The Record - Issue 18: Autumn 2020

104 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om V I EWPO I NT T o develop and update applications faster, organisations are deploying DevOps pro- cesses, agile methodologies and moving their infrastructure to the cloud. However, while applications are being developed and deployed faster than ever, secure coding prac- tices have not kept pace, resulting in a con- stantly growing number of open vulnerabilities that can be exploited. At the same time, the threat environment is continuously evolving and becoming more chal- lenging. 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 con- stantly getting more advanced. The growth in the number of unprotected application vulnera- bilities, coupled with the increase in hacking and malware, has resulted in a perfect storm of data breaches. So, application security is a key require- ment for successful digital transformation. The biggest blockers to public cloud adoption are sophisticated hackers and open vulnerabil- ities 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 scal- ing 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 SecurityCenter. Acomponent ofCAP, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is built on Microsoft Azure and provides advanced web application fire- wall 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 Securing applications in public cloud With applications being deployed faster than ever, it is important to ensure that they remain safe from attack CHR I S H I L L : BAR RACUDA NE TWOR K S