Security Risks To Your Business-Critical Web Apps

Transferring applications to the cloud was once an anomaly, but the benefits of cloud services have proved so advantageous that more companies are relying on cloud service providers.

Today’s businesses are taking advantage of cloud-based apps—particularly with email and productivity applications —to help employees collaborate more easily and work more efficiently, wherever and whenever they want. Using business applications in Microsoft Office 365 and from other cloud providers helps enterprises of all sizes reduce overhead, offload time-consuming administrative tasks and improve storage efficiencies—among other benefits.

Maintaining web application tools on-premise can be costly, which is why a growing number of businesses are moving business-critical web apps to the cloud. But even the cloud has risks. To protect their most critical assets, organizations need to identify and address their business specific risk in cloud-based applications.

Cloud Costs

Everything comes at a price, and the cloud is no different. Though it offers many benefits, the cloud is not impervious to attack. Perhaps the belief that the cloud is ‘safe’ is the root of enterprise security issues.

The reality; however, is that many externally-facing web applications are vulnerable to a variety of cyber threats such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cookie hijacking and layer 7 denial-of-services attacks. Of the top one million websites analyzed in a June 2017 Mozilla survey, 93.45 percent earned an “F” for lack of basic security measures to protect against common web app security vulnerabilities like these.

How To Address Cloud Application Security Risks

To address security vulnerabilities, enterprises need to secure their web-based, legacy and mobile applications with a combination of cybersecurity best practices and advanced protection technologies. Recommended measures include:

• Tracking threats in real time: Stay current on fast-changing threats; consider using IP reputation services with ongoing threat intelligence feeds and updates.
• Correlate to mitigate: Look at solutions with a correlation engine to increase your visibility across environments and consolidate threat intelligence from multiple tools and sources.
• Scan for vulnerabilities: Know the devices accessing your network and continuously scan the different operating systems for vulnerabilities.
• Don’t delay patching: Patch all systems and applications as soon as fixes and updates are released.
• Implement the right technology: Know your environment — especially its weakest links and the risks to them — and deploy technologies that can address them such as web-application firewalls and IPS solutions.

Intelligent, Comprehensive Web Application Security

Defending against threats that directly target the web application attack surface is a challenge for many organizations. Our technology partner, Fortinet, offers a holistic approach to this challenge that includes a comprehensive web application firewall. It can function as part of Fortinet’s collaborative Security Fabric architecture — which weaves together multiple security devices across physical and virtual environments (including all endpoints) to improve enterprise-wide visibility and streamline the sharing of threat intelligence. By enabling you to manage your entirety cybersecurity infrastructure from one centralized console, the Fortinet solution makes it easier to detect and respond to any threats — including the OWASP Top 10.

Tec-Refresh has the expertise to work with you to align your security to your business risks and needs. Contact us to learn how we can help you protect your business-critical web applications from all threats.