Elly Yates-Roberts |
To develop and update applications faster, organisations are deploying DevOps processes, agile methodologies and moving their infrastructure to the cloud. However, while applications are being developed and deployed faster than ever, secure coding practices have not kept pace, resulting in a constantly growing number of open vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
At the same time, the threat environment is continuously evolving and becoming more challenging. Hackers are getting more sophisticated; they are now professional criminals or even nation states. In addition to manual hacking attacks, bots and botnets are increasingly used to attack enterprise infrastructures through web applications. These automated exploits are often executed as Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attacks, at both the network and application layer. And of course, malware is constantly getting more advanced. The growth in the number of unprotected application vulnerabilities, coupled with the increase in hacking and malware, has resulted in a perfect storm of data breaches. So, application security is a key requirement for successful digital transformation.
The biggest blockers to public cloud adoption are sophisticated hackers and open vulnerabilities in applications. Also on the list are DDoS attacks and advanced bots/botnets, and from conversations with both customers and analysts since the onset of Covid-19 it appears that both DDoS attacks and bot attacks have spiked up even higher than before. So, in addition to scaling up online capacity, it is critically important to ensure security and availability.
The Barracuda Cloud Application Protection (CAP) platform features integrations with Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Azure Security Center. A component of CAP, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is built on Microsoft Azure and provides advanced web application firewall capabilities to easily deploy and manage solutions. Using a complete application security platform is the best way to protect applications from all attack vectors, including hacking, DDoS, bots and even application programming interface attacks.
Chris Hill is the regional vice president of public cloud for Barracuda Networks
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2020 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.