As the basis of pretty much every consumer system available today, Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is everywhere and used by everyone. The files on your computer, the media and applications on your smartphone, and even your social media content. They all use DAC to manage permissions. That’s in part because DAC is easy to manage and understand. But DAC also has a few glaring issues when it comes to cybersecurity.
If developers one day considered security a mere ‘good-to-have,’ that day is firmly in the past. As digital transformation accelerates, employee workstations become liabilities for enterprise assets and data, placing cybersecurity in the spotlight. On average, organizations face 130 security breaches annually, and every data breach costs a company around $4.24 million. For better or worse, remote work culture and corrupted credential are the top reasons for security breaches.
In a market projected to grow to $288.30 billion by 2030, data centers will expand to facilitate more data-driven workloads, including AI and big data. Much of this expansion continues to occur in the cloud, as companies seek to reap the benefits of low-cost infrastructure that they can spin up as needed. In fact, research shows that cloud workloads represented 94% of all data center workloads worldwide in 2021.
The coming of the internet was a beautiful thing, bringing about accessibility to reach everyone across the globe. But this reach is a double-edged sword. If everyone is just a click away, so are bad actors who can reach back to attack the organization at its weakest spot, trying to access information that it strives very hard to protect.
As cyber threats become increasingly advanced and complex, organizations are forced to adopt a military attitude of ‘war footing’ to secure their systems and servers. Although the use of new technologies has increased to manage complex workloads and operations, the vulnerability of data stored on devices continues to be a worry. Accenture research revealed that cyberattacks have soared by a shocking 125% yearly.
Rapid digitalization and increasing remote business operations place a significant burden on developers, who are continuously pressured to push out software faster. As a result, CI/CD security risks being overlooked, although it is an essential part of modern software development practice. While it accelerates product releases, CI/CD is vulnerable to cybersecurity issues such as corrupted code, security misconfiguration, and mismanagement of secrets.
The trouble with allowing developers to deploy code directly to production is that security threats are often overlooked in the process. These vulnerabilities only show up later during runtime. Once this happens, it falls on the shoulders of the Ops team or SREs to engage in firefighting.
Becoming and staying PCI compliant both take a lot of work. Developers are often already swamped with an endless list of tasks, and adding PCI compliance can be overwhelming. Security awareness is one thing, but a set of requirements is entirely different. It means you have less freedom in how you wish to implement security in your application, and you must understand the requirements demanded by your organization.
Security is the biggest threat facing organizations that strive for faster software delivery. Organizations are witnessing increasing attacks due to application code gaps and security weaknesses. According to a Forrester report, software security flaws accounted for cyberattacks in about 47% of organizations.
The number of secrets exposed in public repositories is staggering. With reports in 2021 reaching up to 6 million secrets detected, an increase of 50% from 2020. Secret sprawl is part of every organization, but it is a plague on the open-source world of software development. Even if your organization has a top-notch security-aware culture, human error will inevitably cause secrets to leak and data to be lost or compromised.
