Last updated on April 30th, 2024 at 02:47 pm
Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability
In today’s landscape, applications are now the primary gateway for almost all organizations. Brands must not only meet but exceed expectations, delivering seamlessly intuitive digital experiences to captivate customers and drive revenue. Rapid adoption of cloud native technologies is enabling organizations to increase innovation speeds and respond more quickly to constantly evolving customer demands.
However, the transition to modern, distributed applications exposes organizations to more security vulnerabilities. Attack surfaces expand as entities spread across microservice architectures, creating visibility gaps in Kubernetes environments. Many technologists continue to depend on isolated vulnerability scanning solutions, which complicates monitoring security across the DevOps pipeline.
Alarmingly, Aqua Security reveals that over 350 organizations, open-source projects, and individuals have unprotected Kubernetes clusters. Many of these entities have been targeted by active crypto-mining campaigns, underscoring the concern among DevOps, engineering, and security professionals about container and Kubernetes security, which is highlighted in a Red Hat study.
Globally, organizations are facing a surge in security events within Kubernetes environments, with malicious actors exploiting vulnerabilities through frequent and sophisticated attacks. Shockingly, 93 per cent of businesses have encountered at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments in the past year, and nearly a third experienced financial or customer losses as a consequence. The threat to security in modern application environments poses a dangerous risk for all businesses.
Three essential steps for Canadian IT teams to secure cloud native applications
With the elevated risk, Canadian IT teams must act swiftly to safeguard their organizations from potential reputation and revenue losses due to security breaches. Traditional security measures often fall short in cloud native environments making it essential for technologists to embrace innovative tools, processes, and methodologies to swiftly identify, evaluate and address security risks in alignment with potential business impact.
To ensure secure development and deployment of modern applications, Canadian IT departments should prioritize three key actions:
- Enhance security by correlating issues across application entities for rapid isolation
Canadian IT teams need to be able to correlate security issues across application entities (including business transactions, services, workload, pods and containers) to quickly isolate and address issues, minimizing meantime to remediation.
Organizations should be looking to adopt a solution which offers enhanced visibility into cloud native environments. IT teams need to fully grasp their application security challenges, including precise insights into vulnerabilities within crucial application areas. Additionally, they need the capability to group and filter vulnerabilities based on entities, enabling them to prioritize and address vulnerabilities that affect a core area.
- Assess issues based on business context and risk scoring
The flood of alerts due to a fragmented application landscape causes IT teams to be overwhelmed. The challenge is in the inability to discern which issues present the most significant threats.
Technologists must grasp the business context of security findings to prioritize risk and address issues based on potential business impact. The pressure is on the IT teams to quickly evaluate the importance of a business transaction and understand the sensitivity of the associated data.
By integrating application and business impact context with vulnerability detection and security intelligence, a business risk score empowers IT teams to gauge the potential impact of each vulnerability and the severity of each threat.
- Streamline remediation strategies for enhanced security
In dynamic modern application environments, relying solely on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is not enough to prioritize vulnerabilities due to its static nature, lack of risk and its exploitation predictability. Canadian IT teams should also be looking for vulnerability context and intelligence, so they can accelerate mitigation of security issues. They need a solution which provides prioritized and real-time remediation guidance for runtime container vulnerabilities.
This form of business risk observability has become key for aligning application and security teams and integrating security seamlessly into the application lifestyle from inception.
Instead of being reactive and overwhelmed by alerts, IT teams can embrace a more collaborative and proactive approach to ensure secure development and deployment of cloud native applications.
Necessity of business risk observability
Moving forward, a significant industry-wide transition is anticipated to prioritize business risk observability. Organizations are set to integrate application data and security intelligence, strategically managing and mitigating risk within their application environments. According to research from Cisco, 93 per cent of technologists recognize the importance of contextualizing security and prioritizing vulnerability fixes based on potential business impact security and prioritizing vulnerability fixes based on potential business impact.
IT leaders need to empower their teams with essential tools and insights to effectively manage the growing risks associated with the adoption of cloud native technologies. This entails deploying solutions that offer comprehensive visibility and intelligent business risk insights throughout cloud native environments, enabling IT teams to swiftly prioritize and address security threats in real-time and minimizing organizational risk.
