Resilient Delivery Demands Autonomous Security
Business demands fuel technology shifts
The growing shift towards digital business models, accelerated by the pandemic, has revealed the need for increased business and technology alignment across every industry. Customers expect to be able to interact with companies anywhere, anytime, and demand highly responsive, customizable experiences. Gartner refers to organizations with the ability to meet these demands as intelligent, composable businesses1. These businesses are data driven and use that data to respond to shifts in market sentiment, customer demand, or any other relevant events.
All of this begs the question – how are these businesses able to respond so quickly while others lag behind? It’s almost entirely dependent on the underlying architecture of their enabling technology. Companies can’t keep pace with customer demands if they’re reliant on monolithic applications and months-long waterfall release cycles. Modern architecture is often software defined, third-party hosted, and broken down into independent components and microservices. This reduces infrastructure maintenance overhead and allows individual components to be changed or removed in response to shifting business and customer demands with minimal dependencies on other components.
New architecture needs new approaches to security
Breaking applications down into distributed microservices running on third party cloud platforms in various parts of the world presents a double edged sword for security. On the one hand, lightweight independent components are easier to make immutable and have a limited blast radius if they’re compromised. This immutability and independence makes these components more resilient – interruption in one process within an application no longer means the entire application needs to be stopped, patched, and restarted.
The other side of this coin is that traditional security approaches with a centralized security team overseeing every change and manually analyzing every vulnerability no longer work. Mature continuous deployment environments can see upwards of 1,000 changes per day, which no security team can scale to manually review. Policy-based security tools require too much tuning and approaches which rely on AI/ML to establish a baseline and report on deviations are prone to false positives in environments that are constantly changing.
The only way security can keep pace in these environments is if its approach is fully autonomous, deterministic, present in both production and pre-production environments, and focused on actual risk instead of perceived risk. Security teams must also acknowledge that it’s impossible to completely eliminate risk in production which means they need mitigating measures in place to respond to any threats in real time with minimal interruption to operations.
Rezilion is uniquely positioned to securely enable business agility in modern, continuous deployment environments. Rezilion Validate and Certify are both fully autonomous and use the deterministic nature of your code to validate your actual attack surface. This approach enables composable business in a number of ways:
- Focus on the actual attack surface – Rezilion Validate runs in CI or production and analyzes identified vulnerabilities against runtime data to understand if a vulnerability poses an actual threat in your environment. This eliminates 60% of unplanned patching work while delivering 100% of the security benefits.
- Faster releases – 60% less time spent patching removes a key bottleneck between security and devops and enables continuous, secure deployments.
- Less code bloat – Rezilion Validate highlights components and packages that are never run in memory. This allows developers to remove the components and create lightweight, maintainable images.
- Autonomous unobtrusive mitigation – Rezilion Certify creates smart gates to production and detects any unauthorized changes.
Increased reliance on digital channels and experiences is here to stay in every industry, and companies must evolve or fall behind. This evolution requires a fundamental shift in how applications are developed and delivered and these new architectures require a completely new approach to security. This new approach needs to be autonomous, deterministic and deployed across CI and production environments to keep pace with devops and secure your entire actual attack surface.
