Why Web Apps Need to Enhance Secure Service Access

Secure Service Access
Why-Web-Apps-Need-to-Enhance-Secure-Service-Access

Protecting modern distributed networks continues to elude enterprises, resulting in data breaches, ransomware attacks, and more.

The majority of tech stacks are not made to treat web access points, personal identities, and devices as a security perimeter. To close gaps in network security and safeguard apps and their data, businesses must quickly adopt the newest solutions to improve secure service access (SSA).

SSA is more relevant than ever because it helps enterprises modify their cybersecurity tech stacks into a single integrated platform, replacing multiple point products with a cloud security platform.

Enterprises are faced with a bewildering array of options as they attempt to decrease their attack surface by bolstering their security capabilities. While some vendors offer a single integrated platform with end-to-end secure service access, others repackage current point products, create a single user interface for numerous solutions, or jump on the acronym bandwagon.

Also Read: Strategies to Ensure Secure Cloud Collaboration

Every multipoint product in a cybersecurity tech stack is an additional vulnerability, or even worse, a source of implicit trust that hackers can use to gain access to apps and networks quickly.

By implementing SSA, businesses can reorient their tech stacks from being data center and edge-centric to user identity-centric. That’s fantastic news for companies pursuing a zero-trust strategy based on the idea that their security perimeter is made up of human and machine identities.

The challenge of unmanaged devices

The idea of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and unmanaged devices is one of the most challenging aspects of access security for CISOs and CIOs. The pandemic and widespread acceptance of virtual workforces, employee and contractors’ use of personal devices for work-related purposes, is increasing at record rates. Additionally, businesses are turning to contractors to fill positions that have historically been difficult to fill with full-time workers. Unmanaged devices are therefore widely dispersed among third-party consultants and virtual workforces, increasing the number of attack vectors.

The result is that enterprises cannot keep up with the rapid and increasingly complex creation of device endpoints, identities, and threat surfaces. Web applications and SaaS apps are common attack vectors where cybercriminals first focus on breaching networks, launching ransomware, and stealing data. These apps include enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, collaboration platforms, and virtual meetings.

Web application firewalls (WAFs) and reverse proxies, the traditional security controls that businesses use to combat these threats, have sadly shown to be insufficient at securing data, networks, and devices.

Also Read: Averting Ransomware Attacks is Topmost Priority for Enterprises Today

How web application isolation works

Unlike traditional web application firewalls (WAF) that protect network perimeters, the web app isolation technique air gaps networks and applications from malware on user devices using remote browser isolation (RBI).

Application isolation allows IT departments and cybersecurity teams to apply fine-grained user-level policies that limit each user’s applications, how they can access them, and what actions they are allowed to perform on each app.

Policies, for instance, can limit the use of cut-and-paste functions (clip-boarding), malware scanning, DLP scanning, and the ability of users to enter data into text fields.

Protecting web apps with zero trust

It needs to get better when streamlining tech stacks, removing point solutions that clash, and protecting endpoints, particularly those belonging to users and contractors. Web application isolation, one of the many recent innovations in this field, exhibits significant potential for enhancing BYOD security through a streamlined network-based strategy that excludes using agents or software on devices.

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