaps. The attack surface increases with the number of components and configurations, making it easier for attackers to identify entry points into the system. It is essential to manage and secure each of these components to lower the risk of breaches.

• Adaptable and transient nature: Maintaining consistent security in cloud-native environments might be challenging due to their constantly shifting nature. Just when you think you have gotten it all secured, righted all misconfigurations, discovered and encrypted all data. An old pod and its accompanying storage get destroyed, new data makes it into your systems, new storage configurations are required, and the cycle begins again and again. Maintaining uniform security standards and visibility throughout such an environment can be a showstopper.

• Misconfigurations: Security lapses may result from improperly configured components. Because cloud-native systems are so complicated, it is easy to make mistakes when configuring cloud resources, network security, access controls, or encryption, opening the system up to attacks. It is imperative to have appropriate configuration management and automated checks in place to reduce this risk.

• Supply chain risks: Security issues may arise due to flaws in external components. These components can introduce vulnerabilities if they are not adequately vetted or contain malicious code. Supply chain attacks, where attackers compromise a trusted third-party component, can devastate the entire system’s security.

Unfortunately, resolving these risks is not as easy as simply implementing cloud-native security strategies. For one, the cloud is borderless, meaning that, unlike traditional environments, you cannot simply secure a prespecified perimeter and rest easily. This also makes complete visibility cumbersome; without being able to tell exactly how cloud resources are configured, where they are, where data is, who is accessing what, and what they are doing with this access, securing cloud-native apps is near impossible. This is where adopting the right tools and best practices come in.

AI & ML in Cloud‑Native Security

MLOps is coming in the cloud-native era and we will soon see a huge rise in the scaling of AI/ML workloads with Kubernetes and serverless architectures.

Here are some of the future trends and predictions to look out for:

• 72% of companies have integrated AI with at least one business function and a majority are embracing Gen AI technologies. AI will demand security at every layer and cloud-native security will include multi-layered AI security. 47% companies are already customizing their existing models and factoring in AI security as we speak.
• 61% of enterprises agree that they cannot detect emerging breach attempts without the use of AI and ML in cloud-native security. AI and ML models can be trained to detect patterns, malicious behaviors, and flag potential threats. They can analyze huge volumes of data in real-time and continuously learn from new and historical data both to improve their existing detection and remediation capabilities.
• Kubernetes for MLOps will serve as the foundation of cloud-native AI. A hybrid Kubernetes + serverless approach will result in low compute and on-demand performance that balance costs.

Benefits & ROI: Risk reduction, compliance, false‑positive reduction

You can achieve a measurable decrease in security costs by integrating AI-driven monitoring into your cloud-native warehouse. Organizations report cutting breach-related expenses by over $3 million annually when automated threat detection handles 850,000 events per second with 94% accuracy. You will see policy violations flagged instantly, which slashes manual compliance checks by up to 85% and accelerates audit readiness by 91%.

If you deploy encryption key management aligned to NIST SP 800-57, you will notice a 95% drop in key-exposure incidents. You will also benefit from envelope encryption and client-side encryption, which together block 99.9% of unauthorized access attempts during data transit.

You should expect to reduce false positives dramatically when your system applies reinforcement learning to containment workflows. Companies achieve an 89% decrease in false alarms, freeing security teams to address genuine threats without drowning in alerts. There will be more capacity for proactive tasks: predictive analytics prevent 82% of attacks before they strike, and explainable AI provides audit trails that satisfy regulators across HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR frameworks.

If you combine Zero Trust micro-segmentation with continuous monitoring, you will cut breach impact by 95% and shorten mean time to detect to under one minute. You can further boost ROI when automated compliance reporting reduces labor hours by 76%, translating to significant savings across multi-cloud environments.

6 Cloud-Native Security Best Practices

To overcome these challenges, organizations should follow these best practices:

#1 Adopt a DevSecOps Culture

Rather than implementing security post-software deployment, integrate security into all DevOps processes. This requires integrating security tools into the CI/CD pipeline and encouraging collaboration between development, operations, and security teams. Adopting a DevSecOps culture ensures that security vulnerabilities in your code are detected early, before deployment, facilitating faster and more secure software release cycles. For example, with a DevSecOps culture in place, when a developer writes code and commits it to Git Hub, a scan is automatically triggered to discover any vulnerabilities in the CI process.

