Cloud-native security emphasizes scalability, agility, and real-time protection, ensuring that security is embedded into every phase of the development lifecycle, from code creation to production.
Protects applications and infrastructure that are built, deployed, and operated within cloud environments.
Secures dynamic, containerized applications using microservices architecture and DevOps practices.
Container security, orchestration (like Kubernetes), continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and automated threat detection.
As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures, they face challenges in securing dynamic, containerized environments.
Traditional security measures struggle to keep up with the scalability, automation, and distributed nature of cloud-native applications, leading to potential vulnerabilities across workloads, containers, and orchestration platforms.
SentinelOne already had cloud services in place, but with minimal features and a bad user experience, which resulted in no business growth with cloud customers.
Implement continuous security monitoring to detect and respond to threats in real time across the cloud environment.
Integrate security into the DevOps lifecycle (DevSecOps), ensuring security is automated and embedded in every phase of development.
Ensure compliance and governance by implementing policies that adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud-native infrastructure.
Our process of design and development that helped us make it happen, from the PRFAQ sketches to a full-fledged product.
Discoverdiverge
Understand the problem and explore options on how to solve it.
Defineconverge
Based on findings from the Discover stage, detailed requirements are created and teams align towards the vision.
Designdiverge
Option exploration and concept design.
Deliverconverge
Streamlined and intelligent flows. Present the right information and actions at the right time.
Design for varying capabilities, from little technical expertise to engineers. Guidance to mastery.
Anticipate needs and personalize. Contextual signals and recommendations.
A beautiful and familiar interface, yet unique when appropriate. Elevate without distracting.
Users often choose functions by mistake and need a clearly marked “emergency exit”. Support undo and redo.
Don’t make users remember things from one part to another. Make content and options visible, easy to access when needed.
Accelerators, unseen by a novice, may speed up interactions for an expert user. Cater to both inexperienced and experienced users, and allow them to customize frequent actions.
Express error messages in plain language. Explain the problem and suggest a solution.
Help and documentation should be easy to search, focus on the steps to take, and not be too long.
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Here is the team who gave their best to the complete UX design for the CNS project.
Karthik P
Senior UX Designer
Kartik D
Staff UX Designer
Mohit
Jr. UX Designer
Katre
Senior Researcher
Petr R
Design Ops Designer
The UX design team, along with product management, worked closely with the sales and marketing teams to understand and study what our competitors were doing.
We considered our top three direct competitors in the cybersecurity industry, and did a feature analysis along with a detailed analysis.
| Feature | SentinelOne | Prisma Cloud | CrowdStrike | Wiz |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard cloud provider support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations (VCS, CI/CD, DNS) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| System and custom rules (flexibility) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Categorized exposures | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| AI integration to resolve | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Customizable compliance | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Categorized data insights | Yes | No | Yes | No |
“As a cloud security engineer, I would like to make sure I am able to onboard all my cloud data seamlessly, and have the flexibility to control what sort of protection I can provide based on my preferences.”
| Cloud provider | Prisma Cloud | CrowdStrike | Wiz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | CNS and CWS features | CNS, CDS and CWS | CNS only |
| Azure Cloud | CNS and CWS features | CNS, CDS and CWS | CNS only |
| GCP | CNS and CWS features | CNS, CDS and CWS | CNS only |
| Alibaba Cloud | CNS and CWS features | CNS, CDS and CWS | CNS only |
Personas play a crucial role in enterprise product design by representing the diverse needs, goals, and pain points of different user groups. They help design teams understand the end users more deeply, ensuring that products are tailored to meet specific business workflows and user expectations.
In enterprise settings, where products often cater to complex, multi-layered organizations, personas guide decision-making, prioritize features, and align design efforts with real-world use cases. By focusing on personas, design teams can create more intuitive, efficient, and user-centered solutions that drive productivity and adoption across the enterprise.
Using the Persona Based Strategic Experience (PBSE) method, we identified two primary personas and two secondary personas.
DevOps Engineer
Compliance Administrator
Comprehensive monitoring of cloud-native environments, covering containers, workloads, and orchestration layers, to identify potential security risks in real time.
Easy integration with existing DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, to embed security checks early in the development cycle without disrupting workflows.
