The rapid pace of digital transformation has led many organizations to adopt cloud-based infrastructure and applications. In today’s tech-first world, enterprises and small businesses alike are using containers and distributed applications, built with microservices and running on platforms like Kubernetes.
Now, balancing security with innovation and rapid development and deployment has become a challenge. Developers and security teams are both dedicated to meeting business goals–maintaining development and deployment speed while prioritizing security–but their individual directives from business leaders to achieve this common goal create tension.
Developers are tasked with bringing new products and features to market rapidly, while security teams must prevent, detect, and limit the amount of cybersecurity incidents. However, in the world of container security, many solutions are reactive and focused on vulnerability detection, threat detection, and alerting. This creates alert overload for the security team, leads to a list of things for the development team to “fix,” slows down innovation, and ultimately creates friction between these teams that are still dedicated to the same goals.
How can these tensions be avoided? Security teams need solutions that combine prevention and risk mitigation with detection. Having the right solutions in place empowers security teams to achieve their goal of limiting incidents and preventing attacks while not delaying developers’ progress and time to market.
Over-Indexing on Threat Detection
Historically, tools designed for security teams are built to detect as many threats as possible, and many container security solutions are plagued with hard-to-trace false alarms. Detection fatigue occurs because of this inundation of alerts – teams must triage dozens of alerts per hour while facing the immense pressure of deciding which threats to prioritize and investigate – most of which are just noise that blocks harmless traffic and creates unnecessary work. With so much time spent chasing false positives, little remains for responding to real threats, let alone proactively preventing them.
The detection fatigue that falls on security teams is only half the problem. This pressure trickles down to the development team, preventing them from meeting their goals by slowing down the speed at which they can bring new products and features to market. Development teams, faced with the pressure from business leaders to ship applications faster, may start to view security teams as bottlenecks during this process.
What’s more, when security teams are stuck in a reactive cycle, they have less bandwidth to collaborate on building secure systems from the start. There is less trust and more throwing issues "over the wall" to be dealt with later.
Deploying the Right Solutions
To overcome these challenges, today’s security teams need tools that combine prevention and risk mitigation with detection. To do their jobs effectively, and give developers the freedom to do the same, security teams should have a runtime security solution in their toolkit. Runtime security offers a dynamic and proactive approach that optimizes resource allocation and enhances threat detection capabilities. Runtime security brings the intelligence, automation, and continuous protection that security teams need to level the digital playing field, ensuring a defensive posture that's effective in preventing breaches.
By continuously monitoring and analyzing application behavior during runtime, runtime security solutions can identify and respond to emerging threats in real time, reducing false positives and optimizing resource utilization. Reducing false positives enables security teams to focus on addressing the most impactful threats rather than chasing ghosts. Moreover, detecting attacks, risks, and patterns specific to an organization's infrastructure enables accurate and targeted responses.
Runtime security also leverages automation for rapid investigation and response. Some solutions can take containment actions like killing processes or isolating workloads with a single click. Overall, runtime security solutions empower teams with the capabilities they need to work more collaboratively across departments. Organizational leaders should prioritize providing these solutions to their security teams.
Strengthening Relationships While Working Toward a Common Goal
Developers and security teams are working toward the same goal: driving business growth and maintaining development and deployment speed while upholding security. Equipping them with the right tools helps to achieve this goal and maintain strong, mutually beneficial relationships.
