What you Need to Know About Automation for Protecting Application Platforms

Security in the context of IT is a complex endeavor. The idea of security in depth entails applying security best practices to all aspects of IT, including databases, operating systems, networks, applications (either built in-house or acquired), and physical access to server racks, machine rooms, and buildings. Large businesses and governmental organizations now routinely use cutting-edge methods like automation for protecting application platforms, intrusion detection, penetration testing (often known as “white hat hacking”), and threats monitoring to reinforce their security measures.

Relationship Between Patch Currency and the Automation for Protecting Application Platforms

There are still some areas where fundamental security procedures are not yet strictly followed, even though these advanced standards are critically necessary to preserve a solid security architecture for a company. Keeping the software stack updated with the newest software versions and security updates is one fundamental practice. However, it may often prove to be difficult to a keep software up to date, especially in the middleware and application space.

This is caused by a number of things, including the human labor involved in applying the updates, the risks and testing time needed when making breaking changes to the software (usually due to version-to-version incompatibilities), the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and other organizational priorities taking precedence over the patching and maintenance process for a software. An organization’s risk to threats increases if its software lacks the most recent and updated security features (or, worse, if it is using old, out-of-date versions of software that don’t get such patches).

In essence, “patch currency” is a crucial software security procedure, and delays in security patches always exposes a company to dangers. The development teams must respond to new versions and breaking changes, while the operations teams test and deploy the upgrades.

Enterprises must choose solutions that are secure, respond quickly to software vulnerabilities, and deliver frequent, simple software upgrades if they want to be agile and secure without burdening their IT security teams.

Solutions from Software as a Service (SaaS) providers have mostly allayed this worry because the SaaS provider assumes the role of maintaining the security of the software that powers the service, and use SLAs to enforce it. The problem, however, remains inherent for software that is managed by software operations teams and is still on-premises.

Automation for Solution

The cost of patch currency for middleware is the most frequently mentioned pain factor. Teams are unable to devote time to strategic projects because of the work involved. This problem is primarily caused by a lack of innovative automation and visibility across the various deployments that different teams are in charge of. As visibility is required to comprehend what attack exists for a specific software product or application and, understand what activities are essential to maintain a secure posture, the absence of visibility frequently corresponds to a weakened security design. A mix of automation (to minimize cycle durations and human effort) and greater visibility (to verify necessary steps are completed and updates are deployed successfully) is needed to lessen the work of the security patching process.

Teams can achieve continuous protection by using automation to ease the burden and expense of software maintenance. It is possible to automate procedures like vulnerability assessment, tracking, and remediation to cut back on or eliminate labor-intensive, repetitive processes. There are several software programs that concentrate on different facets of patch currency, but very few offer a full picture that the team in charge of the job may use to take action.