Understanding The Benefits and Challenges of Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

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What Are Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)?

As the name implies, CWPP secures workloads in multi-cloud with an agent deployed on each workload. These solutions grew from the need to protect workloads as organizations began migrating to IaaS because the security requirements of cloud workloads are different from traditional IT systems.

In short, regardless of the workloads’ location and granularity, CWPP protects them from attacks. Because it’s agent-based, CWPP is difficult to deploy and manage across multiple clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI). This technology may be best for hybrid environments that include virtual machines, as VMs require you to run specific code from the software vendor for system-level security.

Pros & Cons of Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)

Listed below are the benefits and challenges of cloud workload protection platforms:

Pros (Benefits):

• Includes capabilities such as network visibility, firewalls, and identity-based segmentation; some solutions offer controls such as application whitelisting.
• Enables you to manage workload vulnerabilities and harden configurations.

Cons (Challenges):

• Not all vendors’ CWPP solutions extend security to containers and
  microservices.
• Installing and maintaining agents on every asset slows down deployment,
  adds costs, and may impact performance.

Bottom Line:

Many organizations have been deploying CWPP together with cloud security posture management, but CWPP is no longer an essential component of your cloud security stack because the needs of multi-cloud have outgrown CWPP technology.