What Security Strategies Should Address Across Hybrid Environments
The lack of visibility into security events can severely impact your organization be it a costly data breach or a malicious threat actor hacking into your network. But how do you maintain a coherent security policy across multiple environments when network infrastructures are constantly evolving?
According to Radware’s The State of Web Application and API Protection report, 70% of web applications now run in cloud environments requiring the need for increased agility. Organizations have to start thinking about security differently to ensure a coherent, comprehensive security strategy in a diverse environment.
How To Think About Your Security Strategy
There has been a convergence of application and cloud security happening lately. Application protection in the context of a hybrid cloud environment requires a comprehensive approach that also combines protection against application vulnerabilities, exploits, and security of the cloud infrastructure.
A buzzword in the industry when it comes to cloud protection and security is agility. Outside of reducing IT infrastructure costs, organizations migrate to the cloud because agility is key, modernly in our global economy. Having access to flexible, on-demand IT resources is crucial for keeping pace with competitors and rapidly changing industry regulations and policies.
In IDC surveys, “lack of sufficient tools” was considered the predominant reasons for breaches in cloud environments. Applications are emerging as critical security control points that provide unique contextual information such as behavior, intent, and authenticity. When developing your security strategy, another thing to think about is your approach to providing frictionless security at the pace of innovation. In other words, an approach that is easily deployable, automated to ensure defenses are up to speed, and instantly adapts to change for applications and infrastructures across hybrid environments because what you don’t want is to develop something that becomes a roadblock.
Key Capabilities Your Security Strategy Needs In Order to Deliver Visibility and Control
According to IDC, the hybrid cloud workload security market is forecast to grow at a rate of 19% by 2025. Securing a hybrid environment is no longer optional and requires a security strategy that delivers visibility, control and addresses application and cloud security holistically anywhere and consistently.
- Adaptivity & Automation – Leverage behavioral-based and machine-learning algorithms to proactively manage frequent changes to the application, their underlying environments, new security threats, and more.
- Holistic, agnostic application protection – Provide 360-degree application protection for both the application surface and the cloud application infrastructure across all environments.
- Frictionless Security– Integrate as much as possible with the development cycle (make sure it does 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- Keep your security for applications uniform to enable the same level of holistic protection agnostic to the application infrastructure, whether it be private or public clouds.
- Develop a Broad Range of Solutions- Provide multiple deployment options, including cloud services, software, and hybrid.
- Visibility & Control - Develop dashboards that provide actionable analytics, automation, and customized controls.
