Why Cloud-Native Applications Need Cloud-Native Security

Why Cloud-Native Applications Need Cloud-Native Security
Today's developers and the enterprises they work for must prioritize security in order to reap the speed and feature benefits these applications and new architectures provide.

The rise of cloud-native application architectures — and the deployment speeds they enable — are forcing many organizations to prioritize new features and functionalities over security. However, compromises that make security a low priority expose these organizations to greater risk.


Recent discoveries of API vulnerabilities and the commonplace nature of generic container configurations, for example, have combined to make modern applications highly susceptible to attacks. Enterprises cannot afford to let application security be an afterthought.


Unlike traditional applications that consisted of a single workload and required additional resources to ensure speed, today's cloud-native applications are mostly microservices-based. There are probably as many perceptions on the exact definition of the word "microservice" as there are development teams working on modern applications. Typically, however, these types of applications are broken in such a way that each individual microservice can scale independently of the others. 


If you need the application to go faster, you add more instances of the microservice that is currently acting as a bottleneck. This approach works well — except for the high likelihood of risk exposure by human error.


Cloud-Native VulnerabilityIt is bound to happen. Human beings, especially when working quickly to meet deadlines, make bad judgment calls. Despite warnings, employees will continue to copy and paste blindly from Stack Exchange, make microservices out of random applications found on GitHub, and even automate these microservices to regularly pull code from a repository maintained by an unknown and only questionably trustworthy third party that the developer in question has never met, or even conversed with.


Even in instances when all code is written in-house, removing the ris ..

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