Being a cloud security professional can feel like you’re caught in the middle of a tug-of-war. On one side, developers, driven by the need for speed and innovation, see security as a potential bottleneck; on the other, business leaders, who are often removed from the technical weeds, have little awareness of the security risks that come with a rapidly expanding cloud environment. Together, this represents a common and challenging position for many security teams today.
The developer-security standoff
Developers are under constant pressure to deliver new features and functionalities. Their world is one of rapid iteration, CI/CD pipelines, and microservices. When security teams try to inject controls or manual review processes into this workflow, it can feel like pulling a handbrake on progress – often leading to pushback and promoting a "move fast and break things" mentality that, from a security perspective, can be a recipe for disaster. The result is a dangerous chasm where security is an afterthought, or worse, completely bypassed in favor of deployment velocity.
This tension is especially visible in the findings from Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) [1]. A significant portion of cloud security incidents don't stem from cloud provider vulnerabilities, but from misconfigurations within an organization's own environment—precisely the kind of issue that can arise when security is siloed from development.
The challenge of shadow IT
Compounding this issue is the prevalence of shadow IT, the rogue applications and systems deployed by teams without the express approval of IT or security. Think of a marketing team spinning up a publicly accessible S3 bucket to host a campaign, or a dev team using an unapproved SaaS tool for collaboration. Security teams often lack the authority to shut down these rogue applications, even when they pose significant risks. They can see the vulnerabilities—an unencrypted database, an exposed API endpoint—but they lack the power to enforce policies or remove the threats. It's like having a playbook for a fire drill but no access to the fire extinguisher. The reliance on a disparate assortment of security tools only makes it harder to discover and address shadow IT, creating visibility gaps that leave the organization exposed.
The power of consolidation: a practitioner's solution
So, how can security teams gain the visibility and control they need to be effective? The answer lies in leveraging a consolidated security platform, like the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) discussed in the Gartner Market Guide. By bringing together disparate security tools into a single system, security teams can move from being reactive to proactive, transforming themselves from roadblocks into strategic partners.
A comprehensive platform should offer several key, tangible capabilities:
Holistic vulnerability monitoring and proactive scanning: Imagine a tool that not only scans your live cloud environment for misconfigurations using Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), but also performs continuous host and container vulnerability scanning and scans your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates, like Terraform or CloudFormation files, before they are ever deployed. This proactive approach helps you find and fix risky settings before they become production risks
Prioritization and context: A consolidated platform helps you cut through the noise. Instead of sifting through logs from a dozen different tools, a CNAPP can correlate an alert about an overprivileged IAM role with an application vulnerability identified in a code scan. The platform can then provide a correlated, prioritized alert that clearly shows the cause and potential impact of the vulnerability, allowing you to focus your efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
Comprehensive scanning across the stack: The ability to scan beyond just network devices and view one’s entire cloud-native stack is crucial. This includes agentless scanning of your production workloads, Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) for your container orchestrators, and even scanning the container images themselves. This level of insight ensures you're not just looking at the surface, but seeing every layer of your cloud infrastructure
Real-time threat detection: Identifying vulnerabilities at runtime is crucial for catching threats that traditional static analysis might miss. A CNAPP with Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) capabilities can monitor your production environment for anomalous behavior—like a container reaching out to an unusual IP address—and give you the context you need to quickly investigate and respond
By consolidating these functions, security teams gain a single source of truth. This centralized visibility and control gives them the data and insights needed to work with other parts of the business to build a strong business case for security solutions. Instead of being caught in the middle, they can become a central part of the conversation, armed with the information needed to make their case and secure the organization's future. The Gartner Market Guide for CNAPP highlights the maturity of solutions that are designed to unify security and empower both security and development teams. As businesses continue to embrace the cloud, a unified security strategy is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity for building a secure, resilient, and agile cloud future.
Learn more about Rapid7’s CNAPP solutions today!
[1] Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, Dale Koeppen, Esraa ElTahawy, Neil MacDonald, 5 August 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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