Even in businesses with dedicated IT security officers, the introduction of new apps, software integrations and public-facing websites brings a multitude of risks to be mitigated.
So, when looking to strike a balance between security and usability, it can be a challenge knowing where the vulnerabilities lie.
With the increase in popularity of containerization within DevOps environments – namely, because of the scalability, portability, and CI / CD utility of containers – has unfortunately come increased levels of application risk.
The importance of IAST
IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing) checks code for security vulnerabilities during automated testing of an application. Because IAST reports threats in real-time, your CI / CD pipeline is not slowed down.
IAST is designed to remedy the shortcomings of SAST (Static Application Security Testing) and DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) by bringing both practices together. Simply put, IAST places an agent within an application to carry out analysis in real-time throughout the development life cycle.
The value of RASP
Organisations that have not prioritised application security face significant risk from cyber attacks, and potential legal ramifications from the resultant leaking of customer information. In this situation, one solution is to make use of RASP.
RASP (Runtime Application Security Protection) is directly plugged into an application / its runtime environment, and from there can control application execution. RASP allows apps to run continuous security checks on themselves and fight back against live attacks by ending an attacker’s session and alerting cyber security defenders to the attack.
