[Insights for CISOs] Web Application Security - The Challenges and Solutions

Across industries, business models have evolved into customer-centric, digitally dependent operations that rely on web and mobile applications to keep customers, employees, and other stakeholders connected. With this proliferation in application use, the cyberattack surface at the application layer has expanded and become porous with vulnerable entry points. The increasingly sophisticated threat landscape challenges organizations to secure their back-end infrastructure, web servers, websites, and web applications against application layer attacks while balancing responsibilities between their application development and security teams. The shift from a legacy web application firewall (WAF) strategy to a modern application security strategy will enable businesses to fully protect their web-based applications and application programming interfaces (APIs). Today’s WAF solutions must deploy quickly across any environment, enabling organizations to secure all applications, regardless of their hosting environments and architectures. Flexible deployment (cloud, on-premises, or at the edge) and operational choices (fully managed, self-service, or SaaS delivered) are necessary to best suit individual use cases, depending on each organization’s infrastructure. The shift to a holistic application protection approach reflects the need to integrate WAF with other technologies, like API security, bot management, anti-DDoS, runtime application self-protection (RASP), etc., for better security outcomes and operational simplicity in web application protection.