The present and future of application protection

What enterprises should do to succeed

Published April 2016

In today’s application-centric world, there’s truly an app for everything. Organizations offer applications with data access to employees and consumers to drive greater productivity, meet business demands, and ultimately achieve a competitive advantage. But as organizations deliver more and more sensitive data through applications, they’re also introducing ever increasing risk. That’s because today’s users are everywhere—frequently outside the corporate network—and the apps they rely on can be anywhere, from private data centers to the public cloud. The result is less visibility and control for the organization. It’s no surprise that cybercriminals are taking advantage of this exposure by targeting these applications, which exist largely outside the sphere of traditional security protections like firewalls, antivirus software, and TLS/SSL encryption.

Whether it’s a volumetric denial-of-service (DoS) attack, browser-based malware, or an advanced persistent threat, today’s application attacks are really gambits to obtain or compromise corporate data. As more and more data is encrypted traffic, the majority of today’s security tools are running blind, unable to decrypt that data to ensure it’s not malicious.