To stay relevant, organizations must be nimble, offering new services, and capabilities that transform their customers' experiences while managing the volatile world of cyber attackers.
In this dynamic environment, application development has accelerated. Forty percent (40%) of customers are updating their code daily, and 77% perform weekly updates, opening holes in security vulnerabilities and necessitating a shift in how they are managed. Forget integrating security at the end, leaving exposed risks and increased costs! “Shift left” places security management directly at each application development phase from code to runtime— reducing security risks and costs.
Migrating applications to the cloud can increase agility and scalability. What about securing the data, applications, and tools to ensure that you’re delivering secure cloud applications?
A recent survey with 2,500 respondents highlighted 5 top challenges and 5 top risks corporations encounter as they move toward the cloud. Security challenges that benefit from visibility, prevention, and protection.
Moving to the cloud-5 top challenges
We've found that the five challenges not only slow down your application development process. Moving vulnerabilities and misconfigurations upstream, five commonly experienced application-level risks are emerging.
In the survey mentioned above, 30% of respondents said the lack of visibility into vulnerabilities across their cloud resources introduced risks, blocking their ability to achieve comprehensive security. Lacking the ability to detect, contain, and resolve threats within an hour leaves applications vulnerable to attacks.
Five security risks that can impact your security posture are often encountered in:
Shipping insecure code and exposed credentials cause 82% of cloud breaches
Shift Left – Gain Visibility and Control, Exercise Prevention, and Embed Protection
How do you mitigate the five challenges while minimizing the five risks? Look for a security product specifically designed to continuously build in cloud security. Automating manual processes, securing cloud applications, amplifying visibility and control of security vulnerabilities, exercising prevention, and embedding protection are accomplished at every step of the CI/CD pipeline.
Visibility and control help find and mitigate vulnerabilities in the early stages of application development. Alerts allow you to apply prevention to workload images, web applications, APIs, unrestricted network access, and misconfigurations, ensuring protection at each CI/CD pipeline step. Embed security in the coding, building, developing and runtime mitigates potential risks—reducing remediation costs, the number of exposures, and most importantly potential breaches.
“Shifting left” in your application life cycle requires managing security across teams and embedding a holistic security plan across your organization. For example, automating manual tasks and reducing human error can’t be done in a silo. Sharing expertise on the tools’ capabilities and features builds trust and increases security expertise credibility across the organization.
Cloud security solutions that provide continuous and near real-time detection of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats from code to runtime allow organizations to respond quickly and effectively to detect a breach or vulnerability.
Continuous visibility and control enable rapid and continuous developments, updates, maintenance, and securing of cloud-based applications across dynamic engineering ecosystems and cloud environments.
Right security tools such as Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud scanning capabilities help build security starting with writing the code. Identifying vulnerabilities, risks, and compliance violations ensures that code is free from security holes before progressing to the “deploy phase” of the application's lifecycle.
With modern automation and the need for speed, cloud applications are in a continuous development, testing, and release cycle. Developers often rely on untested open-source code to accelerate development, introducing additional hidden risks.
From the source, a single vulnerability can easily grow exponentially through the pipeline, making it harder to eliminate. Identifying application vulnerabilities and compliance issues prevents weaknesses that bad actors might abuse. Prisma Cloud helps enforce your policies to ensure trusted applications only are deployed in the cloud runtime environment. For example, Prisma Cloud’s Defender automatically protects workloads in runtime, scans registries, and API Security. Other capabilities auto-correct misconfigurations and secure cloud storage.
Regardless of where it’s deployed (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc.), an application’s runtime actions should be monitored for abnormal behaviors, preventing risks from occurring during this phase. Using predictive and threat-based protections, Prisma Cloud quickly identifies expected behaviors and prevents anomalous behavior.
With built-in scanning capabilities, policy enforcement, and predictive and threat-based protection, Prisma Cloud easily shifts your security left, ensuring that your cloud applications are secured from the start.
Prisma Cloud Field Guide e-book helps you learn to maximize application security by leveraging Prisma Cloud’s full capabilities at each stage of your cloud application development cycle.
The Prisma Cloud Security Guide provides a complete guide on how Prisma Cloud establishes the pillars of security for your cloud journey. Need help configuring, provisioning, and deploying Prisma Cloud for the maximum benefit? We recommend Prisma Cloud CBDR Adoption Workshop or Deployment Service for Prisma Cloud Foundations. Shift left for optimum cloud application security.
Learn more read The State of Cloud Native Security Report 2023
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