CWPP vs CSPM

CWPP vs. CSPM

As cloud adoption continues to surge, enterprise attack surfaces continue to grow. Every new cloud service, containerized workload, and virtual machine expands the potential entry points for attackers. The threat landscape is evolving rapidly, with cloud attacks on the rise and getting smarter. In fact, according to the 2025 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report, 75% of cloud-conscious actors removed log files to evade detection.

This rise in cloud adoption has elevated cloud security to a top priority for modern enterprises. With multiple attack vectors, it's essential for companies to implement solutions that proactively defend cloud-based infrastructure. That’s where a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) is invaluable, delivering a comprehensive solution that integrates various cloud security capabilities.

Within a CNAPP, cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) play pivotal roles in securing cloud environments. Together, CWPP and CSPM form the backbone of a solid cloud security strategy, providing the visibility and control necessary to secure ever-expanding cloud environments.

Understanding CWPP

A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) is a cloud security solution that provides real-time protection, threat detection, and compliance monitoring for cloud workloads deployed in your environment, whether they’re virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions. It ensures that these workloads are continuously monitored and safeguarded from vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats.

What makes CWPP especially valuable is its ability to scale easily across diverse environments while remaining user-friendly. As cloud infrastructure grows and evolves, CWPP ensures that security remains intact, safeguarding against vulnerabilities that arise from misconfigurations or gaps in protection. For organizations navigating the complexities of modern cloud environments, CWPP is key to maintaining strong, scalable protection. 

Key functions of CWPP

CWPP delivers many vital features to an organization, providing robust protection across cloud environments. Here’s an overview of the key functions a CWPP offers:

• Comprehensive visibility: Offers full visibility into an organization’s different cloud workloads through a single platform, allowing security teams to monitor assets, identify risks, and track changes in real time.
• Threat detection and response: Applies advanced detection capabilities and threat intelligence, enabling security teams to detect and respond to issues in real time.
• Vulnerability management: Identifies and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on risk, so security teams can focus on addressing those with the highest impact.
• Runtime protection: Safeguards cloud workloads by detecting and preventing malicious activity at runtime in containers and microservices.
• Network segmentation: Ensures workloads are isolated to reduce the risk of lateral movement in the event of a breach.
• Unified security management: Centralizes security management across multiple cloud environments with a single platform, simplifying oversight and ensuring consistency in policies.
• Automated attack path analysis: Identifies potential attack paths within the environment, enabling security teams to take proactive measures to defend against exploitation.
• Integration with DevOps: Seamlessly integrates into DevOps workflows, ensuring security is embedded throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Understanding CSPM

CSPM provides continuous monitoring, policy enforcement, and threat assessment of risks across cloud infrastructures, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS). CSPM provides multi-cloud visibility for cloud resources and automatically prevents cloud misconfigurations and application vulnerabilities. This allows for improved risk visualization and assessment, accelerated response, improved compliance monitoring and remediation, and optimized DevOps integration. CSPM uniformly applies best practices for cloud security to hybrid, multi-cloud, and container environments.

CSPM provides an essential function in helping organizations maintain security hygiene across their cloud infrastructures. By empowering security teams to follow cloud security best practices, CSPM helps organizations prevent breaches and aids in compliance with regulatory frameworks.

Key functions of CSPM

CSPM solutions deliver a range of crucial functions designed to secure cloud environments and ensure ongoing compliance. Some key CSPM features include:

• Comprehensive visibility: Offers full visibility into cloud assets and configurations, providing a single source of truth across multi-cloud environments and accounts.
• Misconfiguration management: Monitors and detects misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, and other security risks in the cloud environment.
• Policy enforcement: Empowers teams to establish a best practice security policy and enforce it across the entire cloud infrastructure.
• Automated detection and remediation: Quickly identifies misconfigurations and indicators of attack (IOAs), automating corrective actions and remediation workflows to reduce the risk of breaches.
• Prevent identity threats: Analyzes the organization’s IAM configurations to prevent unauthorized access and ensure that user permissions are tightly controlled.
• Simplified privileged access and cloud entitlement management: Streamlines the management of privileged access and cloud entitlements, reducing the risk of over-provisioned permissions.
• Comprehensive compliance management and reporting: Captures cloud security findings and provides reports to simplify compliance management.

