Today’s organizations operate in modern-day hybrid (read: complex) networks, are highly reliant on applications and have huge application estates. To deliver value, these applications rely on uninterrupted connectivity and complex connectivity flows. It’s almost impossible to achieve such connectivity using manual methods.

What enterprises need is an easier way to discover, provision, change, and decommission application and network connectivity, while maintaining a strong security and compliance posture. Here’s where application connectivity management solutions like AlgoSec come in.

In an internet-connected, multi-cloud/hybrid cloud world, application connectivity is not optional, but essential. Today, all applications require reliable and continuous connectivity, whether they are used by end users (e.g., via an API) or by one or more back-end services.

But to ensure such connectivity, network and security teams must discover applications, provision network traffic, and understand and map connectivity flows across their complex enterprise environment. They must also identify and block obsolete traffic flows that may be backdoored to unwanted or malicious traffic. Only then can they quickly and securely provision, update, and decommission connectivity for all their business applications.

However, if they perform these activities manually, it may slow down application deployment and expose the company to security risks and compliance violations. Manual operations also increase network complexity and lead to disruptions and errors. None of these situations are acceptable in today’s dynamic business climate.

An automated application analyzer and connectivity solution like AlgoSec can reduce complexities and accelerate application delivery, even when business requirements are rapidly changing. It can also prevent network-related outages, and consistently enforce enterprise-wide security and compliance policies.

Recently, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) in partnership with AlgoSec conducted research on application connectivity security and management. The research report, named Deconstructing Application Connectivity Challenges in a Complex Cloud Environment, highlights the various pain points organizations commonly face around application connectivity security and risk management.

One pain point is the lack of a single source of truth regarding application risk, which forces businesses to use multiple methods to gather this information. Consequently, risk management for application connectivity becomes very complicated and hard to manage.

Another challenge is human error, which often leads to application outages and downtime. And human error is unfortunately all too common. In fact, human error was responsible for 52% of application outages that organizations experienced in 2022. Third, inadequate visibility into cloud environments and connectivity requirements ends up compromising network security and creating risk and compliance gaps for the enterprise.

In addition to security challenges, organizations also struggle to ensure connectivity across complex environments. It gets even harder when there’s not enough documentation about application flows. Additionally, it’s challenging to translate business requirements for connectivity into practical terms that security and operations teams can securely implement.

Automated connectivity management platforms like AlgoSec can eliminate these common and persistent challenges to streamline application discovery and simplify connectivity management.

Integrating an application connectivity management solution that provides intelligent automation, into the network infrastructure, enables enterprises to securely and effectively commission, connect, and decommission applications across the enterprise. It reduces the effort and cost of manual connectivity mapping and provides greater visibility and control over the application ecosystem.

With intelligent automation, organizations can:

• Accelerate and optimize application connectivity
• Speed up service delivery
• Streamline network operations
• Monitor security and compliance posture
• Maintain business continuity

The platform sits at the intersection of enterprise infrastructure, applications, workloads, and security policies, enabling organizations to balance application delivery speeds, security, and compliance.

Here’s a detailed look at the benefits of automated application connectivity management:

Faster application deployment

Many modern applications are complex, with distributed architectures and support for multiple user roles and permissions levels. As a result, application deployment is often a slow and cumbersome process, which lengthens the deployment cycle and causes unnecessary delays.

Organizations functioning in dynamic environments and pursuing digital transformation must move quickly with application deployment. That’s why they need an easier way to understand connectivity requirements, map connectivity flows, and manage provisioning. An automated platform simplifies all these tasks to accelerate application delivery with minimal errors and security issues.

Effortless network policy changes

With an automated connectivity management platform, there’s no need to understand the network topology or firewall configurations to implement policy changes. Instead, application teams can simply define application components and the relationships between them to specify the required connections. Once this is done, the platform converts the required application changes into networking terms that enable the team to design and implement all required network changes.

Improved visibility into the application estate

An application connectivity solution automatically discovers applications and generates an up-to-date connectivity map to improve visibility into the entire app ecosystem. By “listening” to the network and associating connectivity flows with specific applications, the solution provides an application-centric view of the network and abstracts infrastructure complexity.

Improved visibility and observability enable network teams to better manage application connectivity across the environment, regardless of whether it contains on-premises networks, public clouds, private clouds, containers, or some combination of all four. They can also understand how changes in one application can affect other applications by defining and maintaining dependencies between them. The platform raises an alert if a change might impact application availability, so application teams can act quickly to prevent non-availability.

