The security landscape for cloud-native applications is undergoing major transformation. Containers, Kubernetes, and serverless technologies are the defaults in modern companies and accelerate delivery, but expand the attack surface in ways that traditional security models cannot keep up.
As adoption grows, so does complexity. Security teams are asked to monitor vast hybrid environments, sift through thousands of alerts, and protect dynamic applications that evolve multiple times a day. The question is not just how to detect previous risks, but how to prioritize and respond to what really matters in real time.
That’s where the Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPPS) comes up. These platforms integrate visibility, compliance, detection, and response into an integrated system. But in 2025, one feature proves essential. Runtime visibility.
New center of gravity: Runtime
For years, cloud security has leaned heavily towards preventive controls such as code scanning, configuration checks, and compliance enforcement. Although essential, these measurements provide only a portion of the photograph. They identify theoretical risks, not whether those risks are active and exploitable in production.
Runtime visibility fills that gap. By observing which workloads are actually running and how they behave, security teams get the highest fidelity signal to prioritize threats. The runtime context answers important questions:
Is this vulnerability reachable with live workloads? Does this misconception create a real attack path? Is this workload currently being abused?
Without a runtime, organizations risk chasing false positives, but attackers exploit real weaknesses. Runtime allows teams to focus on fixing the most important issues, reducing both noise and exposure.
From prevention to prioritization
Modern businesses face an avalanche of alerts that span vulnerability scanners, cloud attitude tools and application security platforms. The volume is simply not overwhelming. It’s unsustainable. Analysts often spend more time triaging alerts than actually fixing issues. To be effective, organizations must map vulnerabilities and false mining to:
Proactively running workloads. Business applications they support. Teams that fix them.
This alignment is important to bridge the gap between security and development. Developers often view security outcomes as disruptive and low context interruptions. Meanwhile, security teams lack the visibility into ownership and accountability needed to facilitate remediation.
By taking prioritization into runtime insights, businesses can ensure that the right teams fix the right issues at the right time.
The role of AI in cloud security
Even if prioritization is better, the pure scale and complexity of cloud environments challenge human teams. This is where artificial intelligence is beginning to reconstruct the CNAPP landscape.
AI can help you with the following:
Correlates the signals across domains. Apparently unrelated events in logs, network traffic, and workload behavior can reveal new attack campaigns. Reduce false positives. Pattern recognition and large-scale language models can identify which alerts are truly practical. Accelerating response. Automated inference can also propose repair procedures and take action in low-risk scenarios.
At Sysdig, we’ve seen how AI works as a multiplier of the power of security teams. Our AI security analyst, Sysdig Sage™, uses multi-step inference to analyze complex attack patterns and surface insights that traditional tools miss. For excessive security operations centers (SOCS), this means faster detection and shorter average time to resolution (MTTR).
Takeout: AI is not going to replace security teams, but it reconstructs how they work by filtering noise, enriching context and allowing smarter, faster decisions.
Accountability and collaboration
Another challenge facing enterprises is accountability. Security findings are only valuable if they reach the right owner in the right context. However, many organizations have clearly reported vulnerabilities as to which teams should fix them.
This is why the findings return to the importance of code artifacts, ownership and deployment context. You can trace back to teams that introduced vulnerabilities discovered in production. Security is a common responsibility and is not a burden of silence.
Partnerships and integration play a key role here. For example, collaboration between Sysdig and SEMGREP allows organizations to connect to source code that originated runtime vulnerabilities, reducing round-trip and streamline repairs between teams.
Why integration is inevitable
For a long time, businesses have relied on breeding vest security tools. However, in the cloud, fragmentation is a responsibility. Multiple Point products generate duplicate findings, lack shared context and increase operational overhead.
CNAPP represents the next stage of integration. By integrating vulnerability management, attitude assessment, threat detection, and incident response to a single platform, organizations can:
Eliminate the silo. Reduce tool sprawl. Get a single source of truth for cloud risk.
And most importantly, they can bring everything back to runtime, making sure that real-world threats are never lost in noise.
Preparation for the next one
The rise of containers and cloud-native applications shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, by the end of the decade, containers are expected to power half of all enterprise applications. As this growth comes pressure for security teams to adopt strategies to scale, simplify and automate.
The future of cloud security is defined by three priorities:
Runtime-driven visibility to block noise and focus on real risks. AI-driven assistance for team triage, prioritization, and responding at machine speed. A unified platform that consolidates fragmented tools into a single context view of cloud risk.
Companies that embrace this model will be positioned to move faster, reduce exposure and stay ahead of the attackers. Those who cling to disconnect tools and reactive processes will find themselves overtaken more and more.
Ensure that what is important when it matters
The cloud has redefines the way businesses build and run applications. Now they’re redefineing how they have to protect them. Runtime visibility, AI-driven prioritization, and unified platforms are no longer options. These are essential.
At Sysdig, we believe that the future of cloud security is rooted in real-time context and collaboration. By focusing on what’s happening positively in production, organizations can coordinate security and development, reduce false positives, and respond with confidence to threats.
The message is clear: Stop chasing all alerts and start focusing on what’s most important.
To explore these trends in greater depth, download the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms.
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