CNAPP vs. CASB

How can teams enforce granular, risk-aligned controls across cloud workloads, identities, and data without silos or visibility gaps? Do they need to converge posture, identity, and data protection in cloud-native stacks, or do they still have SaaS governance problems to solve? 

These are tough propositions, no matter what the stack looks like. And as modern architectures spread and threats evolve, the challenge is ongoing. Both Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) and Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) play pivotal roles in enforcing policy. But they do so in fundamentally different architectural layers.

So, where should teams unify controls, and where is separate visibility still needed?

In this article, we’ll go beyond basic definitions and address where these tools collide, converge, and create gaps in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. First, let’s revisit the basics.

Why CNAPP and CASB Matter in Modern Cloud Security

The term cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) was first introduced by Gartner in 2021 to describe a unified platform that brings together security and compliance capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to threats across cloud environments. CNAPPs consolidate traditionally siloed tools (e.g., workload protection, posture management, and identity governance) into a single interface so organizations can secure their entire cloud application footprint with greater efficiency and visibility.

While most organizations are using or plan to use CNAPPs, only about 25% have fully implemented a CNAPP as of 2025.

An early core goal of CNAPP was to embed security early in the software development lifecycle, a practice known as “shifting left.” In cloud-native environments, where rapid innovation and scalability are standard, the attack surface expands significantly; this makes it critical for developers and security teams to identify and remediate vulnerabilities early on.

In other words, CNAPP emerged to rein in the expanses of the cloud, offering quicker fixes and comprehensive visibility, even as environments scaled.

Long before CNAPP, Gartner also coined the term Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) to define a solution that acts as a policy enforcement point between users and cloud service providers. 

Whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud, CASBs have been around since the early 2010s, enforcing enterprise security policies as data moves between users and cloud applications. CASBs are the gatekeepers that ensure only authorized users can access cloud services while monitoring and controlling how data is used.

With the rise of cloud adoption, organizations have come to rely on CASBs to manage risk, enforce access controls, and maintain compliance, even when cloud services operate beyond traditional network perimeters.

But what are the basic functions of each of these solutions?

What is CNAPP?

A CNAPP is an integrated cloud security solution designed to safeguard modern, cloud-native applications throughout their entire lifecycle, from development to production. Specifically built for dynamic, highly automated public cloud environments, CNAPPs consolidate multiple security capabilities into a unified platform. These include Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP).

As organizations increasingly shift toward microservices architectures, containers, serverless functions, and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, CNAPPs address the growing need for a holistic cloud security approach. 

Key capabilities of CNAPPs include:

Workload Protection

CNAPPs secure cloud workloads from threats such as vulnerabilities, malware, and misconfigurations. With runtime protection, they detect and prevent attacks in real time, enabling teams to respond quickly to active threats.

CSPM

CNAPPs offer continuous visibility into cloud infrastructure configurations, identifying risks and compliance violations. They provide actionable recommendations to improve security posture and mitigate potential issues.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management

CIEM is the CNAPP component responsible for analyzing and managing identity and access permissions across cloud infrastructure. It can uncover over-permissioned roles, unused entitlements, and toxic combinations that could be exploited by cyber attackers, and helps reduce the identity attack surface in cloud environments.

Collaboration Across Teams

By integrating security into DevOps workflows, CNAPPs foster better collaboration between developers, security teams, and operations. This shift-left approach enables vulnerabilities to be detected and resolved earlier in the development cycle, reducing potential risks down the line.

CNAPP can also include Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), compliance mapping, container security, and attack path analysis. But by unifying these core components, CNAPPs provide the visibility, automation, and protection needed to secure cloud-native applications at scale, making them an essential tool in modern cloud security strategies.

What is CASB?

A CASB is a cybersecurity solution that sits between users and cloud applications, particularly SaaS, and enforces security, compliance, and governance policies. Acting as an intermediary, a CASB provides centralized visibility and control over cloud app usage, including both sanctioned and unsanctioned services. 

CASBs are designed to help organizations securely adopt and manage SaaS by extending traditional data protection and access controls into the cloud. They enforce policies like DLP, access restrictions, and encryption, supporting compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. While not a replacement for cloud infrastructure security tools like CNAPPs, CASBs play a key role in governing user behavior and data movement in SaaS environments.

