This guest blog was contributed by Eyal Arazi, Radware
As we enter 2022, it has never been more important to have a viable cloud security strategy. It starts with visibility and control and addresses application security holistically.
As remote workforces ramped up during the pandemic, businesses continued to move quickly toward the cloud. According to Radware’s The State of Web Application and API Protection report, 70% of production web applications now run in cloud environments. While this rapid shift enhanced productivity, it did not come without challenges.
The same report revealed approximately one third of respondents anticipate that their organization’s most significant application security concerns over the next two years will be maintaining a coherent security policy across heterogenous environments. Nearly as many respondents believe that their most significant concern will be gaining visibility into the security events impacting their organization.
These statistics underscore one of the key overarching issues of application security: despite the implementation of new security technologies, organizations continue to struggle maintaining visibility and consistency of security policies across a collection of platforms, infrastructures, and technologies. To ensure coherent, comprehensive cybersecurity in an environment that is as diverse as it is evolving, organizations must begin thinking about security differently.
The reality is that application and cloud security are converging. In the age of hybrid clouds, application security requires a holistic approach that combines protection against both application vulnerabilities and exploits, with the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure. Moreover, application and cloud environments require “frictionless” security to ensure defenses are up-to-speed and automatically adapt to changes to either the application or cloud environment without becoming a roadblock to innovation and change.
Securing this “out-of-control” environment requires a security strategy that delivers visibility, control and addresses application and cloud security holistically, consistently, and anywhere.
Six Requirements to Keep Applications and Hybrid Environments Secure
Here are the six key security requirements needed to keep applications and hybrid environments secure:
Holistic, agnostic application protection: Security must span all environments – providing 360-degree application protection for both the application surface and the cloud application infrastructure.
Adaptive and automated: Security must leverage behavioral-based and machine-learning algorithms to proactively manage frequent changes to applications and their underlying environments, new security threats and more.
Frictionless: Security should be integrated as much as possible with the development cycle and not interfere with business processes. It needs to be adaptive so it can change with the frequent changes to applications and the underlying deployment platform. As application development and deployment processes become more agile, security must be tightly integrated with the application development process. This seamless integration must rely on automated algorithms that can identify changes to the application and automatically adapt security policies.
Consistency: Security needs to feature uniform, advanced security for applications everywhere to enable the same level of holistic protection agnostic to the application infrastructure, whether private or public clouds.
Visibility and control via security and development dashboards: These dashboards must provide actionable analytics, automation, and customized controls.
A broad range of solutions: Security should provide multiple deployment options, including cloud services, software, and hybrid.
Our dependence on hybrid, heterogenous environments that span public clouds, private cloud and on-premise data centers isn’t going away anytime soon. Because of this, organizations must be able to adapt to these complex ecosystems with a solid security strategy that can keep vital applications and hybrid environments secure.
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