Everything you ever wanted to know about security policy management, and much more.
Enterprise cybersecurity must constantly evolve to meet the threat posed by new malware variants and increasingly sophisticated hacker tactics, techniques, and procedures. This need drives the way security professionals categorize different technologies and approaches.
The difference between network security and application security is an excellent example. These two components of the enterprise IT environment must be treated separately in any modern cybersecurity framework. This is because they operate on different levels of the network and they are exposed to different types of threats and security issues.
To understand why, we need to cover what each category includes and how they contribute to an organization’s overall information security posture. IT leaders and professionals can use this information to their organization’s security posture, boost performance, and improve event outcomes.
Network security focuses on protecting assets located within the network perimeter. These assets include data, devices, systems, and other facilities that enable the organization to pursue its interests — just about anything that has value to the organization can be an asset.
This security model worked well in the past, when organizations had a clearly defined network perimeter. Since the attack surface was well understood, security professionals could deploy firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and secure web gateways directly at the point of connection between the internal network and the public internet. Since most users, devices and applications were located on-site, security leaders had visibility and control over the entire network.
This started to change when organizations shifted to cloud computing and remote work, supported by increasingly powerful mobile devices. Now most organizations do not have a clear network perimeter, so the castle-and-moat approach to network security is no longer effective.
However, the network security approach isn’t obsolete. It is simply undergoing a process of change, adjusting to smaller, more segmented networks governed by Zero Trust principles and influenced by developments in application security.
Network security traditionally adopts a castle-and-moat approach, where all security controls exist at the network perimeter. Users who attempt to access the network must authenticate and verify themselves before being allowed to enter. Once they enter, they can freely move between assets, applications, and systems without the need to re-authenticate themselves.
In modern, cloud-enabled networks, the approach is less like a castle and more like a university campus. There may be multiple different subnetworks working together, with different security controls based on the value of the assets under protection. In these environments, network security is just one part of a larger, multi-layered security deployment.
This approach focuses on protecting IT infrastructure, like routers, firewalls, and network traffic. Each of these components has a unique role to play securing assets inside the network:
Network security tools protect organizations against cyberattacks that target their network infrastructure, and prevent hackers from conducting lateral movement. Many modern network security solutions focus on providing deep visibility into network traffic, so that security teams can identify threat actors who have successfully breached the network perimeter and gained unauthorized access.
Application security addresses security threats to public-facing applications, including APIs. These threats may include security misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities, and threat actor exploits. Since these network assets have public-facing connections, they are technically part of the network perimeter — but they do not typically share the same characteristics as traditional network perimeter assets.
Unlike network security, application security extends to the development and engineering process that produces individual apps. It governs many of the workflows that developers use when writing code for business contexts.
One of the challenges to web application security is the fact that there is no clear and universal definition for what counts as an application. Most user-interactive tools and systems count, especially ones that can process data automatically through API access. However, the broad range of possibilities leads to an enormous number of potential security vulnerabilities and exposures, all of which must be accounted for.
Several frameworks and methods exist for achieving this:
The main focus of application security is maintaining secure environments inside applications and their use cases. It is especially concerned with the security vulnerabilities that arise when web applications are made available for public use. When public internet users can interact with a web application directly, the security risks associated with that application rise significantly. As a result, developers must adopt security best practices into their workflows early in the development process.
The core elements of application security include:
Application security plays a major role ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data processed by applications. Since public-facing applications often collect and process end-user data, they make easy targets for opportunistic hackers. At the same time, robust application security controls must exist within applications to address security vulnerabilities when they emerge and prevent data breaches.
Network and application security are not mutually exclusive areas of expertise. They are two distinct parts of your organization’s overall security posture. Identifying areas where they overlap and finding solutions to common problems will help you optimize your organization’s security capabilities through a unified security approach.
Network and application security solutions protect distinct areas of the enterprise IT environment, but they do overlap in certain areas. Security leaders should be aware of the risk of over-implementation, or deploying redundant security solutions that do not efficiently improve security outcomes.
Successful technology implementations of any kind come with challenges, and security implementations are no different. Both application and network security deployments will present issues that security leaders must be prepared to address.
Application security challenges include:
Network security challenges include:
A robust security posture must contain elements of both network and application security. Public-facing applications must be able to filter out malicious traffic and resist technical attacks, and security teams need comprehensive visibility into network activity and detecting insider threats.
This is especially important in cloud-enabled hybrid environments. If your organization uses cloud computing through a variety of public and private cloud vendors, you will need to extend network visibility throughout the hybrid network. Maintaining cloud security requires a combination of network and web application security capable of producing results in a cost-effective way.
Highly automated security platforms can help organizations implement proactive security measures that reduce the need to hire specialist internal talent for every configuration and policy change. Enterprise-ready cloud security solutions leverage automation and machine learning to reduce operating costs and improve security performance across the board.
No organization can adequately protect itself from a wide range of cyber threats without investing in both network and application security. Technology continues to evolve and threat actors will adapt their tactics to exploit new vulnerabilities as they are discovered. Integrating network and application security into a single, unified approach gives security teams the ability to create security policies and incident response plans that address real-world threats more effectively.
Network visibility and streamlined change management are vital to achieving this goal. AlgoSec is a security policy management and application connectivity platform that provides in-depth information on both aspects of your security posture. Find out how AlgoSec can help you centralize policy and change management in your network.
Receive notifications of new posts by email.