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.

The popularity of serverless architectures continues to grow as organizations seek ease of scalability and to eliminate the need to provision and manage infrastructure. In fact, in our most recent State of Serverless report, we found that more than half of our customers have adopted serverless technologies offered by Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.

Just like shopping on Black Friday, AWS re:Invent has become a post-Thanksgiving tradition for some of us at Datadog. We were excited to join tens of thousands of fellow AWS users and partners for this annual gathering that features new product announcements, technical sessions, networking, and fun. This year, we saw three themes emerge from the conference announcements and sessions.

With the continual increase of attacks, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations, today’s security organizations face an uphill battle in securing their cloud environments. These risks often materialize into unaddressed alerts, incidents, and findings in their security products. However, part of the issue is that many security teams are often stretched too thin and overburdened by alert fatigue.

With the continual increase of attacks, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations, today’s security organizations face an uphill battle in securing their cloud environments. These risks often materialize into unaddressed alerts, incidents, and findings in their security products. However, part of the issue is that many security teams are often stretched too thin and overburdened by alert fatigue.