Frost Radar™: Cloud-native Application Protection Platforms, 2022

Cloud computing is becoming the norm in the business environment with a variety of cloud models and services available. The accelerated migration to the cloud has enabled businesses to embrace their digital transformation journey and simplify their IT infrastructure and operations. The use of cloud computing is transforming the application development life cycle, security operations, and the way organizations build,operate, and manage back-end infrastructure and front-end, customer facing applications with cloud-native technologies such as containers/Kubernetes, serverless, infrastructure as code (IaC), and other continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms for cloud management, application, development, and deployment. With a more intense focus on cloud-native application development technologies, organizations are shifting from a traditional monolithic application development model to a microservice architecture and containerized approach using more open-source dependencies and libraries. Container/Kubernetes technologies and serverless computing are changing application development strategies as they enable organizations to flexibly design, develop, test, and launch their applications to the market, enhancing customer experience. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) 2021 Annual Survey showed that 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes and 93% are currently using, or planning to use, containers in production. However, the use of open-source software, libraries/dependencies, and registries has introduced more security threats and concerns because these application artifacts remain at risk to container image vulnerability, host security, code injection (for serverless applications), and compliance issues.