Stronger security across the enterprise

Improved visibility and control over the application estate allow teams to enforce and manage security and compliance policies across the enterprise. They can mitigate risk by automating security policies across every stage of the app development lifecycle, from code analysis and build, to monitoring and reporting.

The best-automated platforms also provide:

• “Zero-touch change automation”, which makes it easy to plan and execute application connectivity and security changes across all security groups
• Full integration with existing enterprise security stacks (SIEM, vulnerability scanners, etc.) to provide more robust, holistic security across the enterprise

What are some of the other key requirements for achieving and securely managing application connectivity, especially when your data is widely distributed? Our webinar Secure Application Connectivity with Automation answers this question.

Audit-ready reports help maintain a strong compliance posture

With automation, organizations can quickly identify compliance gaps and also assess the impact of changes on the compliance posture. Audit-ready reports will show which applications or security policies are non-compliant so the relevant teams can take appropriate action to bring the enterprise back into compliance.

Furthermore, a platform like AlgoSec ensures that business, application, security, and network teams are all aligned on application connectivity requirements and current status. Such alignment helps improve collaboration, minimizes mistakes, and keeps everyone on the same page with respect to connectivity requirements, status, and compliance.

Easy application decommissioning

With a platform like AlgoSec, it’s easy to identify and remove network access rules for decommissioned applications. Without the platform, decommissioning can be both difficult and prone to security risks. The solution automatically identifies the policy rules that must be changed or removed. It thus ensures that no unnecessary rules or objects remain and that no cybersecurity gaps which may result in a breach are left behind.

Some of the other key benefits of the AlgoSec platform are:

• Auto-discovery of applications and connectivity flows
• Real-time and continually-up-to-date map of connectivity requirements and flows
• Automated translation of non-technical business requirements into networking terms
• Easy assessment of the impact of network configuration changes on application connectivity, security, and compliance
• Intuitive, easy-to-use workflows enabling easy connectivity migrations to a new on-prem data center or the cloud
• Optimized traffic flows and improved firewall performance
• Prevention of application outages due to network device misconfigurations

NSPM software enables organizations to enforce policies related to the control and security of network environments. With NSPM tools, IT teams and network administrators can audit their enterprise networks and streamline the design and enforcement of security policies. They can also document policy changes, monitor policy compliance, and automate security and compliance operations.

That said, NSPM platforms cannot help businesses to discover applications or manage their connectivity. Application discovery and connectivity management are critical for modern organizations. Simply focusing on firewall policies instead of the applications that run the business can cause serious business disruptions and downtime. That’s why, for delivering applications quickly and securely, an application-centric approach is the best approach. Here’s where a connectivity management solution like AlgoSec comes in.

Such a solution intelligently automates application connectivity across the entire network estate, even if it consists of multi-cloud, on-prem, and hybrid networks. It also automates security policy implementation and changes across the estate to save time and prevent misconfigurations and other errors. Furthermore, it ensures that the policy is part of the application delivery pipeline, thus preventing “broken links” in the chain and enhancing enterprise agility and security.

Unlike traditional NSPM solutions that only provide visibility into the network posture; connectivity management platforms visualize the entire network and application connectivity to provide more holistic, application-centric security. Also, these platforms can easily adapt to application intent and traffic, and provide simple application-focused recertification. These capabilities differentiate them from NSPM tools that rely on policy rules and require labor-intensive rule recertification.

Furthermore, automated connectivity management platforms like AlgoSec empower businesses to deliver applications quickly and securely, while understanding which applications expose them to compliance violations and security risks. All in all, such platforms provide a complete solution to deliver secure application connectivity and enforce compliant security policies across the hybrid network/application estate.

AlgoSec’s application discovery and connectivity platform simplifies many activities across the application deployment lifecycle. With AlgoSec, you can automatically discover, provision, and change connectivity flows for all your business applications. The platform intelligently analyzes your network to improve application visibility and connectivity status. It also prevents network-related outages, enforces enterprise-wide security and compliance policies, and safely decommissions applications when you no longer need them.

Get secure application connectivity and accelerate application delivery with AlgoSec. Our platform intelligently automates application discovery and connectivity across the hybrid estate providing you with a better network management method. Contact us for a personal demo of the platform.