A modern method for businesses to secure their data— uniting teams and leveraging observability across the tech stack.

“All businesses are digital businesses.” 

The truth of this statement increases daily, with businesses around the world in an ongoing digital transformation. Organizations are ramping up ecommerce, welcoming more and more remote employees, and doubling-down on software as a service (SaaS). The pressure is on for businesses to innovate and keep up, or face obsolescence.

With an expanding digital perimeter come new security risks and vulnerabilities. As businesses house massive volumes of data within an application, malicious actors are exploiting security weaknesses to breach customer data. These security breaches happen regularly, with or without an organization’s knowledge, and the bill for these data leaks can end up costing millions. 

In order for digital businesses to effectively protect their applications and their customers’ data from daily threats and vulnerabilities, they must act quickly to promote a new culture of collaboration and increased visibility through all phases of app development. 

Protect your end user

In today’s digital landscape, users automatically expect an application with lightning-fast speed and impenetrable security. If a user’s data is compromised because of a breach, your business will lose the trust of the customer, and your brand’s reputation will suffer. Many organizations have a set of security standards, but oftentimes they’re implemented after the development cycle. Implementing security checks during the development cycle both within and outside your app is essential to increase your security posture and stay on top of daily threats. Additionally, development teams need to be tightly aligned with security teams, aligning on a common goal to  ensure a positive user experience. This ensures that an application is built from the mindset of protecting both the business and the end users. 

In order to create this tighter alignment among IT teams, businesses need to foster a culture of collaboration.

Unite Security, Development, Operations, and Business Teams

Security threats are a daily occurrence. As the data housed in an application grows, with networks and cloud workloads increasing, the risk grows too. Businesses can’t afford to be reactive when faced with cyberthreats, they need to be proactive. 

The solution? 

Establish a common goal driven by the business outcome. This ensures alignment among all stakeholders. Implementing a full-stack observability platform not only provides a view of the application performance, but also security threats and vulnerabilities, and— most importantly— includes business performance context. Having a common goal helps remove friction between independent silos within the IT organization, and allows them to understand their impact to the business.  Solving the age-old issue of siloed organizations can be a daunting task, but having the tools that enable collaboration solves half of the battle.

This results in less friction between teams and promotes new innovations in application security. Businesses that leverage security teams to innovate will stay ahead of their competitors in improving user experience. Ultimately, a positive user experience means more customers, and company growth. 

Leverage AIOps to increase security

Implementing automation within operations teams (AIOps) is a critical strategy to reduce the amount of manual work it takes to find and resolve critical issues. These types of issues can span from a bug in the app code, to servers running an out of date operating system that exposes a security threat. The AIOps strategy helps to automate the security response. While malicious actors scan and identify areas to infiltrate the IT environment, AI is helping to detect vulnerabilities and automatically drive actions to remediate.  

Businesses that use a holistic approach through an AIOPs-driven observability platform are in a position to gain the upper hand against their competitors. Historically, if an issue occurred, like a surge of website traffic triggering a denial of service, it would be the catalyst for panic. An all-hands meeting among IT teams would then become a war room, with each team pointing fingers and trying to prove their innocence. 

By leveraging AIOps, IT teams can efficiently isolate security threats. Only the impacted teams will be notified of the threat, and time won’t be wasted playing the blame game. Now more than ever, security threats need to be resolved as quickly as possible, before they impact the end user.

Security cannot be seen as a barrier to innovation. Application and development teams within an organization innovate with and because of security. It’s an enabler of innovation. With the importance of user experience in this digital age, all aspects need a seat at the table for a cohesive solution. 

Learn more about uniting teams to bring security to the forefront and proactively identify threats. Download the IDC Technology Spotlight here.