#2 Implement Continuous Compliance

The cloud’s elasticity allows resources to change rapidly in response to evolving demands. As these rapid changes mean that vulnerability can be introduced at any time, security and governance teams must continuously audit configurations and infrastructure for compliance with security standards such as PCI DSS and HIPAA. Cloud-native security tools can help automate these checks and alert your teams to policy violations in real-time.

#3 Use AI and Automation

AI-driven tools are equipped with machine learning capabilities that help them learn your unique business environment and security requirements. These tools continuously monitor changes in your environment to detect anomalies and potential security threats that may go undetected by traditional tools. For example, AI-driven tools can detect wrongly segregated data that might lead to data exposure, and automate remediation measures.

#4 Regularly Update Security Policies

Threat actors are always developing new TTPs and hunting for new vulnerabilities, so it’s important to review and update policies regularly to keep up with the changing threat landscape. Your Kubernetes setup, for instance, may require network policy adjustments to address zero-day vulnerabilities.

#5 Encrypt Sensitive Data

Encrypt data at rest and in transit, and safeguard encryption keys in secrets management systems. Use secure communication protocols like TLS and HTTPS to encrypt data in transit.

#6 Educate Employees

Train IT engineers to adopt a security-first mindset where everyone—Devs, Ops, and security teams—works towards securing cloud-native apps.

Cloud-Native Security with SentinelOne

SentinelOne has various offerings that help you build the best cloud-native security:

• Singularity™ Cloud Native Security can provide a seamless agentless onboarding experience. It focuses on alerts that matter; it  eliminates false positives, and reduces alert fatigue. Singularity™ Cloud Native Security can help you stay on top of the latest exploits and CVEs and quickly determine if any of your cloud resources are affected by latest vulnerabilities. It also comes with a unique Offensive Security Engine™ that thinks like an attacker, to automate red-teaming of cloud security issues and present evidence-based findings. We call these Verified Exploit Paths™. Going beyond simply graphing attack paths, CNS finds issues, automatically and benignly probes them, and presents its evidence.
• SentinelOne’s Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) supports agentless deployment in minutes. You can easily assess compliance and eliminate misconfigurations. If your goal is to build a zero trust security architecture and enforce the principle of least privilege access across all cloud accounts, then SentinelOne can help you do that. It also supports leading cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others. And it’s a part of the company’s comprehensive CNAPP which connects to multi-cloud environments within minutes.
• Singularity™ Cloud Workload Security is the #1 ranked CWPP. It secures servers, cloud VMs, and containers across multi-cloud environments. CNAPP customers rank SentinelOne highly and it offers 100% detections with 88% less noise, according to the industry-leading MITRE ENGENUITY ATT&CK Evaluation. You get outstanding analytic coverage 5 years in a row and zero delays. SentinelOne also reduces your cloud attack surface with automated asset discovery and aligns with Dev, SOC, and IT with verified exploitable risk.
• Singularity™ Cloud Security from SentinelOne is the most comprehensive and integrated CNAPP solution available in the market. It delivers SaaS security posture management and includes features like a graph-based asset inventory, shift-left security testing, CI/CD pipeline integration, container and Kubernetes security posture management, and more. SentinelOne’s CNAPP can manage cloud entitlements. It can tighten permissions and prevent secrets leakage. You can detect up to 750+ different types of secrets. Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) provides full forensic telemetry. You also get incident response from experts and it comes with a pre-built and customizable detection library. It also does IaC scanning and the AI-powered CNAPP gives you Deep Visibility® of your environment. You defend actively against AI-powered attacks, plus get the capabilities to shift security further left.

Conclusion

We’ve explored the 4 Cs of cloud-native security, cloud-native security tools, and so much more in this post. By now you should have an understanding of the things to look out for when building or improving your cloud-native security strategy. Start with an audit, inventory your assets, and work your way from there. Communicate with your team, stakeholders, and be transparent. Think about your organization’s mission, values, and long-term goals. And embed security with them in mind. If you need assistance in getting started with cloud-native security practices, tools, or anything else, reach out to the SentinelOne team. We are happy to help.