Strengthen Your Cloud Security: Integrate Prisma Cloud CWPP with Your BAS Platform

Anmol Jain -

Security teams are facing an increasingly complex challenge: how do you know that your cloud security controls are working as intended? 

It’s unfortunate as it’s true. Many traditional security approaches often leave organizations guessing whether their defenses will hold up against real-world attacks. 

Fortunately, the integration between Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) and Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) provides a conclusive answer to this question.

In this post, we'll walk through the architectural design and integration process involved in connecting BAS platforms with Prisma Cloud CWPP, specifically focusing on how this combination enables continuous security validation.

Before we dive into the technical architecture of the integration, it's worth asking why organizations are increasingly turning to this integrated approach. 

Let's explore the reasons behind this trend.

Why Integrate BAS with Prisma Cloud CWPP?

Organizations need continuous validation that their cloud security investments are delivering real protection. Integrating BAS with Prisma Cloud helps achieve:

  • Continuous Security Validation: Provides ongoing proof that your cloud workload protection is effectively blocking real attack scenarios, not just theoretical threats.
  • Real-Time Defense Testing: Uses automated attack simulations to test runtime protection capabilities across hosts, containers, and serverless functions without waiting for actual breaches.
  • Comprehensive Coverage: Validates security effectiveness across diverse cloud environments, from traditional VMs and Kubernetes clusters to ephemeral serverless functions.
  • Evidence-Based Optimization: Provides detailed forensic data showing exactly how attacks were stopped or why they succeeded, enabling precise security policy tuning.

Understanding the Target Architecture

Modern cloud environments typically operate across two distinct system types, each requiring specialized security validation:

Traditional Cloud Infrastructure: This tier encompasses cloud-hosted systems, including virtual machines (VMs) and containerized environments such as Kubernetes clusters. These persistent systems require comprehensive runtime protection and continuous attack validation.

Serverless Architecture: The second tier involves serverless computing platforms like AWS Lambda functions, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. These ephemeral, event-driven services present unique security challenges due to their dynamic nature and limited attack surface visibility.

Prisma Cloud CWPP Integration Architecture

Prisma Cloud's Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) operates as a core component of Prisma Cloud's Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). It provides comprehensive runtime security through a sophisticated architecture of Defenders and complementary agentless scanning capabilities.

To integrate your platform with Prisma CWPP, you can take one of the following two approaches that is best suited for you:

Approach 1: Defender-Based Runtime Protection

This approach provides real-time security enforcement through lightweight agents deployed across your cloud infrastructure. It's highly effective for runtime threat prevention and policy enforcement.

Step-by-Step Architecture:

Step 1: Deploy Defenders Across Your Infrastructure: Defenders are deployed on hosts, containers, and serverless runtimes to collect security data and enforce policies set in the Prisma Cloud.

Step 2: Configure Runtime Protection Policies: Secure the Defenders using centrally-managed policies that define acceptable behavior, network communications, and execution patterns for your workloads.

Step 3: Enforce Real-Time Security Controls: Defenders operate at the runtime level, blocking malicious activities, preventing container escapes, and stopping unauthorized network communications based on predefined security policies.

Step 4: Centralized Management and Monitoring: All Defenders communicate with the Prisma Cloud Compute Console for policy updates, security event reporting, and centralized visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure.

Approach 2: Agentless Security Assessment

This method complements Defender-based protection by providing comprehensive security posture management without requiring agent deployment.

Step-by-Step Architecture:

Step 1: Establish Cloud Provider Integration: Connect Prisma Cloud directly to your cloud service providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) to assess security configurations and identify vulnerabilities.

Step 2: Implement Continuous Scanning: Configure agentless scanning to identify misconfigurations across cloud services, perform vulnerability assessment of container images, and evaluate API security settings.

Step 3: Apply Risk-Based Prioritization: Use Prisma Cloud's analytics to prioritize security findings based on actual exposure and potential impact, focusing remediation efforts on the highest-risk issues.

Step 4: Generate Compliance Reports: Leverage comprehensive reporting capabilities for audit requirements and evidence of continuous security monitoring.

Conclusion

Prisma Cloud’s CWPP capability with BAS integration provides a comprehensive approach to cloud security validation that goes far beyond traditional defensive measures by delivering:

  • Proactive Security Validation: Unlike passive monitoring that waits for real attacks, this integration continuously tests your defenses with controlled simulations, identifying gaps before attackers do.
  • Cross-Architecture Coverage: While conventional tools focus on either traditional infrastructure or cloud-native services, this integration validates security across VMs, containers, and serverless functions simultaneously.
  • Continuous Defense Optimization: Static security configurations become outdated quickly; this integration enables dynamic improvement based on actual attack simulation results rather than theoretical best practices.

At Metron, we've successfully implemented this integrated approach across a wide range of cloud environments, from simple containerized applications to complex multi-cloud serverless architectures.

We've worked extensively with both Prisma Cloud's architecture and various BAS platforms, and more importantly, we've identified what works in real-world scenarios so you don't have to spend months fine-tuning policies or second-guessing your security effectiveness.

If your organization is looking to integrate Prisma Cloud with your security platform or is facing challenges while building such integrations, connect with our experts at connect@metronlabs.com.