Secure Application Delivery Powered by Cyber Security

Digitization of businesses has increased in the last few years, with many organizations taking their processes online with cloud migration. The events that took place in 2020 due to the pandemic have only emphasized why digitization is essential in a changing world. While digitization brings numerous benefits, there’s one significant downside: cyber security.

Although there are better and advanced ways to protect applications today than before, the number of attacks keeps soaring. As technology for application protection advances, cybercriminals are also continuously devising new attack vectors. Therefore, there’s a need now more than ever for creating an environment for secure application delivery.

These are services that combine to offer better application functionality. They’re often web-based software applications from data centers or cloud environments. This is where data processing and computation is conducted to the end-users or application clients through the internet.

Elements such as security, latency, load balancing, and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) optimizations are all part of the network infrastructure services. These elements attempt to offer a dependable user experience by delivering application content smoothly.

Cloud hosting services and data center architecture are two of the most important aspects of application delivery for business Information Technology (IT) teams or IT security services providers.

Network traffic has been significantly impacted by the rise in the usage of websites, online apps, and services in the recent past. This shift has been greatly aided by the cloud. According to research, the public cloud market will be worth USD$ 800 billion by 2025. (1)

However, many businesses can’t implement a cloud-only strategy due to the large expenditures they’ve already made in traditional data center infrastructures. This makes a hybrid approach a more preferred option. Hybrid combines on-premises and cloud computing, allowing for better flexibility and scalability, but at the risk of higher security concerns.

There are four significant application delivery problems, as both changing demand and continuous digital transformation push enterprises toward hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architecture.

• Continuous application availability
• Protection against the ever-increasing cyber threat menace
• Providing a high-quality user experience by improving performance
• Visibility and control over a more complex and varied infrastructure

According to research, software applications are the weakest link in an enterprise stack in terms of security vulnerability. Most external assaults exploit software and web application vulnerabilities. (2)

Here are three security application delivery best practices:

Take stock of your assets

You can protect what you don’t know. So, are you aware of the servers you use for your apps or the open-source code in your web apps? It’s crucial that you know what’s in your possession so you can put the right security measures to curb cyber security threats.

A good example of what happens when you’re unaware of the state of your assets is the Equifax incident, which resulted in fines and penalties. All their troubles resulted from an open-source component that was weak, leaving customer data vulnerable to cyber-attacks. (3)

Keeping track of your assets today prevents future problems and calamities. As much as possible, you should try to automate this process for easy monitoring and management of assets. Along with managing your assets, categorize them by significance to your business operations. This is useful for threat assessment and remediation.

Carry out regular assessments

Once you have a list of what requires guarding, you can identify dangers and mitigate them. How might hackers get into your app? Is it possible to identify or block an attack? Do you need more or different tools? These are just a few questions to ask yourself throughout your threat assessment.

However, you must also be realistic about your security expectations. That is, even with the highest degree of security, nothing is impenetrable. You must also be honest about the measures you believe your team can sustain, encouraging security standards and practices throughout the organization. Remember, security is a process, not a one-time event.

Practice access control

Not everyone in your business needs to know everything. One of the best practices of application and data security is restricting access to apps and data to those who need it. Doing so will help keep security at different levels, making it more difficult for a hacker to gain access to the fullness of your data.

For instance, if a hacker gains access to a system using marketing credentials, you must prevent them from accessing more critical data. Whether a threat comes through deliberate action or human error, managing rights and granting teams access just to the data they need might lower your vulnerability compared to no restrictions.

In the same way technology has evolved and allowed for better and enterprise applications, malicious players also adapt to new technologies to hack into those applications. So, your application security strategy has to stay up with the times to defend your apps from the most recent risks to their security. When in doubt, engage IT security services providers.

1. “What is Network Security?”, Source: https://www.forcepoint.com/cyber-edu/network-security
2. “What is cryptography? How algorithms keep information secret and safe”, Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3583976/what-is-cryptography-how-algorithms-keep-information-secret-and-safe.html
3. “WEP vs. WPA vs. WPA2 vs. WPA3”, Source: https://community.fs.com/blog/wep-vs-wpa-vs-wpa2-vs-wpa3.html