Consumption of Public Cloud is Way Ahead of Ability to Secure It

by Timothy Chiu, VP of Marketing on December 14, 2020

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen organizations increase their use of the cloud, partly to accommodate the increase in employees working from home, and partly as the increase they had already been planning on in their move to the cloud. While companies have been increasing their use of the public cloud, security hasn’t necessarily been keeping up, as we’ve seen significant breaches and attacks on applications hosted in the public cloud due to misconfiguration as well as vulnerabilities.

ZDNet recently ran an article on how the consumption of public cloud by organizations is way ahead of their ability to secure their use of the public cloud. Part of the issue is understanding the public cloud, and understanding how to use existing security tools that are available in the cloud, as well as making sure the cloud is configured properly and software running in the cloud is up to date and patched.

But there’s another layer of protection that’s often missed when moving applications to the cloud and that’s security for the application itself. While the public cloud may offer tools to help secure the usage of the cloud, these security tools typically do not protect an application hosted in the cloud for vulnerabilities like those outlined by the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks.

With the increase in cyber attacks and the advanced nature of these threats, including those that attack web applications, organizations may need to re-evaluate their approach to protecting applications that are likely to have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. While many organizations may already have system and network based security for their cloud deployments, it’s important to remember to have a security framework that offers a defense-in-depth architecture. Maybe it’s time to take a hint from the recent finalization of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s SP800-53 that was just released on September 23, 2020. The new security and privacy framework standard now requires Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) as an added layer of security in the framework.

RASP solutions like the one from K2 Cyber Security offer significant application protection, including protection of vulnerable applications, while at the same time using minimal resources and adding negligible latency to an application. K2 Security Platform uses runtime deterministic security to monitor the application and has a deep understanding of the application’s control flows, DNA and execution. By validating the application’s control flows, deterministic security is based on the application itself, rather than relying on past attacks to determine a zero day attack. Deterministic security results in the detection of sophisticated zero day attacks and also protects from application from the risks listed in the OWASP Top Ten, including XSS and SQL Injection.

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K2’s Next Generation Application Workload Protection Platform addresses today’s need for runtime security in an easy to use, easy to deploy solution. K2’s unique deterministic security detects new attacks without the need to rely on past attack knowledge, is lightweight, and adds under a millisecond of latency to the running application. To aid in quick remediation of vulnerabilities, K2 also provides detailed attack telemetry including the code module and line number being in the code being attacked, while at the same time integrating with leading firewalls to do real time attacker blocking.

Change how you protect your applications, and check out K2’s web application and application workload security solution and evaluate K2’s effectiveness at detecting and protecting your organization from attacks.

Find out more about K2 today by requesting a demo, or get your free trial.