Gartner defines the application security testing (AST) market as the buyers and sellers of products and services designed to analyze and test applications for security vulnerabilities. This market is highly dynamic and continues to experience rapid evolution in response to changing application architectures and enabling technologies. AST tools are offered either as software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based subscription offerings, or less often, as on-premises software. Many vendors offer both options.
Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. CNAPPs incorporate an integrated set of proactive and reactive security capabilities, including artifact scanning, security guardrails, configuration and compliance management, risk detection and prioritization, and behavioral analytics, providing visibility, governance and control from code creation to production runtime. CNAPP solutions use a combination of API integrations with leading cloud platform providers, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline integrations, and agent and agentless workload integration to offer combined development and runtime security coverage.
Gartner defines Software Composition Analysis (SCA) as a technology that analyzes applications and related artifacts (containers, registries, etc.) to detect open-source and third-party software components known to have security and functional vulnerabilities, are out-of-date for security patches, or that pose licensing risks. SCA products and services help ensure the enterprise software supply chain includes only secure components and, therefore, supports secure application development and assembly