Cybersecurity vendor Check Point Software adds Risk Management Engine to its CNAPP

Editor’s brief: One of the leading cybersecurity vendors in the world, Check Point Software, expanded its CloudGuard Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with Risk Management Engine, said to provide intelligent risk prioritization, agentless scanning, entitlement management, and pipeline security. Read more below.

SINGAPORE – Leading global provider of cybersecurity solutions Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP) unveils new risk management engine and expanded features for its Check Point CloudGuard Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). Smart risk prioritization, agentless scanning, entitlement management, and pipeline protection are some of the new features. The new capabilities operationalize cloud security with an emphasis on context, speed, and automation, removing the complexities and overhead noise associated with traditional standalone cloud security alerts and freeing up security teams to concentrate on comprehensive threat preventions from code to cloud across the entire application lifecycle while supporting the agility of DevOps.

The pace of cloud adoption and digital transformation is quickening. According to the 2022 Cloud Security Report, 35% of respondents are relying on the cloud for more than 50% of their workloads. But 72 percent are very worried about cloud security, and 76 percent are held back by the difficulty of managing multiple cloud vendors, which frequently leads to incorrect configurations, a lack of visibility, and potential exposure to cyberattacks. Due to the necessity of 24/7 security operations and alert fatigue, the study found that misconfiguration is viewed as the leading cause of security related incidents.

“It is challenging for organisations to manage security risk while supporting faster cloud-native development cycles,” says Melinda Marks, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), “As development teams grow, organisations are looking for a unified platform to help them prioritise and efficiently take the actions that are the most impactful in reducing security risk so they can effectively manage security instead of falling behind.”

In addition to its existing Cloud Identity & Entitlement Management (CIEM), Agentless Workload Posture (AWP), and pipeline security tools, Check Point CloudGuard has introduced Effective Risk Management (ERM) to provide smart risk prioritisation, enabling teams to swiftly eliminate critical vulnerabilities based on severity, such as misconfigurations and over-privileged access, at any point in the software development lifecycle. The collaborative output that businesses receive is straightforward and focused on the dangers that really matter to them, making it easier to deal with the complexity that was once an obstacle. The threat landscape can be simplified by reducing this complexity.

“Cloud adoption continues to accelerate and the ability to streamline cloud security has become vital,” explains TJ Gonen, VP Cloud Security at Check Point Software. “By adding Effective Risk Management and amplifying Check Point CloudGuard’s CNAPP offering, we are making it possible for organisations to shift CNAPP left and take a prevention-first approach to their cloud security that’s easy to manage. With our contextual AI and risk scoring engine, security teams no longer have to manually figure out which alerts to remediate first—the machine will do it for them. By removing this burden, customers can focus on migrating their critical workloads to the cloud with confidence.”

To better assist security professionals, Check Point CloudGuard integrates the most up-to-date tools into a new generation of CNAPP capabilities, while also removing obstacles to DevSecOps with ShiftLeft applications. Check Point CloudGuard harnesses the potential of unification and provides users with operational value, such as:

• Effective Risk Management: CloudGuard’s ERM engine prioritises risks and provides actionable remediation guidance based on full context including workload posture, identity permissions, attack path analysis and the application business value. Security teams can now focus on the critical threats and administer “minimal effective dose” of security for maximum impact.
• Cloud Identity & Entitlement Management: The CIEM capabilities understand effective permissions of users and cloud services, identify exposure and risks, and automatically generates explicit least privilege role recommendations to reduce access and revoke unused permissions. With CIEM built into ERM, users can understand their permissions and enforce least privilege across their cloud environments.
• Agentless Workload Posture: AWP extends CloudGuard’s agentless infrastructure visibility into workloads. AWP scans and identifies risks including misconfigurations, malware detection, vulnerabilities and secrets across all cloud workloads including virtual machines, container and serverless functions. With this agentless deployment model, security teams gain deep workload security visibility at scale without impacting performance.
• Pipeline Security: The pipeline security capabilities fully integrate the Spectral offering to detect and resolve misconfigurations, secrets, and vulnerabilities within CloudGuard. The developer-first security extends workload protection to the CI/CD to pipeline to remediate issues before reaching production. Security teams can shift CNAPP left and secure cloud applications from the start.

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