Automated tools that detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or anomalous behavior, and provide real-time responses to mitigate potential threats.
Features that ensure compliance with industry standards (like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2) and help generate audit reports quickly.
A CNAPP that can scale with their cloud architecture, adapting to the growth of workloads, containers, and clusters without performance degradation.
AI-powered analytics that can predict potential vulnerabilities and suggest preemptive actions to avoid security breaches.
Users struggle with multiple, disconnected tools that need manual effort to get a unified view of their cloud security posture.
Frequent alerts with a high rate of false positives overwhelm users, making it harder to focus on real security threats and reducing overall productivity.
Managing security across multiple cloud providers and platforms can be complex, requiring significant manual effort to ensure consistent protection.
Some CNAPP solutions have overly complex UIs that are difficult to navigate, slowing down users’ ability to address security risks effectively.
Ensuring continuous compliance in dynamic, cloud-native environments is challenging, due to changing regulations and the complexity of distributed applications.
Slow detection and response times to security incidents increase the risk of breaches, and leave vulnerabilities unaddressed for too long.
Here are some of the challenges we faced in the process, and the solutions we found.
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Users onboard their cloud accounts as per their choice of data visibility, and define their choice of protection features.
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Take advantage of all the system-defined policies, and create custom rules to make sure the cloud data is secure.
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Plug and play with various integrations from the S1 marketplace or third-party partners to enrich the security.
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Configure what, how and when the security results have to be visible for various personas.
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Security threats are represented in a unified way, but categorized for easy access and resolution.
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Customers try their best to keep their posture score high, and to be compliant whenever there is an audit.
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A space that shows users their overall level of protection, and how secure their environment is.
Support all the cloud account onboarding flows for AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba and OCI. As we move forward, the designs have to scale to support other cloud providers.
Maintain consistency across the designs, as the persona who onboards is the same one who creates rules. Keeping that consistency, all the different rules have the same experience, with changes in methods and parameters.
The designs have to support and expand to all the various third-party integrations, such as Rego, K8s and DNS, and adapt to marketplace integrations if the customer already has them.
As we already had CDS in place, we made sure the designs for CNS could easily be memorized and adopted by our old and new customers.
A unified way of representing exposures, consistent across the platform, for someone like a SOC analyst, who spends most of their time looking at alerts and exposures.
Compliance is a broad topic that involves many people and is critical to the customer’s organization, so its design had to support multiple personas. We went with a thought process of simple and sleek designs.
As we drafted the user personas, customer journey map, user flows and user tasks, the PM worked closely with us on defining precise use cases in the PRFAQ document. We designed these elements, along with prototypes, to move forward to the next step.
Once we had the first draft of the PRFAQ designs, we prepared a clickable prototype and started user interviews with our partner customers. The research process included:
| Test scenario | P1 | P2 | P3 | P4 | P5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Onboarding a cloud account (AWS, GCP) | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed with difficulty | Completed |
| 02Editing a cloud account (AWS, GCP) | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed |
| 03Creating a custom rule or policy | Completed with difficulty | Completed | Completed with difficulty | Not completed | Completed with difficulty |
| 04Creating a scanner and defining a policy (CNS, CDS) | Completed | Completed with difficulty | Completed | Completed | Not completed |
| 05Customizing a compliance report | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed |
| 06Identifying and resolving an exposure | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed | Completed with difficulty |
Measuring the user research with the SUS score, we decided to move into the next phase, and started converting the PRFAQ designs into design mock-ups.
We drafted all the user flows and tasks, along with identifying the edge cases.
We adapted the design to match the current design patterns in the product, and worked closely with the Gravity design team.
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We believe in providing the best experience to our users. We keep them informed, so they learn, explore and grow with each new feature we introduce.
We work towards customer engagement and experience, so we can learn and improve to provide the best experience for our customers.
Plan user interviews with a wide range of users, conduct surveys, and tag the features on Pendo, so we can gather both quantitative and qualitative findings.
Iterate on the designs as per the research findings, to align with user needs. Also work with PMs to bring in new features as per the business requirements.
The design process will be iterative: repeating and modifying the designs on a very regular basis, and looking at them every quarter to see if any enhancements have to be made.