Blog | CloudStakes Technology
1712233866Security Observability A New Approach for Modern Applications.webp

Security Observability: A New Approach for Modern Applications

user-img

Nikita Gill

10th June 2022

The emerging technological advancements bring critical security challenges for businesses and ease in operations. That is why observability is necessary for all process and security-related procedures. Its nature of helping organizations achieve more responsive, reliable, proactive decision-making skills and offer valuable services to customers makes it popular among industries. The continuous security observability of applications reduces IT operators’ time in mitigating cyberattacks to a certain level by notifying them instantly whenever they discover any issue. The best thing is that it detects the security problems before they face any trouble in the application for customers.

Security Observability:

There was a time when all applications depended on their visibility factors to manage cybersecurity challenges. Here, visibility implies monitoring applications, systems, reports, and logs. Such monitoring processes detect suspicious data and system activities through its gathered and analyzed information. System administrators must first configure some improper behaviours and alert types to detect such unauthorized changes. One thing to note is that this monitoring process can only see known scenarios. So, it is only sufficient for the long-term trends, but for dynamic ones, it is not. Being a passive approach to this highly dynamic world full of cybersecurity threats, it may face many difficulties while executing complex operations. Plus, it may lag in providing proper root causes for the unknown or difficult to analyze problems. That’s where the concept of security observability comes into play, which is an extended version of the monitoring process. It correlates and inspects data thoroughly to provide many descriptive and meaningful insights. Security observability uses logs and metrics for deep tracing, modelling, and analytics. As this approach uses AI and ML capabilities, companies can proactively mine data and identify patterns to protect business-critical systems against threats proactively.

The Urgency of Security Observability:

The transformation in application development methods creates a severe need for security observability. Transitioning on-premises operations and applications to cloud-native architecture is the current trend around industries as it offers many benefits, such as scalability, privacy, etc. With cloud support, organizations can easily update their business application aspects without impacting the entire infrastructure. Plus, businesses can leverage the power of modern technologies in their infrastructure with fewer efforts. However, this development approach also brings some potential vulnerabilities and complexities with benefits. Explicitly talking about cloud-native and microservices approaches to building modern applications, they introduce new evolving challenges with development ease. The reason is that they create loosely coupled applications with distributed nature. It makes it harder for developers to understand and solve performance issues. Traditional cybersecurity approaches often miss many inter-dependencies and intuitiveness of elements that today’s modern applications contain. They also have limited reach to detect security glitches and offer prospective solutions. For instance, the traditional cybersecurity approach often misses relevant data to consider.

This cybersecurity approach is helpful in monitoring and results in insecure platforms. Consider security challenges in low-code development approaches that present an open implementation platform for all types of developers. Using this approach, any developer can build sophisticated applications but often misses necessary security guidance. Low-code development includes assembling various application building blocks, and if developers lag by customizing security controls, they can leave applications unpatched and vulnerable to cybersecurity threats.

DevSecOps Need for Security Observability:

By seeing the dynamic of trends that businesses are following, there is no doubt for them to explore new security strategies and approaches. The need for quality assurance is becoming more of a necessity. With its involvement in automated testing processes, cybersecurity operations are becoming integral to development processes. This integrated platform is known as DevSecOps, which organizations are rapidly adopting. Many organizations choose to move to cloud-native to get better security defence capabilities. However, the evolution of security threats in that platform can make them wonder about new approaches to regain control over their data deployed on cloud platforms. That’s where the concept of API and microservices lies, which provides improved advantages of security controls by keeping applications and data inside the cloud ecosystems. Additionally, developers can integrate application data with APIs and microservices to make them aware of ongoing operations. Security observability often takes control over monitoring processes by giving importance to the data.

This way, they can detect security vulnerabilities with incidents that have been done due to some compliance clashes in the development process. The plus point of using security observability is that it concentrates on security threats and issues in regulatory compliance. Furthermore, just because DevSecOps give more importance to security observability and automates the process of detecting loopholes and taking corrective actions, it is famous among organizations.

On The Bright Side:

After seeing security threat possibilities and all possible problem mitigation solutions, we would like to suggest the adoption of DevSecOps and other automated security observability approaches. This way, organizations can ensure tightened security and peace of application in compliance with industry regulatory standards. Implementing cybersecurity solutions in an organization from scratch is a big headache for many companies. Having the support of cybersecurity experts can be a plus point. Therefore, if you need any assistance regarding cybersecurity solutions with continuous security observation, feel free to contact CloudStakes Technology Pvt. Ltd. with all your queries. We will ensure to get back to you with the best DevOps & Cybersecurity solutions in India within 24-48 hours.