Worldwide Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform Forecast, 2024-2028

This IDC study presents a five-year forecast for the worldwide cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) market, formerly known as cloud workload security (CWS). As such, market fundamentals such as shift-left security including cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) are now part and parcel with shield-right tools including cloud workload protection platform (CWPP). The ability to correlate and prioritize this data along with threat intelligence feeds - all of which may rest on top of a security lake, and most recently paired with a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) digital assistant - provides organizations with the right level of visibility and contextualization to optimize their environments security controls and improve both the cloud builders and cloud defenders' efficiency."Since 2020, the security industry has promoted the consolidation of vendors and tools. The talent gap, siloed teams, digital transformation, compliance mandates, risk assessment, inflationary pressures and, now more recently, GenAI have necessitated such a move. A long-held belief that cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection platform were two sides of the same coin reflected efforts to simplify the number of tools and resulting acronyms that lead to complexity. The term CNAPP expands on this principle and realizes the fundamental promise of a platform - simplicity," says Philip Bues, senior research manager, Cloud Security at IDC.