CNAPP consolidation and risk visibility: what IAM teams need to know

TL;DR: CNAPP adoption is accelerating as enterprises look to unify risk visibility across the cloud lifecycle, reduce tool sprawl, and embed security more cleanly into DevOps workflows, according to Orca Security’s summary of Gartner’s 2025 CNAPP Market Guide. The real shift is that cloud security is moving from point findings to contextual control across identities, workloads, code, and runtime.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Orca Security: the 2025 Gartner CNAPP Market Guide analysis

By the numbers:

• By 2029, 40% of enterprises that successfully implement zero trust within cloud service provider environments will rely on the advanced visibility and control capabilities offered by CNAPP solutions.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams evaluate CNAPP tools for cloud identity governance?

A: Security teams should test whether a CNAPP can connect identities, workloads, data, and code into a single risk path, not just list separate findings.

Q: Why does CNAPP matter for NHI and workload identity programmes?

A: CNAPP matters because cloud-native exposure often depends on non-human identities such as service accounts, roles, and tokens.

Q: What do security teams get wrong about unified cloud security platforms?

A: Teams often assume consolidation alone solves cloud risk.

Practitioner guidance

• Map cloud identity relationships into one governance view Inventory how service accounts, roles, workloads, and data stores connect across your cloud estate, then identify paths where one entitlement can reach multiple sensitive assets.
• Embed security findings into developer workflows Route cloud and application findings into ticketing, SCM, and IDE processes so remediation happens where developers already work.
• Test whether your stack can explain toxic attack paths Validate that your current tools can show how a misconfiguration becomes an exposure path through identity, workload, and data relationships.

What's in the full article

Orca Security's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The Gartner quotes and category comparisons behind each of the six CNAPP takeaways.
• Orca’s product-specific explanation of how its platform maps to cloud-native lifecycle coverage.
• The implementation examples for AppSec, runtime protection, and integration workflows.
• The vendor’s own framing of how its platform supports multi-cloud visibility and remediation.

👉 Read Orca Security’s analysis of Gartner’s 2025 CNAPP market guide →

CNAPP consolidation and risk visibility: what IAM teams need to know?

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