What is a cloud workload protection platform (CWPP)?

The benefits of a CWPP include valuable cybersecurity features that protect against data breaches, minimize downtime, and ensure regulatory compliance throughout the workload lifecycle. The features include: 

• Real-time visibility: CWPPs monitor all active workloads across cloud environments up to individual endpoint access controls, revealing important operating system and application information, including version and patch histories.

• Advanced threat detection: CWPPs can reduce an organization's attack surface by detecting vulnerabilities on cloud platforms. Machine learning, signature-based detection and heuristics-based detection tools defend against malware and other security threats.

• Improved regulatory compliance: CWPPs help organizations handling sensitive data—such as financial and medical institutions—maintain regulatory compliance beyond simple firewalls through extensive automation and security controls engineered for complex cloud applications. 

CWPPs play an important role within cloud security posture management (CSPM) and are typically integrated within broader cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP).

While not as robust as a CNAPP, which includes application security, CWPPs help ensure cloud workload security by preserving the integrity, confidentiality and availability of workloads. CWPP solutions protect workloads across a range of cloud infrastructure architectures and workloads, including: 

• On-premises data centers: Traditional, bare metal resources located in onsite data centers. 

• Cloud environments: Private clouds, public clouds, hybrid and multicloud variations. 

• Virtual machines: Virtual machines (VMs) are simulated servers capable of emulating a physical computer system through virtualization, useful for running multiple types of operating systems on a single physical machine. 

• Containers: System-level virtual packages known as containers are used to isolate and deploy applications consistently across different cloud environments. 

• Serverless: Cloud-based serverless functions such as updates or patches can be deployed without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure code.

Collected into a single platform, CWPPs provide holistic cybersecurity through a range of security tools, such as vulnerability management, intrusion prevention, runtime protection and compliance monitoring. This enables quick incident response and remediation for security teams.

An effective CWPP is a critical component of any DevOps and DevSecOps security strategy for cloud computing. Common among all industries reliant on cloud platforms and cloud applications, CWPPs are crucial for mitigating security risks, security threats and preventing security issues. 

Underpinning every function of cloud computing, workloads refer to any service, application or capability that consumes cloud-based resources. Put simply, a cloud workload is any combination of resources, processes and tertiary tasks required to access cloud services. 

A cloud workload might contain compute resources, data storage, networking features, applications and any number of processing tasks used to complete requests. Virtual machines, databases, applications, microservices, nodes and more are all considered workloads and all are vulnerable to security threats. 

According to the Orca Security 2022 State of Cloud Security Report¹, most organizations using cloud services are at high risk for a security event, with 81% maintaining public-facing unsecured assets. In general, of all the surveyed organizations, 11% of all stored assets were found to be vulnerable to several security threats, including the following:   

• Data infiltration: Data breaches happen when unauthorized users access protected files with the threat of corrupting, stealing or leaking sensitive information. The IBM 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that breached data stored in public clouds incurred the highest average breach cost at USD 5.17 million.

• Compliance violations: Organizations storing customer data such as health records or credit card numbers in the cloud are subject to strict cybersecurity regulations. The IBM^® X-Force^® Threat Intelligence Index 2024 found that data theft and leaks accounted for 32% of all security incidents, more than any other category. When companies fail to secure user data, they open themselves up to costly liability penalties, not to mention the loss of their customers’ trust.

• Outages and downtime: Cloud vulnerabilities are dangerous vectors for potentially devastating attacks that can cripple organizations and even public infrastructure. An example is the Colonial Pipeline attack, which shut down critical public and private fuel access across the eastern US seaboard, costing USD 5 million in data loss and nearly USD 1 million in regulatory penalties. However, even smaller security incidents can have a significant impact on the bottom line. IBM researchers found that 75% of increased costs associated with data breaches in 2024 were due to the cost of lost business. 

As cloud-based services continue to expand dramatically with the proliferation of software as a service (SaaS) apps, platform as a service (PaaS) offerings and an increasingly remote workforce, cloud platform protection is becoming even more important and complex.

As cloud resources spread across hybrid and multicloud platforms, each new type of environment presents unique challenges and parameters. CWPPs defend organizations against cyberthreats, mitigate outages and help ensure regulatory compliance in increasingly complicated cloud environments.   

CWPPs use various methods and tools to automatically detect and analyze any active workloads within a cloud environment to monitor networks, detect potential issues and apply customizable security standards.

Many development operations teams employ a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) methodology by starting cloud service updates as they become available and constantly iterating on various features. CWPPs contribute additional value by tracking new deployments and applying and maintaining standardized security protocols as new features and updates are released. 

The specific features of a CWPP might vary between vendors. However, various security experts from Gartner to Cloudstrike and leading providers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) recommend these general protections and features:

• Network visibility and workload discovery: A CWPP will provide a dashboard for authorized users to monitor activity from across the entire network to individual segments and users. Administrators can provide system-level controls, such as white or blacklisting specific applications, resources or activities based on predefined security policies and security best practices.

• Vulnerability scanning: Vulnerability assessments automatically scan workloads for potential weaknesses or misconfigurations before deployment for easy scalability. Security measures might include firewalling, malware detection and microsegmentation (dividing platforms into smaller subsections to slow down and stem potential attacks). Endpoint detection and response (EDR) and host-based intrusion prevention shield cloud workloads from external server attacks or infiltrations. CWPPs strengthen all new and existing cloud workloads by shrinking an organization’s attack surface and promoting shift-left security postures and zero-trust methodologies.  

• Configuration and compliance monitoring: CWPPs provide constant network diagnostics, ensuring that the entire cloud system is functioning as intended to mitigate any potential cloud misconfigurations that might open the door to an attack. Also, behavioral monitoring scans for any suspicious network activity, which might indicate unauthorized use or access.

Additional services, features and capabilities might include:

• Runtime protections

• Container and Kubernetes security configurations

• Application security

• CI/CD pipeline integration

• Web application and API security (WaaS)

• Web application firewalling (WAF)

Certain CWPP solutions might be better (or worse) suited for an organization’s specific workflow requirements. While all CWPPs might provide similar security measures, they provide protection in different ways. The 2 main types of CWPP are the traditional agent-based and the more modern agent-less variety. 

Traditional agent-based CWPPs require a software agent to be installed on every cloud workload. Benefits of agent-based CWPPs include:

• Detailed visibility into workloads, network traffic and system configurations for extensive security monitoring.

• Real-time threat detection that improves response time to active threats.

• Customizable agents that can be configured to meet the needs of individual workloads or workload categories. 

While agent-based CWPPs offer certain benefits, they are also slow to deploy and often slow down individual workloads and platforms by adding significant overhead. Because agent-based CWPPs provide security on the workload level, partially deployed agents create security blind spots and any workload potentially deployed becomes highly vulnerable. 

Agent-less CWPPs are integrated within the cloud service provider’s API and avoid the need to package individual workloads with their own agents. This method trades granular control and real-time monitoring for several valuable benefits, including:

• Highly improved deployment speeds.

• Total continuous coverage of all cloud assets, including existing and newly created assets.  

• Reduced overhead for agent deployment, updates and management and improved workload efficiency by eliminating resource consumption associated with individual agents and potential compatibility errors.