Radware Embraces APIs to Improve AppSec Across Multiple Clouds | #cloudsecurity | #hacking | #aihp

Radware this week launched an application programming interface (API) approach to securing multiple clouds designed from the ground up to be an extension of a DevSecOps workflow.

Eyal Arazi, a senior product marketing manager in Radware’s security group, said that Radware SecurePath makes it possible to invoke any of the company’s cloud security offerings via an API. That eliminates the need to depend on inline security platforms that require separate consoles to be managed.

Instead, the out-of-path approach enabled by Radware makes it simpler to consolidate the management of security across multiple clouds, he said. The API approach allows application requests to go directly from the client to the application server and reduces complexity and latency, eliminates routing changes and increases overall availability, noted Arazi.

DevOps teams can now access the entire Radware cloud security portfolio, including the Radware web application firewall (WAF), API protection tools and a service that thwarts distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks via a consistent set of APIs, said Arazi. Radware will continue to make those offerings available to be deployed inline or out-of-path as IT teams see fit, he added.

Every time an organization deploys workloads on another cloud platform, an already complex security challenge becomes more complicated. Today, most of the responsibility for securing those clouds lies with cybersecurity teams. However, as DevOps teams gain access to tools and platforms that make it more feasible for developers and DevOps teams to programmatically manage security, more of the responsibility for it is shifting further left.

Part of the benefit of that approach is the elimination of the need to deploy and manage firewalls on virtual machines or the need to reroute traffic via content delivery networks (CDNs) to inspect traffic, noted Arazi. It also enables the Radware security offerings to piggyback on the certificates that are already being employed in cloud platforms, he added.

In the longer term, the goal is to reduce—or outright eliminate—the vulnerabilities that now routinely make it into production applications. Many of the cloud security issues that organizations regularly face can be traced back to misconfiguration mistakes made by developers. It’s not that a developer deliberately sets out to build and deploy vulnerable applications. Rather, they simply lack the expertise required to make sure that, for example, ports are not left open. In the absence of that expertise, more tools must be embedded within DevOps workflows to better ensure application security. After all, it may be years before most developers attain any meaningful cybersecurity proficiency.

In the meantime, closer collaboration between DevOps and cybersecurity professionals is required. There are simply not enough cybersecurity professionals available to participate in every phase of an application development project. DevOps teams need to be able to identify and remediate issues as early as possible. Otherwise, a cybersecurity issue that gets discovered at the last minute is likely to prevent a workload from being deployed in a production environment.

In the absence of any additional effort, it’s really only a matter of time before cybercriminals become more adept at compromising cloud application environments.