Forbes
Application Security That Puts Your Business And Customers First
By: Sunsharay Chestnut
Security - it’s undeniably important for every organization to implement. But the reality remains that many businesses today struggle to secure their data. That’s unsurprising considering that until now, implementing security tools or protocols meant sacrificing both development speed and operational agility. Many businesses decided to forgo security in favor of getting their applications on the market as quickly as possible, but those businesses paid the price. To the tune of almost 4 million dollars.
Today, we’re witnessing an unprecedented rise in malicious actors and threats to organizations.
Opportunists are taking advantage of the recent shift for many businesses to remote work, and the average number of cyberthreats has skyrocketed. So, organizations need to go a step further to ensure that their security leaves no gaps, while still balancing business agility and success.
As organizations, especially enterprises, race to digitally transform their business in order to remain competitive, security must remain a priority. Luckily, there is a modern breed of security approaches and tooling that enables organizations to maintain a focus on digital business objectives and customers. This new approach centers on the application. The effort to secure mission-critical assets that flow through an organization’s app, such as customer data and personal identifiable information (PII), is taking center stage.
A bygone era of security
While for many business leaders and practitioners alike, the word “security” evokes memories of clunky tools and friction between IT teams, that no longer needs to be the standard. In fact, as technology upstarts have prioritized design and seamless user experiences, these principles have influenced not just what consumers expect of digital services but also what businesses expect from their technology providers.
The result?
Security tools that help businesses minimize their risk without surrendering organizational productivity or becoming barriers to innovation. On the contrary, good security practices enable innovation. They identify the weak points in current processes to dynamically adjust, helping businesses stay ahead of daily cyberthreats and finding new ways to fill gaps where customer data can be breached. A holistic and modern approach to security aligns all the key players on an IT team to address issues as they happen, with minimal or no impact to the business. As IT teams strive to make all their systems more observable across the entire technology stack, security is a critical piece of the puzzle to identify and solve issues before your customer even has a clue.
Put customers at the forefront
When building and implementing a security strategy for your business, it’s critical that your strategy not only improves security posture, but also prioritizes your end-customer and enables your business to innovate and grow.
The solution: an “application-first” security approach.
Almost all businesses today are digital businesses. They connect with customers near and far through a browser or mobile application. These business-critical applications are like a house through which customers – and their data – pass. As with any house, there needs to be a lock on the front door to control who can come in and who needs to be kept out. Repeatedly over the years, we’ve seen that a security approach that acts as a fence, only securing the outer perimeter, isn’t sufficient to accomplish this. Instead, it’s paramount to build protection and defense mechanisms inside the house to effectively ward off threats.
Prioritize your business
To implement an application-first security strategy, it’s critical to choose tools that protect applications in real time, no matter when or where they’re being used. These tools also need to be able to correlate security data to real user and business data, and they need to be easy for both application and security teams to leverage.
Safeguarding customers and their data is critical to the success of any business in today’s digital age. So too is operating with agility and flexibility. That’s why organizations that embrace an application-first security approach are in the best position to move fast, win business, and protect customers and the business overall.
