Balancing Security, Agility, and Efficiency for Your Apps in the Cloud

As we discussed before, protecting your applications in the cloud against layer 7 attacks is an essential piece of any organization’s security strategy. The challenge lies in finding the right balance of strong security, operational efficiency, and deployment speed. Deploy an insecure application, and you risk breaches, regulatory fines, downtime, and damage to the business. Deploy an application with excessive security policies, and you increase operational complexity, leading to inefficiencies and loss of productivity. Fail to deploy an application on time—or at all—and you lose business opportunity and risk damage to your reputation.   

To deploy applications with the right level of protection, without excess overhead, and as fast—or nearly as fast—as the business would like, you need to take the best parts of your enterprise security practice and fuse them with the speed and agility that is sweeping through IT. The delivery of enterprise-grade protection combined with the flexibility of cloud deployment can help organizations defend their critical applications against ever-more sophisticated and numerous attacks.

So you must industrialize your security. With predefined templates and automation systems that offer “security services as code,” application security policies can be defined centrally and distributed globally to the right enforcement points. Security services must be deployed as part of an integrated, orchestrated system that builds and deploys all of the application delivery services required as part of a coordinated application deployment process.

If you architect a system like this, you can have a number of different security policies to match the requirements of different applications, as well as templates that can be deployed via API from management and orchestration tools. This kind of integration delivers the optimal balance of protection, agility, and operational efficiency your business requires. As an added bonus, it can remove the IT bottleneck when deploying applications, reducing the chances of potentially harmful shadow IT. The bottom line: you get enterprise-grade security, deployed as simply and easily as the most basic load balancing policy.