Key capabilities of CASBs include:

Visibility and Discovery

CASBs provide deep visibility into cloud application usage, enabling the discovery of both sanctioned and unsanctioned services (shadow IT). These insights help assess risk levels and categorize cloud apps for more informed decision-making.

Data Protection

CASBs safeguard sensitive information through data loss prevention (DLP), encryption, tokenization, and redaction, ensuring data security both at rest and in transit within cloud environments.

Access Control

CASBs enforce robust access policies for cloud applications, including features like single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and role-based access control (RBAC). These measures ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive data and services.

Threat Protection

With integrated threat intelligence and behavior analytics, CASBs detect anomalous user activity and potential threats in real-time. They can trigger alerts, automate responses, and mitigate risks before they escalate.

Compliance and Governance

CASBs support regulatory compliance by enforcing industry-specific policies and maintaining detailed audit trails. They simplify reporting, facilitate incident response, and help organizations meet standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2.

In essence, CASBs empower organizations to confidently adopt cloud services while maintaining a strong security posture and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Side-by-Side Comparison: CNAPP vs CASB

While CASBs and CNAPPs serve different layers of the cloud stack, it’s their overlapping goals (visibility, control, and risk reduction) that make it necessary to compare them head-to-head. Here’s what that looks like:

	CASB	CNAPP
Primary Focus	Securing access to cloud services and protecting SaaS data.	Securing cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
Deployment Model	Acts as a proxy or API-based control between users and cloud services.	Integrated directly into cloud environments (IaaS/PaaS).
Environment	SaaS-heavy environments	IaaS and PaaS environments with containers, VMs, serverless apps.
Key Capabilities	Access control, DLP, SSO, threat detection, compliance monitoring.	Runtime protection, CSPM, CWPP, vulnerability management, DSPM.
Data Protection	Encrypts and monitors data in transit and at rest within SaaS apps.	Monitors and secures data across cloud-native workloads and storage.
User Activity Monitoring	Strong emphasis on user behavior analytics and cloud app usage.	Limited user monitoring; focuses more on workload behavior and configurations.
Threat Detection	Detects threats from user behavior and risky app usage.	Detects threats in application and infrastructure runtime environments.
Use Case	Enforcing security and compliance across SaaS platforms.	Securing DevOps pipelines and cloud-native application lifecycles.
Best For	Organizations prioritizing SaaS governance and user access control.	Enterprises with modern, cloud-native architectures that seek full-stack protection.

When to Use CNAPP, CASB, or Both

CNAPPs are purpose-built for securing cloud-native infrastructure, especially where apps are containerized, orchestrated, or deployed via IaC pipelines. They provide contextualized visibility, integrate into the CI/CD workflow, and incorporate runtime protection for workloads. A CNAPP excels in IaaS and PaaS environments where ephemeral resources and dynamic permissions are prevalent.

CASBs, by contrast, are optimized for SaaS consumption and data flows. They handle access control, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), session monitoring, and shadow IT discovery so teams can use tools like Salesforce, Microsoft 635, or Dropbox more securely. They’re best in environments where sensitive data resides in SaaS and human behavior is the primary threat surface.

For organizations operating across both domains, the two tools aren’t competitive. They’re complementary, covering different control planes: infrastructure-layer risk versus application-layer governance.

Deployment Models

CNAPPs integrate deeply into the cloud environment itself, whether via APIs, lightweight sensors, or agents. This embedded architecture means they can contextualize risk in real time.

CASBs are intermediaries. They operate via proxy, API connectors, or endpoint integrations. Their deployment enables policy enforcement across sanctioned SaaS and insight into user activity in shadow IT.

This means that if an organization’s critical assets live in cloud infrastructure, CNAPP is crucial. However, if its biggest risks involve user behavior in SaaS, CASB is more important. For most enterprises operating in both spaces, the architecture demands both tools to achieve complete visibility and enforce policies across the full cloud attack surface. 

Scope of Protection

CNAPPs secure the full lifecycle of cloud-native workloads, including virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, and the infrastructure they run on. They provide runtime protection along with vulnerability management, compliance enforcement, and identity safeguards. The most advanced modern CNAPPS tie together insights from build to runtime.

