5 Common Cloud Security Gaps and How Lacework FortiCNAPP Can Close Them

How to Close Visibility, Misconfiguration, and Runtime Gaps with a Platform-Based CNAPP Approach

Cloud computing has transformed how businesses develop, deploy, and scale applications. But while agility and speed have increased, so have the risks. Security is too often left behind—fragmented across tools, disconnected from development, and misaligned with how cloud environments actually operate.

To keep up, many organizations are turning to cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs). The value of this approach becomes clear when viewed through the lens of today’s most common cloud security gaps.

However, not all CNAPPs deliver the full range of capabilities required to close those gaps. A comprehensive solution must unify visibility, posture management, runtime protection, cloud detection and response (CDR), and application-layer defense. Lacework FortiCNAPP does exactly that: bridging signals from host telemetry and cloud audit logs through features like composite alerts, and delivering continuous, contextual protection in one platform.

1. Lack of Unified Visibility Across Cloud Environments

Public cloud environments are inherently dynamic. New workloads, APIs, containers, and serverless functions are deployed and destroyed within seconds. In many cases, each business unit or cloud account may use different tools—or none at all—to monitor risk.

Without a consistent view across cloud providers, security teams struggle to detect misconfigurations or quickly respond to threats. As a result, blind spots become persistent liabilities.

How Fortinet Helps:
FortiCNAPP delivers cross-cloud visibility through continuous asset discovery and real-time inventory mapping. It identifies unmanaged resources, tracks changes, and correlates data across providers, helping security teams maintain awareness of every workload, user, and configuration.

2. Delayed or Fragmented Misconfiguration Detection

Misconfigurations are one of the most common causes of cloud breaches. However, many organizations only identify these issues long after deployment, typically during a compliance review or following an incident.

Traditional cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools help flag violations, but they often operate in isolation from runtime environments or deployment pipelines. This slows remediation and disconnects findings from their operational impact.

How Fortinet Helps:
FortiCNAPP includes built-in CSPM that continuously scans for misconfigurations across multi-cloud environments. It not only detects violations in real time but also ranks them by severity and maps them to compliance frameworks, such as CIS, NIST, and PCI. Its integration with FortiAnalyzer provides deeper contextual analysis, helping teams prioritize what matters most.

3. Disconnected Runtime and Control Plane Protection

Even well-configured cloud environments can be compromised at runtime. Attackers may exploit vulnerable containers, escalate privileges, or use lateral movement to spread. Runtime behavior is often hard to track, especially in Kubernetes or serverless environments that lack traditional agents.

Security tools that focus solely on configuration cannot detect what happens once workloads are running.

How Fortinet Helps:
FortiCNAPP integrates runtime workload protection, including file integrity monitoring, process behavior tracking, and anomaly detection. It observes container and serverless functions in real time, flags suspicious behaviors, and provides actionable insights, often without requiring separate agents.

In addition to agent-based runtime data, FortiCNAPP continuously monitors Kubernetes audit trails and cloud provider logs to detect threats within the control plane. These CDR capabilities expand detection to areas often overlooked by traditional workload-focused tools, such as unauthorized identity actions or unusual cloud API usage.

One of the key differentiators of FortiCNAPP is its use of composite alerts, which combine signals from both host-level activity and cloud logs. This unified analysis increases detection fidelity and enables rapid investigation of multi-vector attacks, such as when abnormal container behavior coincides with suspicious cloud identity activity.

4. Inconsistent Application-Layer Defense

Attackers increasingly bypass infrastructure controls by targeting APIs, web interfaces, and business logic flaws. However, organizations often treat application-layer protection as a separate domain, relying on legacy web application firewalls (WAFs) or API gateways that may not align with cloud-native deployments.

This fragmentation leads to inconsistent enforcement and leaves APIs and web applications vulnerable.

How Fortinet Helps:
FortiWeb and FortiWeb Cloud deliver advanced WAF and API protection, and they are now integrated with CNAPP functionality. These solutions provide deep inspection, bot mitigation, and behavioral analysis for APIs and applications, no matter where they are hosted. Combined with FortiCNAPP, application-layer protection becomes part of the same continuous risk assessment pipeline as posture and workload security.

5. Security Not Integrated into Development Pipelines

In many organizations, security is often introduced late in the development process. By the time an application reaches production, insecure code or misconfigured infrastructure may already be deployed.

Traditional scanning tools aren’t built for modern CI/CD pipelines. This leaves developers without timely feedback, creating friction between the security and engineering teams.

How Fortinet Helps:
FortiCNAPP supports a shift-left approach by integrating with CI/CD systems to scan Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), container images, and application artifacts before deployment. It also ties findings back to runtime behavior, creating a closed feedback loop that improves security outcomes. Fortinet’s broader platform includes FortiDevSec for SAST and DAST scanning, as well as FortiSOAR, which automates response workflows when risks are identified prior to deployment.

From Fragmentation to Unified Protection

Each of these gaps reflects a familiar problem: fragmented tooling. Many organizations have adopted cloud services faster than they’ve evolved their security practices. As a result, risk management becomes reactive, inconsistent, and hard to scale.

A platform-based CNAPP approach changes that. By unifying posture management, workload protection, cloud detection and response, and application-layer defense into a single workflow, FortiCNAPP helps teams secure cloud-native applications from code to runtime, across any cloud, any deployment model, and any stage of the software life cycle.

As cloud environments become increasingly complex, this integrated approach will be crucial, not just to reduce risk, but to maintain the speed and flexibility that cloud computing was meant to deliver in the first place.

Discover how Lacework FortiCNAPP addresses the top cloud security gaps by unifying posture management, runtime protection, CDR, and application-layer defense to reduce risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.