PSPM and CNAPP: Better Together
PSPM and CNAPP: Better Together
Organizations investing in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) face an important question: "Why would we need PSPM when we already have CNAPP?"
CNAPP remains essential. PSPM helps your security team use it effectively by reducing noise and eliminating alert fatigue.
Prevention and detection serve fundamentally different purposes in cloud security. They address different stages of the security lifecycle, operate with different mechanisms, and solve different problems. Understanding these differences explains why organizations need both - and how PSPM helps teams focus CNAPP on truly critical threats.
The Core Distinction: Different Problems, Different Solutions
PSPM and CNAPP solve fundamentally different problems. Here's how they compare:
| PSPM | CNAPP | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Prevent misconfigurations | Detect & respond to misconfiguration |
| When It Acts | Before resources are created | After resources are deployed |
| Approach | Enforce at deployment time | Scan and alert on existing resources |
| Coverage | Policy enforcement | Runtime posture visibility |
| Key Benefit | Zero-day security posture | Visibility across cloud estate |
| Remediation | Proactive → block | Reactive → fix |
CNAPP answers: "What security issues exist in our environment right now?"
Comprehensive scanning across clouds, continuous visibility into current state, threat intelligence and risk context, compliance mapping and evidence, detection of sophisticated attacks.
PSPM answers: "How do we systematically reduce what reaches production?"
Prevention visibility and gap analysis, simulation confidence before enforcement, safe deployment with exception management, measurable risk reduction over time, iterative prevention expansion.
Neither replaces the other. CNAPP without PSPM creates alert fatigue - comprehensive visibility into thousands of preventable misconfigurations. PSPM without CNAPP creates blind spots - prevention reduces issues but provides no validation, no detection of sophisticated threats, and no compliance evidence.
Together, they create defense in depth: prevention handles predictable, preventable misconfigurations at scale, while detection catches sophisticated threats, unknown risks, and issues that bypass preventive controls.
This guide explores how PSPM and CNAPP work together to create defense in depth: what each provides, how they enhance each other, and why organizations need both for comprehensive cloud security at scale.
Distinct Capabilities: Different Tools for Different Jobs
PSPM and CNAPP address fundamentally different aspects of cloud security. Understanding what each provides - and what each doesn't - explains why organizations need both.
What CNAPP Provides (That PSPM Doesn't)
CNAPP excels at comprehensive detection and visibility:
Continuous security scanning across every cloud service. CSPM, CWPP, KSPM, and CIEM components scan configurations, workloads, Kubernetes clusters, and identity permissions. CNAPP finds misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, overprivileged identities, and security gaps wherever they exist.
Runtime threat detection. CNAPP identifies malicious activi
How PSPM Reduces CNAPP Noise and Alert Fatigue
Organizations investing in CNAPP worry that adding PSPM creates overlapping spend. PSPM doesn't replace CNAPP - it dramatically reduces CNAPP noise so your security team can focus on truly critical threats.
The Problem: CNAPP Drowning in Misconfiguration Noise
Without prevention, CNAPP platforms surface every misconfiguration in the environment:
Alert volumes overwhelm security teams. Cloud alerts surged 388% in 2024. CNAPP finds thousands of misconfigurations: public S3 buckets, unencrypted databases, overly permissive security groups, missing MFA, wea
How PSPM and CNAPP Work Together
PSPM and CNAPP create a symbiotic relationship where each enhances the other's effectiveness through continuous feedback loops.
CNAPP Findings Inform PSPM Priorities
Detection data drives prevention investment decisions:
Volume analysis identifies prevention targets. CNAPP shows which issues appear most frequently. "Unencrypted EBS volumes" appearing 1,500 times signals a prime prevention candidate. "Public RDS snapshots" appearing 800 times across accounts indicates systematic gaps. PSPM uses this volume data to prioritize which preventive controls to deploy first for maximum impact.
Pattern recognition reveals systematic issues.
Common Questions: Justifying the Investment
Security teams evaluating PSPM alongside existing CNAPP investments need clear answers to budget and strategy questions.
"Isn't this overlapping with our CNAPP?"
No. CNAPP and PSPM address different problems at different lifecycle stages:
CNAPP detects issues after deployment. Resources exist in production, configurations are set, CNAPP scans what's there. Detection operates in the "find and fix" model: discover issues, generate findings, create tickets, coordinate remediation.
PSPM prevents issues before deployment. Build-layer scanning catches problems in code. Access-layer policies block risky API calls. Config-layer
Getting Started: Building Defense in Depth
Organizations approach prevention and detection from different starting points. Understanding what each platform provides helps teams build comprehensive cloud security.
What PSPM Provides
PSPM helps organizations systematically manage preventive controls:
Visibility into prevention posture. PSPM discovers and maps preventive controls across all four layers: Build (IaC scanning), Access (organization policies and SCPs), Config (secure defaults), Runtime (auto-remediation). Most organizations have scattered prevention with no unified view. PSPM makes existing prevention visible and quantifiable.
**Simulation before enforcement
Key Takeaways
PSPM and CNAPP serve complementary roles, not competing ones. CNAPP provides comprehensive detection and visibility after deployment. PSPM provides prevention management before and during deployment. Different stages, different mechanisms, different problems solved. Neither replaces the other.
PSPM reduces CNAPP noise and eliminates alert fatigue. Prevention reduces CNAPP finding volumes by 50-80%, eliminates misconfiguration noise, and helps security teams focus CNAPP on truly critical threats: sophisticated attacks, complex attack paths, and runtime threats requiring human judgment. Organizations with both reduce risk and eliminate alert fatigue while maintain
What's Next
Understanding Prevention
Learn the prevention-first framework:
- Prevention 101 - Complete framework for prevention-first security
- Why Prevention-First? - Six benefits of prevention-first security
- What We Prevent - Four prevention layers: Build, Access, Config, Runtime
- How We Prevent - Five practices for implementing prevention systematically
Understanding PSPM
Explore the PSPM category:
- What is PSPM? - Market category definition and platform capab