Acronyms are the worst.

I guess people do it to sound cool or something, but I once maintained a legacy project that had an acronym for a name. Not a single person working at the entire company knew what the acronym originally meant, and of course, it was never documented.

Acronyms are no different from words, in this regard. How many people remember/know why your storage is called a drive? A computer used to be a person. Why is the company Stripe named that?

Then there are backronyms and names that used to be acronyms, but technically aren't anymore.

Analyst firms (ie Gartner) are a big driver of this too. Couple that with the start up / VC model which needs to create new 'categories' to demonstrate differentiation, and you have a total mess.

I work for a vendor that sells a CNAPP. I've worked with this product before and it's been around for several years.

Until last week, I had never heard or read the term CNAPP.

"CNAPP is a term first coined by Gartner in 2021 to describe an all-in-one platform that unifies security and compliance capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to cloud security threats. A CNAPP integrates multiple cloud security solutions that have been traditionally siloed in a single user interface, making it easier for organizations to protect their entire cloud application footprint."

Thanks, Gartner. What a racket they have as a self-ordained arbiter of market segments.

A long time ago I worked on a defense program called "XMS 3000", hilariously, it was explained to me that this literally did not mean anything. They needed a name and somebody came up with this to sound cool.

15 years ago some interns where I now work created a spreadsheet and named it an acronym of their first names. That project has since developed into a fairly important system with a front end and database. They kept the name the same, of course.

You don't need to know the acronyms to understand the article. Use context clues to infer that the author's point is "traditional tools don't solve the problem I am about to present". They even expand the acronyms later in the article.

Besides, most such acronyms for classes of security tools don't actually mean much. They just represent the current flavor of the week in the security arms race.

> They even expand the acronyms later in the article.

That's the OPPOSITE of how you're supposed to use acronyms. If you're going to spell it out anyway, why not do it the first time you talk about it like you're supposed to?

FWIW I’ve worked extensively in AWS IAM for over a decade and have never heard of half the acronyms in the article. Don’t be intimidated.

My condolences.

Crap, I didn't know these acronyms before either and now I've turned into a Gartner shill :sob:

There is a middle ground, if the author cares enough: the `<abbr>`[1] and `<acronym>`[2] markup tags were designed to solve those problems in an unobtrusive way. It makes folks unfamiliar able to hover-over (or long-press, I believe) the dotted underlined terms to know, and stays out of the way for those who already know them

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...

2: (evidently deprecated but still parsed) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ac...