2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP: Our Key Takeaways

The 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP has just been released, which we believe underscores how CNAPPs are evolving into the foundation of cloud-native security strategies. CNAPPs are now defined as unified, integrated platforms that protect cloud-native applications throughout their entire lifecycle, from development pipelines to runtime environments.

As enterprises scale their use of cloud-native technologies, the challenges of fragmented tooling, siloed teams, and limited visibility have intensified. In our view, the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP makes it clear that CNAPPs are rapidly becoming the answer for organizations seeking to consolidate capabilities and gain a full-stack view of risk.

Gartner® Market View

The Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP describes CNAPPs as a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. The market is growing rapidly, driven by vendor consolidation and increasing demand for contextual, full-stack risk visibility.

This positioning reflects an important shift in buyer priorities: instead of stitching together multiple point solutions, organizations want a consolidated platform that delivers continuous, contextual security across code, configuration, identity, and workloads.

Our Top 5 Key Takeaways/Learnings from the Report

Several insights from Gartner are discussed for security and DevSecOps leaders, our key takeaways are:

1. Consolidation and Integration Are Top Priorities
   Enterprises want fewer tools. CNAPPs that combine CSPM, CIEM, CWPP, and DevSecOps capabilities are strongly preferred. In our opinion, the Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP highlights that organizations are looking for platforms that unify these capabilities rather than juggling separate tools, with the goal of reducing complexity and improving coordination across teams.
   
   To be considered a full CNAPP, solutions must include API integrations with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes, along with CSPM + CWPP + CIEM + IaC scanning + Container scanning capabilities.
2. Developer-Centric Security Continues to Gain Importance
   Shift-left security, IaC scanning, CI/CD integration, and minimal developer friction are critical. Development pipeline integration and security guardrails are now mandatory capabilities, with compliance reporting support for CIS, NIST, PCI, and HIPAA standards.
   
   The reality is clear: developers distrust security tools that slow them down, making low-friction user experience essential for successful adoption across development teams.
3. Runtime Context Is Increasingly Critical
   Real-time visibility into workload behavior across VMs, containers, and serverless environments is vital for prioritization and remediation. Support for multicloud and both agentless and agent-based deployments is required, as both approaches are necessary depending on specific use cases.
   
   This flexibility in deployment approaches reflects the diverse nature of modern cloud environments and the need for adaptable security solutions.
4. Risk Correlation and Prioritization Are Defining Features
   Customers want attack-path-style insights and unified risk views that correlate across code, configuration, identity, and runtime. Graph analytics and attack path analysis are expected differentiators that help organizations focus on risks that matter most to the business.
   
   Unified policy management and data models enable rich context with attack paths and graph correlation capabilities, transforming how security teams understand and respond to threats.
5. Emerging AI Differentiators
   Generative AI integration for summarization, remediation guidance, and policy suggestions is becoming a key market trend. These capabilities are designed to reduce management overhead and enhance pattern analysis for threat detection and response.
   
   Application security convergence is also emerging, with AST, ASPM, and API security features folding into CNAPPs, while data security posture (DSPM) capabilities are becoming adjacent requirements.

Consolidation, Context, and Collaboration

In our view, the Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP highlights both the opportunities and challenges in the CNAPP market. While adoption is rising, many solutions still lack the depth of integration that enterprises need. Tool sprawl, siloed teams, and incomplete coverage across compliance, runtime, and DevSecOps workflows remain persistent pain points. At the same time, buyers are increasingly cross-functional, with security, DevOps, and engineering teams all expecting platforms that align with their workflows and reduce friction.

Uptycs is closely aligned with this vision. Our CNAPP consolidates CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, and DSPM into a single platform that reduces complexity while delivering graph-powered attack-path analysis for context-rich prioritization. We integrate directly into CI/CD pipelines to support shift-left practices, and we provide both agentless and agent-based runtime protection across multicloud environments to ensure flexibility without slowing innovation.

Our understanding of the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP is that it underscores that the future of CNAPP is about unifying capabilities, delivering actionable context, and enabling collaboration across diverse teams. Uptycs is proud to deliver CNAPP capabilities , helping organizations strengthen cloud-native application security while reducing complexity at scale.

👉 Download the complete 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP to explore the full findings.

Uptycs can help your organization consolidate tools, prioritize risks, and protect cloud-native applications.

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Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms, By Dale Koeppen, Esraa ElTahawy, 5 August 2025

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