Cloud security has undergone a rapid evolution over the past few years. Initially, organizations relied on CSPM to identify misconfigurations in their cloud environments. As threats became more sophisticated, CWPP emerged to provide runtime visibility into workloads, but even this was largely focused on infrastructure and host-level behavior. Eventually, CNAPP (Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform) solutions were introduced as a consolidated approach, combining CSPM, CWPP, CIEM , and often some level of runtime threat detection.

However, despite their broad coverage, legacy CNAPP solutions can’t understand the applications running in these environments. They remain focused on cloud infrastructure security—scanning configurations, analyzing IAM roles, and monitoring workload behavior—while neglecting the deeper layers where modern attacks occur: inside the applications themselves.

Even solutions that claim to provide runtime security barely scratch the surface. They focus on high-level workload activity and basic process monitoring but fail to see what the application is actually doing, what data it handles, how it interacts with APIs, and how threats manifest at the application level.

The CNAPP Blind Spot: The Missing Application Layer  

We all know that CNAPP stands for Cloud Native Application Protection Platform. Yet, the application part is what is most neglected. Most CNAPPs are designed around infrastructure-centric visibility, offering insights into:

• Misconfigured buckets
• Over-permissive IAM roles
• Publicly exposed cloud resources
• Vulnerable container images
• Suspicious process executions

While these are important, attackers are no longer just exploiting infrastructure misconfigurations; they are targeting the logic and behavior of applications inside the cloud as well. Consider a modern API-driven microservices application:

• It may have properly secured cloud permissions, yet still suffer from an authentication bypass due to a logic flaw.
• It may be running in an isolated VPC, yet still expose sensitive PII via an API misconfiguration.
• It may have no known CVEs in its dependencies, yet still be vulnerable to business logic abuse attacks that CNAPPs cannot detect.

Cloud security without application visibility is an illusion of security. Without seeing inside the application, legacy CNAPPs leave organizations blind to API abuse, data exposure risks, and complex attack chains that leverage application behavior.

Seeing Inside the Application at Runtime: The Missing Layer of Cloud Security

Most runtime security capabilities rely on monitoring process activity, network traffic, and system calls at the host or container level. While this can help detect anomalies like cryptominers or certain types of malware, it completely misses application-layer threats.

For example, a CNAPP with runtime security might detect a compromised container running a malicious reverse shell, but it will not detect:

• An API returning excessive amounts of sensitive data (API3:2023 - Excessive Data Exposure)
• An attacker leveraging a flawed authentication mechanism to escalate privileges (API5:2023 - Broken Authorization)
• A toxic combination of vulnerabilities—such as an RCE in a function that also holds plaintext API keys to a high-privileged internal service

To put it simply: Detecting a suspicious process execution does not mean you understand the risk of an application. So how do security teams bridge this gap? The answer lies in deep application visibility. This means:

• Full Layer 7 Visibility: Monitoring actual application traffic, including API calls, sensitive data flows, and authentication mechanisms.
• Context-Aware API Security: Detecting and correlating API risks with real-world attack vectors, rather than just generating static OWASP API Top 10 alerts.
• Toxic Combination Analysis: Connecting vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, and application behavior to reveal how an attack would unfold in a real-world scenario.
• Intelligent Risk Prioritization: Not just listing CVEs, but analyzing whether vulnerabilities are exploitable based on application context (e.g., is the vulnerable function ever executed? Is the affected API endpoint exposed externally?).

Real-World Breaches: The Danger of Ignoring Application Visibility for Stopping Cloud Attacks 

Recent breaches have proven what happens when cloud solutions fail to monitor for application-layer threats:

• Capital One (2019): A misconfigured WAF allowed an attacker to exploit an SSRF vulnerability, ultimately gaining access to S3 buckets. Their CNAPP failed to detect the API abuse that led to this breach.
• Uber (2022): Attackers used social engineering to gain access to an internal network, but what made the breach damaging was their ability to pivot through internal services using hardcoded credentials and weak application security controls.
• MoveIT (2023): A zero-day vulnerability in the application itself was exploited for mass data exfiltration, highlighting how infrastructure-based security tools are insufficient for modern threats.

