Frost Radar: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2025

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Organizations worldwide continue to accelerate their cloud migration, driven by the surge of AI-native applications and services that on-premises systems are not designed for. Multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies are becoming the norm in their digital transformation journey. This has exposed new security challenges, such as inconsistencies in controls across cloud platforms and gaps in workload risk and threat visibility, that attackers have been quick to exploit.

A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) manages these complex environments, providing comprehensive visibility and security protection for cloud workloads, applications, and data. These platforms enable automation, deep visibility, and the detection of anomalous behaviors and threats across diverse cloud workloads, such as containers, K8s clusters, and serverless functions.

A CWPP, which is normally agent-based, is a server workload-centric security solution to protect computing workloads in cloud environments (private, public, hybrid, and multicloud) from cybersecurity risks and attacks, regardless of the workload's location.

Frost & Sullivan analyzes numerous companies in an industry. Those selected for further analysis based on their leadership or other distinctions are benchmarked across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria to reveal their position on the Frost Radar™. The publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™ considering their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.

Analyst: Anh Tien Vu

Strategic Imperative and Growth Environment

Strategic Imperative

• Organizations worldwide continue to accelerate their cloud adoption in 2025; multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies are becoming the norm as businesses diversify their strategies and migrate a greater volume of workloads to cloud environments. Cloud migration is also driven by the surge in adoption of AI-native applications and services, as on-premises systems are not designed to support them.
• The broad adoption of cloud has exposed new security challenges, such as inconsistencies in controls across cloud platforms and gaps in workload risk and threat visibility, which attackers have been quick to exploit. This has driven a corresponding rise in demand for cloud workload protection solutions to manage these complex environments and provide comprehensive visibility and security protection for cloud workloads, applications, and data.
• Many businesses realize that they must adopt CWPP to protect their critical workloads in these complex cloud environments by enabling automation, deep visibility, and detection of misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, secret exposure, policy violation, compliance misalignment, anomalous behavior and threats across diverse cloud workloads, such as containers, K8s clusters, and serverless functions.
• A CWPP, which is normally agent-based, is a server workload-centric security solution to protect computing workloads in cloud environments (private, public, hybrid, and multicloud) from cybersecurity risks and attacks, regardless of the workload's location. Typical workloads that CWPPs secure include cloud/edge servers, hosts, VMs, containers/K8s, serverless functions, databases (SQL and NoSQL), APIs, and AI models.
• By providing critical pre-deployment security checks, such as scanning of IaC templates, virtual machine and container images, and compliance management, CWPPs can provide better workload misconfiguration and vulnerability management across workloads, repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and application codes and automate remediation to reduce exposure to supply chain attacks.

Growth Environment

• The CWPP industry is in a growth phase and has evolved rapidly, with vendors prioritizing real-time threat detection, runtime protection, and cloud-native workload visibility. Many LBs invest heavily in cloud security technologies and their workforce to secure workloads, applications, and data to avoid service disruptions and data breaches and adhere to regulatory compliances.
• The CWPP market is expected to generate revenue of $6.43 billion in 2025, representing YoY growth of 25.4%. Revenue is set to hit $15.54 billion in 2030 (a compound annual growth rate of 19.3% from 2025 to 2030).
• Customers in the BFSI and tech industries are the largest adopters of CWPP, requiring robust cloud security solutions to manage compliance, shift-left security, vulnerability/risk management, and runtime protection/threat management. They take a proactive approach to cloud security and cyber-risk management as they accelerate their cloud migration for critical workloads.
• The growth of cloud spending, better awareness of the cloud threat landscape, and heightened accountability of CISOs and their teams are driving CWPP adoption globally. The use of multicloud, hybrid cloud, and containerized environments in modern application development exacerbates inherent cloud security challenges that create gaps in visibility and control in the supply chain.
• Simultaneously, as organizations are maturing their DevSecOps culture, there are requirements for integration of CWPP with the CI/CD pipeline to enable automated security and compliance checks. This integration provides granular visibility into the entire application development lifecycle.