Despite its name, traditional CNAPP falls significantly short of delivering comprehensive application security. Its most critical gap: the absence of continuous, always-on runtime protection with deep observability into live application processes.
Traditional CNAPP primarily focuses on infrastructure security, covering endpoint protection, workload and configuration management, identity and permissions, compliance monitoring, SIEM/SOAR/TDIR/SOC integrations, VM/container/serverless security, Kubernetes posture management, IaC scanning, and network traffic analysis.
From an application security standpoint, traditional CNAPP covers software composition analysis (SCA), software bill of materials (SBOM), application security posture management (ASPM), application security testing (AST), application vulnerability management, API discovery, and API security testing. This represents the full extent of application security that traditional CNAPPs currently offer.
The first thing that becomes noticeable when reviewing this list of application security features is that they are not sufficient to ensure comprehensive application security.
Why Traditional CNAPP Application Security Falls Short
SAST, DAST, SCA, SBOM, and ASPM are part of the first phase of application security. While these tools are important, they cannot address today’s challenges, such as the following
- Lack of Insight into the “Real” Application:
SAST and SCA do not analyze a “real” application in its running state; they only examine source code and component composition. This is their most critical limitation. DAST does interact with a running application, but as a black box, it has no insight into the underlying code, architecture, or composition.
- Lack of Observability:
Without observability into a live application, security teams cannot detect anomalous behavior, trace attack paths, or understand how threats manifest at runtime. SAST and SCA are entirely blind to this, and DAST, due to its black-box nature, can only observe surface-level responses rather than what is happening inside the application.
- Intermittent Nature of the Technologies:
Today’s environment is defined by relentless, globally distributed attacks, which means applications must be under continuous, always-active monitoring and protection. Unfortunately, technologies such as SAST, DAST, and SCA are scanners and therefore intermittent by nature. A scan may run for a few minutes or hours, and then it stops. The next scan may not run again for many hours, days, weeks, or even months. In between scans, the application remains unwatched, unobserved, and unprotected.
- Limited Coverage Across the DevOps Lifecycle:
None of these technologies covers the entire DevOps lifecycle: from left to right, from programming to building/testing, and to operation. SAST, DAST, and SCA work at the Build/Test phase and to some extent at the Programming phase, but not at the operation phase. DevSecOps specialists must learn, run, and take responsibility for a wide variety of tools, which creates significant overhead and increases the risk of gaps. In some DevOps phases, they are not equipped with those technologies at all, or they lack the tools entirely.
- Too Complex to Use:
The Application Security industry was successful enough to make SAST and SCA reasonably user-friendly, so they could be put into developers' and security specialists' hands. DAST was not that successful. It requires a level of skill and expertise that most development teams cannot realistically provide. Configuring DAST and tuning it to ensure authentication, proper crawling, and coverage are not sustainable tasks for most teams.
Traditional CNAPP Must Innovate to Meet Modern Security Challenges
Traditional CNAPP must evolve into Runtime CNAPP: a platform capable of delivering continuous observability, deep visibility into application and API processes, and real-time insight into architecture, logic, vulnerabilities, and threat flows across the entire DevSecOps lifecycle.
This is where the industry’s most important innovation must happen. In our next post, we take a deeper look at Runtime CNAPP, what it is, how it works, and why it represents the future of cloud-native application security.
