What steers digital transformation in the right direction? It is the potential to innovate new digital capabilities rapidly that offer the power to enhance business agility in a significant manner. There are certain aspects to the Cloud capabilities, like scaling storage resources dynamically with an elastic infrastructure, making use of web apps to give support to transactions and workflows, and increasing the access to resources that are essential in this digital transformation. In recent years, web applications have evolved exponentially. Nowadays, companies prefer building internal business applications using cloud and web-scale technologies to streamline workflows and simplify access to critical information from any device present in any location. This results in increased profitability and productivity.
Security: A fundamental element of the DevOps process
It is imperative to provide DevOps teams with the resources required to build, deploy, and quickly update web applications to support the transition.
As web applications tend to go through various infrastructure boundaries critical resources, security poses as an important element of app development. But unfortunately, most of the DevOps teams barely have any security experience and the IT security teams are unfamiliar with the majority of DevOps processes. All of this makes it difficult to implement security.
Despite these hurdles, companies strive to place security on the highest priority simply because resources and applications are vital for their business. Implementing security calls for a sturdy strategy to ensure that security can be achieved without any complications in the development or the decrease in productivity and efficiency.
Tackling the challenge of incorporating security into DevOps
To tackle these challenges, any organization must consider certain aspects in order to secure their applications and reduce risk.
To start with, DevOps service companies require security tools that are precisely designed to be integrated with the app development process. As a lot of critical services now make use of CI/CD pipeline methodologies, Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) are crucial as they provide advanced web security capabilities that can be utilized in various form factors.
Whenever DevOps establishes a new web app version, standard web security products eat up a lot of time and effort. They also require scaling up of defenses every time the website’s or application’s traffic grows. Moreover, whenever an application changes, any element related to security needs further fine-tuning so the WAF doesn’t drop valid traffic.
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Web Application Firewall: A SaaS Solution?
A highly critical component of DevOps is speed. It is imperative to deploy security tools rapidly in order to avoid delays in the DevOps CI/CD Pipeline. Primarily, DevOps teams focus on integrating the security tools to achieve the rapid delivery of business capabilities as it does not require them to be experts in that process. All their aim is to be able to attach their application with security capabilities and protect them with minimal management.
A practical way of implementing security while supporting speed, effective nature of the apps, and ease-of-use it to leverage a SaaS deployment that puts protection resources close to the web app’s origin servers dynamically.
SaaS solutions can be deployed and configured automatically, with only slight configuration changes to make them more effective. For a hassle-free integration into the app lifecycle, these solutions often consist of easy-to-use APIs and interfaces. Being a managed service, SaaS functions work just fine without being constantly deployed, maintained and fine-tuned.
To further enhance the accuracy and rule out the need to invest time in eradicating false positives, there is an option to go with SaaS solutions that leverage Machine Learning capabilities that fine-tune policies in real-time. Machine Learning enables the WAF to differentiate precisely among malicious intent, benign anomalies, and normal behavior, enabling new and improved applications to be launched instantly without compromising with productivity.
Conclusion
For your business to achieve success in today’s time, maintaining an efficient app development process is crucial. However, security has to be of utmost priority when it comes to your web applications. Make sure to keep an eye on the security tools that will help your digital business strategy stay on track without compromising the security of important customer data, regulatory compliance, and brand reputation.
Ajeet Singh
