Identifying and evaluating security vulnerabilities is essential at every stage of software development and system management. New vulnerabilities surface all the time, demanding ongoing vigilance as well as effective methods of assessment and response. And recent data shows that this is increasingly the case.

Open source libraries have become an indispensable part of modern applications. Approximately 90% of organizations use open source software to support their services, but monitoring these dependencies can be difficult when environments run thousands of ephemeral services. The complex nature of modern applications, in combination with the challenge of keeping a competitive edge in a fast-moving market, can make it difficult for organizations to identify and remediate threats in a timely manner.

Securing modern-day production systems is complex and requires a variety of measures—from secure coding practices and security testing to network protection and vulnerability scanning. Scaling these solutions to keep pace with the speed of development teams can be difficult, resulting in sprawling workflows and disparate sets of tooling.

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of securing an organization’s network, application components, and the endpoints that support them. In this post, we’ll look at the following best practices for protecting the different types of data that flow through these components. But first, we’ll look at how modern applications process and manage data, as well as common weaknesses and security threats to these systems.

As your business grows and your services scale in number and complexity, it’s difficult to maintain a rapid pace of innovation while keeping your applications secure. It’s particularly challenging to respond to attacks, as DevOps and security teams need to collaborate to understand each attack’s root cause and remediate the vulnerabilities that enabled it.

Organizations are scaling their environments at a rapid pace, deploying thousands of cloud resources, services, and accounts. Because of their size and complexity, these environments are more susceptible to compliance issues—a misconfiguration in a single cloud resource can lead to costly data breaches. For that reason, organizations are prioritizing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management to ensure that their environments are configured appropriately.

Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of a five-part cloud security series that covers protecting an organization’s network perimeter, endpoints, application code, sensitive data, and service and user accounts from threats. In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, we discussed the importance of protecting the boundaries of networks in cloud environments and best practices for applying efficient security controls to endpoints.