What Is a Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)?

What is CWPP?

A Cloud Workload Protection Platform, or CWPP, is a type of cybersecurity solution designed to detect and manage threats to cloud workloads, such as virtual machines and Kubernetes-based containers.

The purpose of CWPP is to deliver the specialized features necessary to identify and mitigate security risks in cloud workloads. The focus on the cloud is what distinguishes CWPP from other types of cybersecurity detection and response solutions, which are geared toward on-prem environments rather than the cloud.

How does CWPP work?

CWPPs work mainly by collecting data from cloud environments and workloads, and then analyzing it to detect potential risks and threats.

The way that CWPPs detect risks and threats can vary. Some CWPP platforms use a rules-based approach, which means that they assess whether a cloud workload’s configuration or behavior matches any predetermined patterns that are known to be risky. In other cases, a CWPP might use more sophisticated, AI-powered algorithms to detect threats and risks dynamically, making it possible to identify issues that don’t match predefined risk conditions. Some CWPPs use a mix of both approaches.

CWPP benefits

The main benefit of a CWPP is that it helps organizations address the unique security challenges that arise in the cloud.

This is important because, again, cloud workloads are different in some key respects from on-prem workloads. Cloud workloads change and scale more quickly, and they often rely on a complex mix of configurations and services. Cloud environments also include special types of security tools and services, like Identity and Access Control frameworks, that don’t exist on-prem.

By collecting and analyzing data that is specific to cloud environments and workloads, CWPP can detect risks that wouldn’t generally exist on-prem.

Key CWPP features

A CWPP provides a range of capabilities for protecting cloud workloads. Key types of features include:

• Workload discovery, which enables CWPP tools to detect cloud workloads automatically.
• Assessing workload configurations (such as access control settings) to detect cloud misconfigurations that could open the door to attack.
• Scanning for vulnerabilities that threat actors could exploit in cloud workloads.
• Monitoring network activity for signs of an attack or attempted attack.
• Behavioral monitoring to uncover anomalous requests or actions involving cloud workloads that could reflect malicious activity.
• Allow-listing, which makes it possible to control how workloads can interact with each other and with other cloud resources.

In these ways, CWPP helps protect against various types of threats and risks that could impact the runtime environments where cloud workloads reside.

The role of CWPP in cloud security

As a type of solution tailored to address security risks in cloud workloads, CWPP plays an important role in protecting cloud environments and assets. However, it’s important to understand that CWPP is designed to address only some types of cloud security risks. Typically, organizations deploy a CWPP alongside other types of cloud security tools, rather than relying on CWPP alone.

To provide context on where CWPP fits into cloud security, here’s a look at how CWPP compares to other types of cloud security solutions.

CWPP vs. runtime security

In many respects, CWPP is essentially a type of runtime security solution built for the cloud. That’s because CWPP can detect security issues that impact cloud workloads at the time of deployment – in other words, at runtime.

That said, because CWPP focuses on protecting cloud workloads and doesn’t address other types of risks (such as cloud infrastructure misconfigurations) that could lead to breaches in runtime environments, CWPP covers only a subset of the functionality necessary to ensure runtime security. This is why analysts like Gartner in its latest guide to the cloud security market position CWPP as only one element of runtime security.

CWPP vs. CDR

Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) is another type of cloud security solution that is similar in many respects to CWPP but collecting security logs from cloud providers as part of their data sources. Arguably, the main difference is that CDR focuses on identifying threats reactively, whereas CWPP is more about preventing threats and risks. 

CWPP vs. CSPM

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) focuses on identifying misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure and services. In contrast, the main goal of CWPP is typically to detect and mitigate insecure settings, risks, and vulnerabilities in workloads themselves.

Thus, CSPM might tell you about an insecure IAM setting that could allow malicious users to make changes to a virtual machine (VM) hosted in the cloud, whereas CWPP would tell you that the application you host on the VM has a security vulnerability that threat actors could exploit and assist you to remediate it

CWPP vs. CNAPP

• CWPP is frequently compared to the type of security solution called Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). A CNAPP is an end-to-end cloud security platform designed to protect cloud workloads and environments from “code to cloud” – meaning from the development process through to runtime.
• Since workload protection is one aspect of a CNAPP, CWPP capabilities are a subset of the features offered by CNAPP solutions. But CNAPPs also provide other capabilities, like cloud security posture management and scanning of infrastructure-as-code. Therefore, CWPP is a subset of CNAPP, but CWPP and CNAPP don’t mean the same thing.

Implementing CWPP with Aqua

As a complete Cloud Native Application Protection Platform, Aqua provides the CWPP capabilities businesses need to secure cloud workloads, as well as a range of additional types of protections. With Aqua, you can be confident that you’re covering all aspects of cloud security – including CWPP and beyond.