Know What Are Major Types, Major Trends, and The Future of Application Security
Today, web applications and APIs have become the primary source of communication between people. A group chat decides whether to plan a holiday and an Instagram page paves the way for business growth. Mobile applications can have the potential to raise the standard of living of a person or can destroy it in a matter of sectors. Thus, companies pour billions into ensuring the safety and security of APIs and web applications.
A sudden glitch or one flawed application can negatively affect the customer experience and damage the company’s reputation forever. Furthermore, security leaks in the application can expose the company, private information about customers, and legal issues. Thus, protecting resources and improving the security of applications is a priority in the company’s security strategies.
According to Allied Market Research, the global application security market is expected to reach $33.94 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 18.7% from 2021 to 2030. Increase in security breaches targeting business applications, a surge in the shift toward cloud-accessed applications, and strict compliance and regulatory requirements for application security have boosted the market growth.
What are the major types of application security?
1. Critical infrastructure and cybersecurity
Cyber-physical systems offer access to vital infrastructure such as water purification, electricity grids, and financial service systems among others. These systems demand the deployment of an additional layer of security. Moreover, it is essential that companies manage such applications and invest in cybersecurity.
2. Mobile and network application security
Any company, whether it is an internal or public application, requires a formal process of testing and fixing security vulnerabilities. Moreover, to protect privacy, encryption should be built if the application offers mobile or remote access. The traditional layers of protection including antivirus and firewalls must be present on every connected node.
Threat monitoring systems and network intrusion tools are essential to protect the internal systems of a company and upgrade its overall security. For years, network administrators took care of the process. However, with the advancements in deployment methods, network security has become the job of every developer who has been involved in process of launching a new application.
Today, the majority of the newer applications are cloud-based. Thus, software-based security tools that offer protection to cloud applications have gained importance. Cloud service providers continuously review their platforms and enhance their security solutions. Several studies show that on-premise deployments face more security breaches compared to the cloud environment.
The global adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has encouraged companies to invest in application security and control their connected devices at risk. From biometric scanners to building management systems, everything can lead to breaches if not protected. As any and every device connected to the company network is accessible via the internet, it needs additional protection. Such layers of protection prevent hackers from using IoT devices for attack. What’s more, with IoT devices, it is difficult to spot security attacks, making IoT security even more important.
Over the years, companies have upgraded application security strategies to address security gaps and cyber threats. The threat of cybercriminals has pressurized many companies to take drastic measures to improve security in various workload deployment environments including serverless, containers, or other microservices.
Here are some of the major trends in the application security industry:
1. Shift from DevOp to DevSecOp
Application development in agile environment has increased, thus, the need to improve the security of DevOps. Software development is much quicker and more efficient in an agile environment. however, without proper security measures, the undetected security vulnerabilities will be uncontrollable. With the functionality of applications, there are multiple entryways for hackers to attack. Over the last few years, cyber-attacks have increased.
On the other hand, the term DevSecOps refers to integrating cross-functional organizational structure and improving application security through the post-release lifespan. DevSecOps seeps a lower rate of vulnerability while keeping the failure rate of the product minimum. Thus, DevSecOps framework is widely used for the early detection of security and threats. Moreover, it has become a vital step in application security development.
2. Adoption of cloud-ready security solutions
Cloud adoption has taken the world by storm. More and more companies have moved their workload to the cloud and the Covid-19 pandemic facilitated the shift even more so. Cloud offers flexibility, scalability, and agility that was required during the unprecedented time of the pandemic and most companies adopted work from home culture. The demand for DevSecOps has increased drastically and newer applications that are entering the market demand the benefits of the cloud. Thus, the security solutions must keep up. The application security requirements must be designed and developed for the cloud. Moreover, security solutions must match the same levels of flexibility, scale, and agility as the cloud. However, this requires a great deal of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
3. APIs to gain importance as internet-facing service
In today’s world, web application firewalls (WAFs) are not sufficient to protect internet-facing assets from cybercriminals. Thus, companies must use web applications and web APIs. Such web APIs also face several challenges including improper asset management, misconfigurations, injection, and broken authorizations. These challenges have propelled the development of API Protection (WAAP) and Web Applications solution to replace the traditional WAF technology.
4. Advent of bot-as-a-service
Commonly, bots are used to interact with websites and automate cyberattacks. For instance, bots can be a part of distributed denial of service (DDoS) to perform or attack credential stuffing against outside unauthorized access. On the other hand, malicious bots are more readily available with bot-as-a-service providers. This has made it easier for cybercriminals to attack. Thus, application security companies must come up with novel solutions to fight against them. Recently, bot management solutions have gained traction as they are critical to fighting attacks on a company’s application or APIs and protecting their resources.
5. Automated security solutions powered by AI
The security operations center (SOC) teams often face common issues such as increased threat landscape, expanding infrastructure, limited resources, and compliance requirements. These challenges are overwhelming to deal with and hard to respond to as well. Thus, application security solutions powered by AI became more popular to address these issues. The advancements in AI have offered a unique chance to automate data gathering, incident response, and threat identification. Moreover, automated security solutions can function with limited security personnel and resources while offering maximum benefit to the company.
6. Consolidation for improved incident detection
An average security operation center (SOC) receives around 10,000 alerts every day for detecting security threats. This is too overwhelming for the security team and hard to effectively triage, remediate, and investigate. Moreover, there is a big chance that real threats can get lost and security gaps widen as the security team focuses on false positive threats.
This alert fatigue can be solved by consolidation. Companies can work with each other to update their IT infrastructure and improve security architectures. Moreover, they can work together to address multiple threats, which can streamline operations and security teams can detect potential threats quickly.
What will be the future of application security?
Cloud security refers to policies, protocols, and an array of technology that are used to keep cloud-based systems and applications safe. As more and more companies take their workload to the cloud and offer employees remote-working facilities, the trust in the cloud has increased. Thus, application security continues to hold a great deal of importance. While there are new technologies entering the market, there will always be room for vulnerabilities. Moreover, in the majority of cases, human errors are prime reasons for security breaches. Thus, here are some recommendations for application security to keep businesses protected.
1. Multi-factor authentication
This may sound too basic, but multi-factor authentication could go a long way to improve application security. It offers an additional layer of defence against cybercriminals. With MFA in place, hackers need to go through at least two verification processes before they access a private account. The use of a one-time password on devices, biometrics, and other security keys offers improves the application security significantly.
Cloud-to-cloud refers to the transfer of data that is stored in one cloud and copied to another cloud service. This process is similar to off-site backup, which is vital if your company is involved with software-as-a-service applications. In an event of system failure, cloud-to-cloud backups come rescue. As cloud-to-cloud backups are automated, they are secure to detect unauthorized access and ransomware.
3. Regular employee training in application security
As mentioned above, most security breaches are a result of human error. Thus, in order to reduce liability, training employees about cybersecurity measures is vital. Employees often fall to phishing attacks and everyone must keep on guard to keep fighting cyberattacks.
Keeping this in mind, companies must take a fresher look at their security measures and investments in improving applications. The use of website applications and APIs in the future. Thus, application security would become essential to any company in the IT sector.
Author’s Bio-
Swamini Kulkarni holds a bachelor’s degree in Instrumentation and control engineering from Pune University and works as a content writer at Allied Market Research. She is deeply fascinated by the impact of technology on human life and loves to talk about science and mythology. When she is not glued to the computer, she loves to read, travel and daydream about her areas of interest.
Originally published at https://medium.com on August 22, 2022.
