The Gartner EDR Market Guide for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms addresses what industry professionals should look for in a cloud workload protection platform. After reviewing the guide and evaluating, two things remain clear—protection must span development and runtime and should include aspects of cloud security posture management.
Notable Best Practices from this Gartner Market Guide:
Legacy Support: When using operating systems that are no longer supported by their providers (like Windows Server 2008), Gartner affirms that when exploring CWPP solutions, security professionals: “require support for those OSs, …and compensating controls if the system is unpatched.”
Single offering: Gartner recommends looking for offerings that protect physical machines, VMs, containers, and serverless workloads — all managed from a single console, regardless of the location of the workloads and their granularity.
Solid Container Support: Vendors should have mature container image support and looking to implement serverless function scanning and protection in the near future if not already.
Flexible deployment: CWPP vendors should support alternative deployment options, including privileged containers, Kubernetes DaemonSets, sidecars, and emerging options for disk image analysis (typically via snapshotting.
Urgency: Security and risk management leaders are now advised to implement CWPP for all workloads or application architectures, not just tier-1 apps.
DevSecOps: Pre-deployment workload scanning and compliance efforts in DevSecOps, especially for container-based and serverless functions
In the future: If using Kubernetes and considering a managed Kubernetes service, make explicit support of this environment a requirement as well.
Virsec Security Platform (VSP) was recognized as a 2021 Gartner Representative Vendor as a part of this Market Guide, furthering Virsec’s market validation in the Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) space. To learn more, download it here.
Additional Reading from Gartner:
“How to Protect Your Clouds With CSPM, CWPP, CNAPP and CASB“ by Richard Bartley
“How To Make Your Cloud More Secure Than Your Own Data Center” by Neil MacDonald, Tom Croll
Disclaimer:
Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, Neil MacDonald & Tom Croll, 12th July 2021.
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