CNAPP vs. Governance Platform: Different Tools, Different Missions
As cloud security matures, two categories of tools have emerged as essential—but often misunderstood—players: Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs) and Governance Platforms. While both operate in the cloud security domain, they serve fundamentally different purposes. Understanding the distinction is critical for security leaders building a modern, resilient, and scalable cloud strategy.
Different Philosophies, Different Problems
At their core, CNAPPs and governance platforms were designed to solve different challenges.
CNAPPs are built to protect workloads and applications. They scan for vulnerabilities, detect misconfigurations, monitor runtime behavior, and flag threats. These tools sit close to the infrastructure and workloads, providing protection through inspection and detection.
By contrast, a Governance Platform is built to define, enforce, and orchestrate policy. It's not just a scanner or alert engine—it’s an intelligent data layer that contextualizes and unifies information from across your cloud ecosystem, enabling teams to make decisions, set policy, and automate enforcement across disparate tools.
What They See—And What They Miss
A CNAPP thrives on logs, agents, and real-time scanning. It tells you what’s misconfigured or at risk right now. That’s valuable—but it's limited to what the CNAPP can see and interpret.
Governance Platforms see something different: configuration state, ownership metadata, security posture, and operational context across CSPs, identity providers, SaaS tools, and more. They excel at answering nuanced questions like:
- “Which untagged long-lived resources exist across all regions and accounts?”
- “Are the right policies being applied based on the business owner’s function?”
- “Where are gaps between what the CNAPP detects and what should be remediated according to our framework?”
These are not detection problems. These are data problems, and they require a layer that can normalize and interrogate data with precision.
SQL, Not Search Boxes
Most CNAPPs provide dashboards, filters, and static rule logic. They surface what they’re designed to detect—but rarely let users explore or join across data sets.
Governance Platforms take a different approach. They normalize all ingested data into a queryable, SQL-accessible format, enabling teams to write investigations, join disparate sources, and save those as repeatable queries, views, and eventually policies. This enables a powerful feedback loop: investigations turn into monitoring, monitoring turns into automation.
Why SQL? Because almost every organization already knows it—and it’s one of the most expressive, extensible ways to reason about structured data.
From Insight to Action
CNAPPs are often bound by their own alerting logic. Governance Platforms go a step further: they orchestrate insight across tools. If an alert is raised in one system, the governance layer can add ownership, sensitivity, exception policy status, or remediation SLA context—then push that enriched alert to the appropriate downstream system.
This transforms noisy alerts into actionable signals.
Federation, Tenancy, and Real-World Fit
In the real world, organizations aren’t monolithic. Enterprises have dozens of teams, business units, and regions. MSSPs support hundreds of clients. CNAPPs might struggle to accommodate that complexity.
Governance Platforms, on the other hand, support federated governance and fine-grained ABAC/RBAC controls, making it possible to give different teams visibility and control over their domains—without losing central oversight.
That’s not a feature. It’s table stakes.
Both Are Critical, But Only One Governs
CNAPPs are indispensable for identifying issues in the cloud stack—but they weren’t built to govern architecture, align teams, or orchestrate action across an enterprise or ecosystem. Governance Platforms don’t replace CNAPPs—they connect and contextualize them, and everything else.
If CNAPPs are the guardrails, Governance Platforms are the map.
Final Thought
Security teams don’t just need more alerts—they need more context, clarity, and control. A Governance Platform provides that by transforming data into decisions. It’s not just protection—it’s direction.