These examples demonstrate that legacy CNAPPs alone cannot prevent attacks when the application is the primary target. Here’s why: 

• Secrets Scanners detect exposed API keys but do not check if those keys are ever used in an actual attack path.
• Vulnerability Management Tools report thousands of CVEs without understanding which ones are truly reachable in runtime.
• CNAPPs track cloud misconfigurations but fail to see if an attacker can exploit those misconfigurations via an API vulnerability.

Security teams can only uncover real risk before it turns into an active breach by connecting these dots and understanding the dangerous impact of these toxic combinations.

How CNAPPs Need to Evolve: Bridging Cloud and Application Visibility 

To truly protect cloud-native applications, security must move beyond cloud misconfigurations and runtime process monitoring. Looking ahead, the future of cloud and application security will be shaped by three key shifts:

1. From Static Scanning to Continuous, Context-Aware Security: Security teams will increasingly rely on live data from applications, monitoring API flows, user behavior, and active exploit attempts rather than static scan results.
2. From Cloud Security to Full Cloud-Native Application Visibility: The most effective security tools will merge cloud security insights with real-time application security analysis, giving teams full-stack protection.
3. From Generic Vulnerability Management to Automated Exploitability Analysis: AI-driven security platforms will prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world exploitation likelihood, reducing unnecessary patching efforts and developer workload.

These shifts will redefine how both cloud security and application security teams operate, reducing alert fatigue and improving remediation efficiency. 

Core CNAPP Updates 

CNAPP vendors needs to provide update their core use cases to include:

• Intelligent Vulnerability Prioritization: Traditional vulnerability management overwhelms security teams with CVEs of varying severity, often without considering whether the vulnerability is exploitable in a given environment. Analysts need tools that correlate vulnerabilities with runtime execution, network exposure, and exploitability factors. For example, an RCE vulnerability in a package might seem critical, but if the affected function is never executed in production and the listening port is inaccessible, it should be deprioritized compared to a vulnerability that is actively reachable and exploited.
• API Security Beyond the Perimeter: Traditional API security solutions often rely on WAFs and perimeter defenses, which are insufficient for detecting Layer 7 threats. Security teams need visibility into how APIs process sensitive data, interact with authentication systems, and handle business logic. For example, data in motion monitoring can detect whether an API is unintentionally exposing sensitive PII. Similarly, AI security risks arise when internal APIs send proprietary or sensitive data to external AI models, often unnoticed by traditional security tools.
• Toxic Combination and CWE-Driven Risk Analysis: Vulnerabilities rarely exist in isolation. AppSec teams need platforms that correlate CWEs (Common Weakness Enumerations) with real-world attack paths, identifying scenarios where multiple weaknesses create a high-risk condition. For example, consider an application with an exposed RCE vulnerability that also contains plaintext secrets and runs with excessive privileges—each issue alone is risky, but combined, they present a critical security gap that CNAPPs fail to detect.
• Secrets and Exposure Risk Management: Detecting exposed secrets is not enough—security teams need to understand where those secrets are used, who has access to them, and whether they can be leveraged in an attack. A leaked API key may be harmless in isolation, but if it provides access to an externally exposed API or is hardcoded in a container image, it becomes a major security risk.

Don’t Wait for Vendors to Change: How AppSec Teams Can Improve Cloud Security Today

While CNAPPs continue to evolve, application security teams don’t need to wait for vendors to catch up. Here’s what application security professionals can do today to help bridge the security gap:

• Enhance API Security Monitoring: Go beyond traditional WAFs and implement deep Layer 7 monitoring to detect authentication bypasses, excessive data exposure, and business logic abuse.
• Implement Exploitability-Based Vulnerability Management: Prioritize vulnerabilities based on runtime execution, exploit paths, and exposure risks, rather than just CVSS scores.
• Monitor Toxic Combinations: Identify high-risk intersections of misconfigurations, RCE vulnerabilities, and secrets exposure that could lead to full application compromise.
• Enforce Data-in-Motion Protection: Track how sensitive data moves across APIs and external integrations, ensuring that AI models, third-party services, or misconfigured APIs don’t expose critical information.

By incorporating these capabilities, application security teams can help cloud security professionals move beyond cloud blind spots and gain true visibility into the application layer, where modern cloud attacks unfold.