CASBs, by contrast, focus on user access to SaaS platforms and preventing data and compliance breaches. They monitor file-sharing behavior, session activity, and policy violations in apps. CASBs apply DLP policies, access controls, and encryption, often identifying shadow SaaS usage and making sure it’s compliant with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. 

What does it mean? If an organization’s threat model centers on compromised infrastructure, identity sprawl, or misconfigured workloads, CNAPP delivers the protection teams need. If core concerns also include data leaving the enterprise via SaaS usage, CASB is key. Of course, the most common approach for organizations in both environments is to use both tools to protect both arenas.

Strategic Integration Challenges

While CASB and CNAPP cover different layers, real-world cloud security challenges often span control planes, creating blind spots even as enterprises deploy both tools. Is it possible to align telemetry, deployment, and response across tools? The challenge goes beyond saying “yes” to one tool or the other — it’s more about operationalizing two tools without duplicating effort or missing threats.

First, IAM visibility is split. CASM monitors SaaS logins and user sessions, while CNAPPs look at cloud IAM roles and permissions. The issue? Without unified identity analytics, overprivileged roles with unsanctioned SaaS access can slip by.

Second, CASB and CNAPP are often maintained in isolation, which can lead to inconsistent DLP rules and conflicting response logic across environments. 

Further, CASBs typically rely on predefined policy violations while CNAPPs increasingly use runtime behavior. Without integration, teams can’t correlate a risky identity’s actions in SaaS with infrastructure behavior in cloud-native apps.

Finally, as tools incorporate new features, the chance that teams will find their tools overlapping increases. Decide who owns security posture and who owns SaaS from the start. 

Ultimately, teams need identity, risk, and workload triaged together, not in silos. That can mean sharing telemetry, risk scoring logic, and workflows across teams in order to cover gaps that come from tools like CNAPP and CASB naturally covering different security layers.

Upwind Bridges Runtime and Infrastructure Risk

CASBs excel at managing SaaS data exposure and user access, but they’re blind to what happens inside cloud infrastructure. That’s where CNAPPs like Upwind come in. By focusing on runtime context, identity behavior, and attack paths within cloud-native environments, Upwind helps security teams close the fissures between user-layer controls and workload-layer threats.

Ultimately, it’s not about CASB vs CNAPP — most teams will eventually use both tools. It’s about knowing where each tool stops. Upwind won’t replace CASB, but it can ensure SaaS-level protections are backed with real visibility into what’s running, misconfigured, or exploitable beneath the surface. Get a demo to see how.

FAQs

Is CNAPP meant to replace CASB entirely?

No. CNAPPs provide comprehensive security for cloud applications, while CASBs focus primarily on controlling access to cloud services. Both are essential for strengthening an organization’s cybersecurity posture and can be used together to complement each other, rather than CNAPP replacing CASB entirely.

Can CNAPP and CASB work together for better cloud security?

Most often, CNAPP and CASB complement one another in an organization’s security strategy. 

CNAPPs provide specific protection for cloud-native workloads, while CASBs address access control, data protection, and compliance across various cloud services. By combining both solutions, organizations can achieve a more comprehensive security posture.

How does CNAPP impact cloud compliance efforts?

A CNAPP enables organizations to automate entitlement management and risk detection. Leveraging automated policy enforcement, it helps security administrators protect against exposure from overly-permissive access to cloud infrastructure. CNAPPs integrate data from various security and compliance capabilities into a single platform, simplifying management compared to handling multiple disparate tools.

Additionally, CNAPPs automate risk detection and compliance monitoring, allowing organizations to scale their cloud infrastructure while maintaining a strong security posture.

What should enterprises prioritize when evaluating CNAPP vendors?

When evaluating CNAPP vendors, organizations should prioritize several key factors to ensure they select the best solution for their needs. Comprehensive coverage is essential, so security teams should look for a platform that integrates a broad range of security capabilities, such as workload protection, compliance management, CPSM, and risk detection. 

Ease of use is another important consideration; the platform should streamline security management by consolidating multiple tools into a unified interface. And of course, integrating with existing tools is most important, since data-based tools are only as good as the data they can ingest and correlate.

Automation is also a crucial attribute to consider, as CNAPPs should offer automated policy enforcement, risk detection, and compliance monitoring to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency. The best solutions should also provide scalable protection that adapts to your organization’s evolving cloud infrastructure, not only now, but into the future.