Cloud computing has become a pivotal element in the modern business paradigm, offering diverse cloud models and services that streamline IT infrastructure and drive digital transformation. The transition to cloud computing introduces a huge number of new cyber risks and attack vectors, leaving organizations susceptible to a variety of cybersecurity risks and threats, including insecure cloud connections, misconfigurations, identity theft, unauthorized access, and attacks on cloud servers, workloads, applications, code, and APIs.

Embracing cloud-native technologies, such as containers/Kubernetes (K8s) and serverless functions, introduces further security challenges due to their inherent complexity and vulnerabilities. Each of these technologies presents potential attack vectors, increasing the cloud environment's susceptibility to infiltration and compromise. Consequently, organizations must manually correlate risks across disparate tools, leading to operational complexity and heightened security challenges. While the use of open-source software in the development process provides benefits such as access to source code, cost savings, flexibility, and community support, it also introduces unique risks, including vulnerabilities in container images, code injection, credential loss, and compliance issues.

The increasing complexity of cloud environments, particularly hybrid and multicloud, characterized by dynamic and distributed architectures involving multiple workload technologies and services, is also prompting organizations to equip their developers with contextual risk information to gain visibility and facilitate quick understanding and remediation of critical security issues.

This is driving organizations to realize the importance of cloud security posture management (CSPM) and its indispensable role in managing security risks and threats in complex cloud environments, as it can offer them comprehensive visibility into the cloud environment and other critical capabilities such as misconfiguration management, continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and compliance management, to help them address the challenges posed by cloud migration. The demand for CSPM tools is surging as it has become an essential part of an organization’s cloud security strategy to maintain a strong security posture amid the challenges in managing multiclouds and adhering to stringent regulatory standards, which is expected to persist as a primary driver for CSPM adoption in the foreseeable future.

As organizations proactively use cloud-native technologies through DevOps workflows, CSPM is increasingly recognized as vital in supporting container, K8s security, and DevOps security practices. CSPM integrates with their containers/K8s, CI/CD pipeline, and application security tools, such as software bill of materials (SBOM), to improve visibility, detection, and management of application vulnerabilities, threats, malware, and secrets for consolidated risk management. This will lead to a shift toward automated and intelligent systems capable of prioritizing risks based on their impact and providing actionable insights for remediation.

Moreover, the increasing complexity and dynamic nature of cloud and cloud-native environments require advanced threat detection and response capabilities, which not only address simple compliance and risk management issues, but also real threats. This drives CSPM and cloud security vendors to innovate, ensuring their solutions support secure, compliant, and efficient cloud operations.

Moving forward, organizations seek integrated security solutions that offer detailed visibility and protection across various layers of cloud-native application environments. This shift from isolated security tools, including CSPM and cloud workload protection platforms, vulnerability management, infrastructure as code, and container security (which often lack cohesive coverage and context and require manual risk correlation and operational complexities) toward fully integrated cloud-native application protection platforms enable comprehensive visibility, risk management, and security protection across different cloud deployment layers. This evolution emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to cloud security that goes beyond compliance and static risk assessments toward a more proactive threat detection and response in real time across cloud-native workloads and applications while aiming to streamline operations and optimize the total cost of ownership.

In a ?eld of more than 35 global CSPM industry participants, Frost & Sullivan independently plotted in this Frost Radar™ analysis the top 13 companies that excelled in growth and ability to drive visionary innovation in the past year. Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to reveal their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™, considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.