What are considered business threats in the digital age? Cybercrime has emerged to become the greatest risk to businesses. While the financial and organisational impact from cybercrime are enormously damaging, the reputational risks can impact consumer and investor confidence. Many businesses use applications to drive their businesses, making it important to secure all applications. In 2015, cybersecurity spending topped US$75 billion. This spending was driven by facets of digital business such as cloud and mobile computing, IoT and the sophisticated and high-impact of advanced cyber attacks. Cybersecurity spending is predicted to continue soaring, hitting US$101 billion by 2018 and US$170 billion by 2020, with “hot” spending areas such as security analytics, threat intelligence, mobile security and cloud security.
The cost of damage
Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and organized, and enterprises will need to secure their apps wherever they are located because access to data is most commonly exposed via applications. On average, companies worldwide suffer from approximately 99 successful attacks a year, losing an average of US$7.7 million. Besides the initial repercussions, such an attack could also lead to revenue loss and damage brand reputation, and result in significant downtime and compromise sensitive data. Organisations need to ensure they maintain compliance across hybrid environments, secure data and web apps by protecting against zero-day attacks and app vulnerabilities all while driving operational and cost efficiencies.
The magic of WAF
When companies move their apps to the cloud, they face the risk of losing data center and app security. At the same time they have to ensure there are comprehensive protections and compliance solutions along with consistent security policy management. Historically, deploying web application security and compliance policies only for critical apps across a variety of on premises and hybrid cloud environments meant greater complexity, security gaps, and higher costs. As a result, what might otherwise lead to application downtime, revenue losses, and brand damage some organizations choose to offload WAF administration, policy management, and attack mitigation. Along with self-managed on-premises and cloud application protection, F5 enables cloud-based WAF functionality through an “Managed Service” model to make it easy for organizations to quickly bolster their defences from increasingly sophisticated Layer 7 security attacks, multi-vector threat risk and app vulnerabilities.Ensure that you have comprehensive app protection across your threat landscape that is reliable, flexible and secure enough to meet present and future business requirements. This will go a long way to reduce your risk profile and help you battle and thwart cybercriminals wishing to attack you at the heart of today’s business: your applications. Secure your apps, protect your brand.