Uptycs Extends CNAPP Reach to DevOps Workflows
At the RSA Conference 2023 event, Uptycs today revealed it has extended the reach of its cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) to include the ability to collect log data from DevOps workflows to surface suspicious behavior.
Sudarsan Kannan, director of product management for Uptycs, said the company’s namesake CNAPP can now analyze log data to provide organizations that are embracing DevSecOps workflows to better secure software supply chains with increased visibility into the platforms and tools used to construct applications.
Cybercriminals today are targeting both endpoints and application development tools as part of a larger effort to compromise cloud computing environments, noted Kannan. As such, it’s not enough to provide a platform to protect cloud applications. Organizations also need to be able to protect the tools and platforms used to access those cloud services, he added.
Uptycs has been making a case for a CNAPP that includes extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities that can be used to secure endpoints. That capability is now being extended to enable the company’s CNAPP to analyze data collected from GitHub repositories, Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) and the Okta authentication platform. That capability provides cybersecurity teams with an early warning system that surfaces indications of compromise within a software supply chain, said Kannan.
Cybersecurity teams are already employing the Uptycs CNAPP to track and analyze malicious activity across multiple attack surfaces, including endpoints, cloud, containers, control planes for cloud services and Kubernetes clusters as part of an effort to centralize the management of cybersecurity. Instead of requiring security operations teams to stitch together multiple point products to address those concerns the Uptycs approach provides a unified platform that reduced the total cost of cybersecurity, said Kannan. At time when more organizations are looking to reduce the total cost of cybersecurity CNAPPs are gaining traction as a means to enable short-handed cybersecurity teams to manage more functions at scale.
Extending that platform to also include data collected from DevOps tools and platforms will also reduce the level of friction that many organizations routinely encounter when trying to adopt DevSecOps best practices, he added. Most DevOps teams want to be able to focus on software engineering while leaving it to cybersecurity professionals to ensure the application development platforms are secure, noted Kannan.
A lot of progress has been made in terms of adopting DevSecOps, but it’s still early days. The goal should be to reduce the cognitive cybersecurity load on developers to the point where they can just focus on writing secure code, added Kannan.
It’s not clear how much cybersecurity teams are participating directly within DevOps workflows, but at the very least, they should be making sure that applications targeted by cybercriminals are secure. Most developers don’t have a lot of cybersecurity expertise, so asking them to secure application development tools and platforms on their own is not likely to result in a positive outcome. The challenge is achieving that goal in a way in the least obtrusive way possible.
