While far from perfect, this approach provided multilayer security defenses to protect apps and APIs.
As network architectures gradually became more complex, so did protecting apps and APIs.
The on-premises enterprise environment gave way to a hybrid mix of on-premises, data center, and multiple cloud environments.
These days, hybrid and multicloud environments are more the rule than they are the exception.
They introduce complexity and challenges that make it significantly more difficult for organizations to apply defense-in-depth practices to protect apps and APIs.
While the idea of rebuilding the enterprise perimeter doesn't make much sense in the current state, perhaps there is another way to bring requisite protections to apps and APIs.
Standardized Communication The first step in protecting apps and APIs is standardization across different environments.
Uniform Policy The ability to uniformly apply and enforce security policy is another important step in protecting apps and APIs.
When there is inconsistency in how environments are managed or a large amount of manual labor involved in managing those environments, that opens up holes that attackers can exploit.
Without the ability to see traffic to and from apps and APIs across all environments, security teams don't have the ability to monitor their environments for potential security and fraud issues.
Reliable Alerting While visibility is extremely important, it needs to be properly leveraged to create and sustain reliable alerting across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Good Governance Managing the life cycle of apps and APIs is also an important, yet sometimes neglected, part of securing them.
Having apps and APIs inventoried, managed, controlled, versioned, compliant with schema, processing input and output as expected, and adherent to change control procedures makes them less prone to vulnerabilities being introduced during the software development life cycle.
Proper governance is an all too often overlooked component to protecting apps and APIs, requiring the capabilities that a digital shield provides.
Central Controls Preventive and detective controls work collaboratively to help secure apps and APIs.
Preventive controls help secure environments against attacks they face.
Part of the appeal of a digital shield is that, in addition to providing an added layer of protection, it acts as a logical overlay to different cloud environments.
The idea of having multiple layers of protection around apps and APIs to avoid single points of failure and weakness makes sense logically.
Raise Your Shield Protecting apps and APIs is an important undertaking for any organization.
While the effort involves many moving parts, leveraging a digital shield as a logical overlay and added layer of defense can greatly simplify app and API security.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Sat, 18 May 2024 08:05:25 +0000