DevOps Rising to the Occasion, Filling the Web App Security Gap with F5’s Essential App Protect Service

Provided as a cloud service, Essential App Protect is a modern SaaS solution now available to solve your web app security challenges

In many organizations, building and securing apps has typically been a siloed and complex undertaking. The product owners, developers, and security engineers are coming from different teams with varying sets of resources, skills, perspectives, and expectations. Too often, these teams have priorities and resources that are not aligned.

This can create tension, introduce roadblocks, and ultimately impact the business, especially when they all have a stake in the app development process.

One of the major areas of struggle and strife is security. As the number of apps skyrockets and pool of security expertise continues to lag demand, there is a growing expectation being placed on developers to shoulder more of the responsibility (since most infosec departments don’t have the resources to manage the protection of every app).

Apps are squarely in the crosshairs, as one of the weakest links (outside of humans) to be exploited. Code is fundamentally imperfect, thus vulnerable, and it continues to be the #1 attack target—and represented the initial targets in 53% of breaches being studied by F5 Labs.

While security is top-of-mind for many, it hasn’t always been for developers. They are traditionally more focused on innovation, hitting timelines, and app performance—needing to remain unhindered by work that slows velocity including security.

Also: security is hard. It traditionally requires a unique skillset; it’s time consuming to set up and manage. And for security novices, it can be crippling, especially app security. According to F5 Labs’ 2019 research, 71% of organizations reported a skills gap in security with the largest skills gap in the discipline of protecting apps according to 54% of respondents.

Without much support from SecOps teams, limited knowledge and understanding of security, where are developers supposed to turn?

Enter F5’s Essential App Protect Service.

It takes the complexity and guesswork out of safeguarding applications delivering simple, fast, and scalable cloud-based security for web apps—wherever they’re deployed.

The service can be activated with a few intuitive UI clicks or robust APIs allowing for integrating it into DevOps toolchain(s). Within minutes, apps will have out-of-the-box protection against common web exploits, malicious IPs, and coordinated attacks.

We’ve preconfigured Essential App Protect using more than 20 years of networking and security expertise, which means users don’t need to be security experts to provide the protection necessary. And apps will be shielded against evolving threats automatically thanks to a direct link with real-time threat intelligence.

Essential App Protect makes it easy to defend web-facing apps as-as-Service—without sacrificing the speed and agility application owners and developers need to keep delivering innovative offerings to market.

For more information on F5 Essential App Protect, check out this DevCentral blog or visit: f5.com/cloudwaf