Key functions of CWPP vs CSPM

While both CWPP and CSPM are pivotal for cloud security, they address different aspects of the cloud security landscape. Here’s a look at how they compare across key functional areas:

How CWPP and CSPM work together

CWPP and CSPM complement each other to form a holistic cloud security strategy by addressing different layers of security needs. CWPP focuses on the protection of individual workloads while CSPM, on the other hand, oversees the broader cloud infrastructure, ensuring that configurations are secure, policies are consistently enforced, and compliance requirements are met. Together, CWPP and CSPM create a comprehensive security framework that protects both the micro-level details of individual workloads and the macro-level aspects of overall cloud infrastructure.

Adopting both CWPP and CSPM creates a layered defense that enhances an organization’s overall cloud security. For example, in a real-world scenario, CWPP can identify and respond to a security threat within a specific workload, such as isolating a compromised container. Meanwhile, CSPM monitors and corrects broader configuration issues that can eliminate vulnerabilities in the first place, such as ensuring that cloud security policies are properly enforced and compliance standards are met.

This combined approach improves risk management by providing a more robust defense mechanism, covering all angles from real-time threat detection and vulnerability management within workloads to overarching security posture and compliance management across the entire cloud environment.

Selecting the right tool for your needs

When choosing between CSPM and CWPP, it’s important to consider the specific security challenges your organization is facing. If your primary concern is protecting individual workloads from threats and vulnerabilities, CWPP is likely the right choice. It offers targeted protection and real-time threat detection for these components of your cloud environment.

If, on the other hand, your focus is on managing the overall security posture of your cloud environment, including ensuring secure configurations and compliance with policies, CSPM will be more appropriate. CSPM provides a broader focus with continuous monitoring, misconfiguration management, and policy enforcement across your entire cloud infrastructure.

In many cases, organizations operate in hybrid environments that span multiple cloud platforms and on-premises systems. In such scenarios, both CWPP and CSPM might be ideal. Adopting both tools can provide a more comprehensive approach, addressing both detailed workload protection and overarching cloud security management.

When navigating the decision on which tools are best for your organization, here are some important factors to consider:

• Compliance readiness: Assess how well the tool helps your organization meet relevant regulations.
• Scalability and flexibility: Choose solutions that can scale with your cloud environment and adapt to evolving security challenges.
• Vendor reputation: Evaluate the vendor’s track record and industry standing to ensure you choose a reliable and trusted solution provider.
• Support and service: Consider the level of customer support offered, including the responsiveness, expertise of the support team, and availability of resources.

CrowdStrike’s approach

Eliminate security blind spots with agentless cloud-native protection that continuously monitors your environment for misconfigurations. CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security integrates all aspects of cloud security — CWPP, CSPM, CIEM, CDR, and ASPM — into a unified console, enhancing threat visibility and correlation across cloud, endpoint, identity, and more, for complete attack path analysis and quicker investigations.

Falcon Cloud Security is the industry’s first and only unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Fully integrated from code to cloud, Falcon Cloud Security provides powerful capabilities that support your CSPM and CWPP use cases:

Secure cloud infrastructure with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM):

Get full and continuous visibility and monitoring across all clouds. Empower teams to provision cloud infrastructure securely, prevent misconfigurations through standardized policies and maintain compliance.

Secure cloud workloads with Cloud Workload Protection (CWP):

Protect your entire cloud-native stack, on any cloud, across all workloads, containers and Kubernetes applications. Get complete visibility into workload and container events for faster and more accurate detection, response, threat hunting, investigation and remediation.