With the establishment of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the expanding international landscape of data protection laws, organizations today face complex requirements and heightened scrutiny when it comes to data privacy. In addition, public awareness of data exploitation and digital surveillance is growing, and individuals are more concerned than ever about data privacy.

Web application security is an important concern for organizations. Attacks have historically happened at the infrastructure and network level, but today, they increasingly target the business logic exposed by services that handle the most critical and sensitive data. The attack surface of applications is ever increasing, with more than 25,000 vulnerabilities identified in 2022 alone.

Detecting and remediating security threats is a constantly evolving concern for modern DevSecOps and security operations center (SOC) teams. Moreover, manually investigating and responding to vulnerabilities and threats is time-consuming, laborious, and knowledge-intensive.

Developers spend over a third of their time fixing bad code and reducing technical debt. Detecting and fixing errors in production is not only more costly than doing so during development but also slows down innovation and has a negative impact on productivity, the development experience, and team morale. Having tools that help catch and fix coding mistakes earlier in the development process creates a better experience and increased productivity.

Open source libraries have become an indispensable part of modern applications. Approximately 90 percent of organizations use open source software to support their services, but monitoring these dependencies can be difficult when environments run thousands of ephemeral services.

Editor’s note: This is the final part 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. So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of securing an organization’s network, its application components, the endpoints that support those components, and its application data.

For organizations in highly regulated industries, any misconfiguration in their cloud environments can be detrimental to customer trust and privacy if overlooked. To mitigate this risk, DevOps and security engineers follow recognized compliance standards to quickly surface issues in their AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environments. Organizations can take this work a step further by developing detection rules tailored to their unique business or security goals.

Cloud environments, in all their dynamic complexity, demand careful monitoring by DevOps and security teams. But the sheer abundance of telemetry data associated with the thousands of resources, users, and roles that comprise these environments can make monitoring a formidable task, causing security risks and other issues to be all too easily overlooked.

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.