Consistent Security Meets Continuous Deployment on Azure
It wasn’t that long ago when applications were monolithic pieces of software and updating them required a formal software release. Most businesses released updates once or twice a year— a very agile company might update once a quarter. But as cloud computing evolved, a revolution began in software development.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) became the mantra every company adopted as they moved their dev teams toward agile development. And cloud computing changed with it; the introduction of containers and microservices allowed organizations to break up those monoliths into specific functions so they can improve each function independently and update their products continuously. Now, most companies push updates daily.
How organizations secure their applications has changed as well. The focus is on continuous integration and deployment, making it difficult for security teams to identify and mitigate risks. If security doesn’t run at the same speed as development, it is usually left behind.
The Challenges
Overall, application development life cycles today are focused on being agile for continuous delivery, not consistent security while being continuously delivered. The rapid evolution of demand creates dynamics of constant change where security sometimes is an afterthought, and normally you don’t know until something has gone wrong….
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We see two main challenges that businesses face when dealing with securing their applications:
- Keeping up with the variety of attack types and different threats that requires a comprehensive and effective security model; and
- Consistent security of applications in the ever-changing dynamic environment – with cloud migration and the need for continuous delivery that requires an adaptive & automated application security model.
The rapidly evolving threat landscape poses a daunting challenge for the protection of web applications. Attacks on web assets are continuously growing in complexity and persistence. Zero-day attacks exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered. Bots, crawlers and spammers keep crowding web assets, evolving their techniques to disguise their nonproductive traffic as legitimate.
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The Smart Solution Is…
Web application security solutions must be smarter and address a broad spectrum of vulnerability exploitation scenarios. On top of protecting the application from these common vulnerabilities, they have to protect APIs and mitigate denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, manage bot traffic and make a distinction between legitimate bots (search engines, for instance) and bad ones, like botnets, web scrapers and more.
Companies face a wide range of security challenges, such as OWASP vulnerabilities, bot management, securing APIs and protecting against DoS. A synchronized attack-mitigation system that provides secure application protection against all the above threats, across all platforms and at all times is the way to go. It provides comprehensive security and a single view of application security events for quick incident response and a minimum impact on the business.
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…A Managed Service Option
Customers are increasingly requesting, if not requiring, a fully managed service option for security elements. Beyond the obvious complexity of managing the positive and negative security model rules, today’s attacks are dynamic and evolving. Teams managing application security are stressed by the rapid pace of new application development and application changes, all of which require vulnerability assessment and remediation in the form of continuous and consistent security policies.
Security service providers, including several in the cloud WAF space, have been adding some levels of managed service capabilities. However, relatively few of these come from teams with extensive real-world experience providing protection form advanced cyber-attacks and non are offering a fully managed services.
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Cloud is disrupting technology and Radware is embracing this shift by focusing on ‘Strength in Security’ with Microsoft Azure. Radware has worked closely with Microsoft to innovate and build joint solutions on Azure, for Azure, helping customers to take advantage of the most comprehensive managed security service available on any public cloud environment by introducing Radware Security for Azure.
