Securing public cloud environments with tools like Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) has become a top priority for InfoSec leaders. In fact, cloud security spending has increased (statistics show that the market is growing at a rate of 25.1% year over year, from $10.98 billion in 2021 to 13.73 billion in 2022¹), but unfortunately, so has the number of data breaches, with the 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report from Verizon finding that 90% of data breaches target the public cloud.²

The whole point of this increased spend is to protect sensitive data in the cloud, so what’s wrong?

One of the things I hear from customers several times per week is that they don’t know what sensitive data they have in the cloud and they certainly don’t know where that sensitive data resides. Unfortunately, the CNAPP solutions that they’ve invested in can’t help. While these solutions do a great job of characterizing the likelihood of an incident by correlating weaknesses and visualizing attack paths, they don’t understand the impact of the potential incident because they don’t know whether it would result in sensitive data being exposed to the attacker.

In other words, most CNAPP solutions are unable to differentiate between a “critical” severity event with no sensitive data exposure versus a “high” severity event with millions of records of PII at risk. At Zscaler, our customers have repeatedly asked us to solve this problem, and that’s what is so exciting about today’s announcement. We are combining the capabilities of our comprehensive CNAPP solution, Zscaler Posture Control, with the time-tested data protection capabilities that are already trusted by thousands of organizations.

Growing pains in the public cloud

Cloud services like Amazon S3 Buckets, Azure Blob, and Google Storage have been widely adopted across enterprise cloud deployments and approximately 90% of enterprises³ use multiple clouds for data storage. However, data’s exponential growth poses a risk: the more data stored in the public cloud without proper controls, the easier it is for bad actors to steal them. As a result, the top challenges of securing sensitive data are now because of:

CNAPP solutions that lack visibility into sensitive data: With data distributed across cloud applications and services, organizations are experiencing 10K data loss events annually.⁴ Without a deep integration of data exposure into the correlation and prioritization engine, enterprises are unable to really understand which risks are most important. Additionally, most solutions focus only on object storage, such as S3 and Azure Storage Blobs, but sensitive data, malware, secrets, and more can be found across the cloud, including in VM and container images.
Too many alerts, not enough resources or context: Siloed security policies from point products yield thousands of isolated alerts, but approximately 30% of alerts go uninvestigated⁵ due to volume, context, and talent scarcity without helping the organization understand and prioritize true risk.
Insecure configurations: Cloud service configurations are complex—especially in multicloud environments that lead to configuration errors or excessive permissions—and can result in high-profile exposures and compliance penalties.

With these challenges in mind, here at Zscaler, we believe a new approach is needed.

Introducing the industry’s most comprehensive CNAPP solution with integrated DLP and threat intel

Zscaler Posture Control addresses these challenges so organizations can take advantage of the cloud without compromising on security or productivity. With the latest release, we are excited to share that we will be strengthening our Posture Control, Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) solution by natively integrating our best-in-class Data Loss Protection (DLP) solution and ThreatLabz threat intelligence which is powered by the world’s largest security cloud. Deep understanding of how incidents will occur and the resulting data exposure gives DevOps and security teams an unprecedented sense of where to focus their limited resources. The result? Increased security AND increased efficiency.

Get the biggest return on your investments

By bringing these capabilities together, security teams can get rid of siloed point products and more accurately correlate hidden risks caused by the combination of misconfigurations, threats, and vulnerabilities across the entire cloud stack. With this precision, you can eliminate alert fatigue and enable security teams to prioritize risks more effectively, allowing faster response time and greater security while being more resource- and cost-effective.

In addition, embedding DLP and threat intelligence into Posture Control makes it easier for security and cross-functional teams to understand who is doing what with your sensitive data and implement tighter controls when and where needed. This tighter integration of components also allows for better cross-team cooperation across the entire application lifecycle.

Key benefits:

Resource and cost reduction with point product consolidation: A single, easy-to-deploy agentless solution that eliminates point products by unifying CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, and DLP, continuously securing every stage of the application lifecycle.
More accurate risk identification, correlation, and prioritization: Integrated DLP and threat intelligence that identifies attack paths and detects ongoing attacks by automatically correlating seemingly low-risk signals when viewed individually but can be considered great risks when viewed holistically.
Efficiency at scale: An integrated graph-based correlation and prioritization engine that expedites remediation and reduces alert fatigue by focusing on the risks that matter most.
Native, end-to-end solution without silos: A solution that reduces security and DevOps silos with 360-degree in-depth visibility of risks across the entire multi-cloud footprint – including virtual machines (VMs), containers, and serverless workloads – from build to run.

Summary

Data breaches and sophisticated threats will continue to rise. As a result, organizations undergoing digital transformation or building new cloud apps must streamline security processes. Zscaler is committed to helping organizations address the digital transformation challenges they face in an ever-changing cloud native environment. Bringing CNAPP, DLP, and threat intelligence components together is part of that commitment. A unified, cloud native security solution like Zscaler Posture Control is designed to identify, prioritize, and remediate the most critical cloud security risks.

For more information please watch the on-demand launch webinar or sign up for a free security risk assessment.