With the growing number of Web applications and APIs as a primary source for interacting with customers, application security is a priority for companies across all industries. One flawed application or glitch that causes a negative customer experience can have a devastating impact on a company’s image and reputation.
Even worse, security gaps in the application that can expose the customer or company. This is why protecting these resources against security threats has been a major priority for companies and a key component of their security strategies.
Top trends in application security
Companies are continuing to change their application security strategy to address new security gaps and threats that plague their evolving workload deployment environment such as containers, serverless, or other microservices.
While we’re already well into the first quarter of the year, let’s take a look at the top major application security trends shaping up in 2022:
#1. Moving to cloud-ready security solutions
Cloud adoption has accelerated drastically, with 25% of surveyors in a recent Check Point study sharing they have more than 50% of their application workloads in the cloud. This move is facilitated by the cloud’s flexibility, agility, and scalability–all characteristics that support growing DevSecOps and essential for supporting DevSecOps processes. As newer applications emerge at great velocity to take advantage of these benefits, security must keep up. Security requirements need to be designed and built for the cloud. The security solutions must meet the same levels of agility, flexibility, and scale to meet the adoption needs, which also requires a great deal of automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
#2. Consolidation for improved incident detection and response
With the average security operations center (SOC) teams receiving approximately 10,000 alerts per day for security alone, they are feeling overwhelmed. This is more than the average team can effectively triage, investigate, and remediate, which results in true threats being lost and security gaps widening as security analysts waste time on false positive detections.
A major common cause of alert fatigue is a result of disparate, standalone security solutions, as the modern network is complex, spanning on-premise environments, cloud deployments, remote sites, and mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This creates a security architecture that is difficult to monitor and manage. As companies work to modernize their IT infrastructure, consolidation to simplify security architectures is critical. Companies will be looking for solutions that address multiple cloud security needs across their entire IT environment. This will streamline operations and make it more feasible for security teams to effectively detect and respond to potential incidents.
#3. APIs are the new internet-facing service
Web application firewalls (WAFs) are not enough to protect today’s internet-facing assets against exploitation, as companies have shifted to a mix of web applications and web APIs. In fact, according to analyst research firm, Forrester, companies are exposing over half of their applications to the internet or to third-party services via APIs.
These new web APIs face unique security challenges like misconfigurations, improper asset management, broken authorizations, injection, etc. These new challenges have driven the development of new Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solutions to replace legacy WAF technology.
#4. The rise of bot-as-a-service providers
Bots are commonly used to interact with websites or web APIs, and are often used to automate cyberattacks. As an example, a bot may be used as part of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack or to perform credential stuffing against an authentication service.
Malicious bots are more readily available now more than ever with Bot-as-a-Service providers- making it easier to perform these attacks. This leaves companies needing to catch up to protect against them. Bot management solutions, as part of an application security strategy, are critical to thwart attacks on an organization’s web-facing applications and APIs or to waste resources that would otherwise be used to fill legitimate requests.
#5. Adopting automated security capabilities powered by AI
Expanding infrastructures, accelerated threat landscapes, compliance requirements, and limited resources are just some of the issues facing Security Operations Center (SOC) teams. These challenges are overwhelming and slow the ability to detect and respond to threats. As a result, security automation tools will become more readily adopted this year to address expanding security challenges. Artificial intelligence offers a solution with its ability to automate data gathering, threat identification, and incident response. With security automation, limited security personnel and resources can be used where they provide maximum benefit to the organization.
As web applications and APIs become the primary source for interacting with customers, one flawed application or glitch that causes a negative customer experience can have a devastating impact on a company's image and reputation. #appsec #respectdataClick to Tweet2022 will set its own course and create its own headlines, but your company does not have to be featured in them for the wrong reasons, such as a security or data breach. By adopting some of the top trends within your application environment, you will stay ahead of attackers and create greater operational efficiency.
