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Businesses that refuse to upgrade and innovate will eventually lose customers and become irrelevant. Therefore, it’s important to keep up with trends and get ahead of the competition. It’s no wonder why many business owners and managers have adopted cloud-native applications in their businesses. These applications make teamwork and collaboration easy and allow employees to do tasks more efficiently.
However, using cloud-native applications has security risks. Organizations must understand that before they can switch to cloud-native applications, they must have a full understanding of the risks involved—especially since it can compromise business data and customer information.
This article outlines what you need to know to improve your understanding of cloud-native architecture and how to secure it.
What Are Cloud-Native Applications?
The introduction of cloud services has revolutionized how businesses store and access sensitive data. It’s easier now to access stored data on servers, regardless of your physical location. With that in mind, cloud-native applications are software and resources that are designed and operated over cloud systems. The applications take advantage of cloud computing by integrating all the necessary design principles and operation properties.
There are several examples of cloud-native applications, including:
- Software Containers – This refers to a portable and integrated operating environment with an application and all the necessary components needed to run it. Unlike a complex virtual system, a container is smaller, portable, and reusable, making it a popular alternative. Additionally, if you have enough resources, it can run on any device, from household computers to supercomputers.
- Application Program Interfaces (APIs) – This is another example of a cloud-native application. The major function of this software connector is to expose the functionality that other software can use. This makes it easier to customize applications without disrupting their underlying codes.
Although cloud-native applications are scalable and portable, there are several security threats you should look out for. They include numerous entities to secure, environments in flux, diverse patterns, and more.
3 Ways To Secure Cloud-Native Applications
As mentioned above, there are several security threats you should look out for when designing and operating cloud-native applications. For this reason, it’s important to employ tips to improve the safety and security of your cloud-native applications. They include:
- Change The Security Level
In the modern era, obsolete security tools might be unable to handle the size, speed, and ever-changing cloud-native systems. Furthermore, integrating serverless features into your cloud environment may worsen your security.
Cyber attackers will use the vulnerabilities and misconfiguration in serverless systems to access sensitive information, affecting its integrity. This will not only compromise your competitive advantage but also affect your public image.
Besides the above issue, most companies continually utilize CI/CD tools to build and test software applications. Also, the developers use the tools to automate the application build and create a document trail for the development process. When using containers to design applications, a developer may use base images from a local storage vault. However, in most cases, the developer might not check whether those images have security flaws, which could compromise your whole system.
You can avoid the above issue y providing the necessary tools to check whether the base images contain security vulnerabilities. The tools also help the developers scan the code before its released to production, improving your security standards.
- Employ A Zero-Trust Approach
This is another way to use to boost the security of your cloud-native applications. The approach will help you evaluate why, when, and how a team member can access cloud-native resources. Instead of allowing everyone to access the resources, the owner does not need to authorize an individual, allowing other users to utilize your cloud services.
If you don’t authorize, a team member can’t access your resources, improving the security and adoption of remote working compared to the broad access approach.
- Shift Perimeter Security To the Functional Level
When you integrate serverless features into your system, it’ll be broken into several components. Each of the components can respond to event-driven triggers from several sources. At this point, the multiple components are exposed to cyber threats, affecting your security architecture.
One of the ways you can avoid this is through the integration of APIs and application security tools. Additionally, you can enforce perimeter security at the function level. Hence, you can identify functions triggered by different sources and protect them from anomalies.
Bottom Line
Modern life is moving at a fast-paced rate and for this reason, businesses have to keep up with changing trends and lifestyles to stay relevant. One of the ways to achieve this is the utilization of cloud-native applications. However, the use of these applications also introduces new security concerns. The tips above can help you impose security measures for cloud-native applications.