“Today’s CSOs need a plan. You must execute on a structured program that keeps you focused on the five Reasons to Secure: Maintain business system availability, protect intellectual property, [...]. Showing the value of security to the organization and proving the safety of the computing environment to internal and external auditors are no longer optional activities.”
The Pragmatic CSO: 12 Steps to Being a Security Master, Mike Rothman, Securosis
Software is more complex than ever. Development cycles are shorter than ever. No wonder most successful attacks now target the application layer.*
Why is the application layer the leading vector for cyber-attacks?
- Assembled as hybrid code from a combination of in-house development, third-party libraries and open source components — without visibility into which components contain critical vulnerabilities.
- Continuously being updated — with developers under constant pressure to ship code to support new business initiatives.
- Even more vulnerable with Web 2.0 technologies that increase the attack surface by incorporating client-side logic, using complex JavaScript or RIA technologies such as Adobe Flash.
- Constantly exposed to cyber-attackers located anywhere in the world, who can easily scan for common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection using freely-available tools — as often as they like.
Why is it hard?
- There's a high level of variability in languages and platforms — and even in the security standards and policies across teams in your own organization.
- Developers don't consistently follow secure coding practices — and they're concerned about being slowed down by bulky processes.
- Audit and compliance standards are continuously evolving — with independent attestation increasingly required, especially for third-party software.
- Legacy, on-premises approaches to application security have brought added complexity — plus require specialized skills which are in short supply — slowing time-to-market and further increasing risk.
Effectively securing your global application infrastructure is a multi-dimensional challenge — especially given the sheer number of applications and disparate organizations that should ideally be governed by common policies, metrics and reporting. It's clear that a fundamentally different approach is required — one that enables you to implement a structured and ongoing program through a series of pragmatic steps.
How we can help
We're the most widely used cloud-based platform for securing web, mobile, legacy and third-party applications.
Fact is, more than 500 organizations trust our simpler and more scalable approach to secure their application infrastructures — including three of the top four banks in the Fortune 100. We’ve analyzed tens of thousands of applications for threats and we've been a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader since 2010.
Using our smart, cloud-based and programmatic approach to application-layer security, you can drive your innovations to market faster — without hiring more consultants or installing more servers and tools — and without sacrificing security in the process.
We can help you define and execute a successful plan for reducing your global application-layer risk, by enabling you to:
- Rapidly identify application threats — before and after deployment — with a combination of automated static, dynamic and behavioral analysis techniques and manual penetration testing, aggregated via a unified cloud-based platform with risk analytics and role-based access control (RBAC).
- Discover all your public-facing applications and identify the most exploitable vulnerabilities — in days or weeks compared to months or years with legacy approaches — via our massively parallel, auto-scaling cloud infrastructure.
- Coach developers in secure coding practices — and how to rapidly prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities.
- Help you implement a centralized, policy-based approach for managing enterprise-wide governance and KPI reporting on a structured, ongoing basis — based on best practices developed with the world's largest and most complex enterprises.
*SOURCE: Verizon DBIR
