Observability has burst onto the scene across all types of operational and security-focused activities. Its need is being driven by increased demands for businesses to be more responsive to changes and more proactive when dealing with potential problems. In particular, security observability holds the promise to help reduce the time to detect a cyberattack. And going a step further, it can help detect security vulnerabilities before an attack even occurs.
What is security observability?
In the past, most operations relied on visibility into their systems and applications to manage security. Visibility would be achieved via monitoring applications, systems, and their logs. Monitoring solutions would collect and analyze information to detect suspicious behavior or unauthorized system changes. And having defined which types of behavior should trigger alerts, solutions would take action as needed.
Perhaps more to the point, monitoring lets you detect a known set of problems or conditions. Thus, it is essential for alerting and analyzing long-term trends. Simply put, monitoring lets users know how their systems and applications are functioning and being used.
However, the problem with security monitoring of complex distributed applications is that it is a passive approach to highly dynamic operations. And it often does not provide any insights into root cause problems or anomalies that might be precursors to problems in the making.
Security observability expands on monitoring by enabling correlation and inspection of the data to provide much deeper insights. Observability typically requires logs, metrics, and deep tracing. All data is used for modeling and analytics. Companies can mine the data, look for patterns, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to remediate problems and proactively defend against problems.
Why security observability is needed now
The need for security observability is growing due to the way applications are developed.
The general industry trend is a move to cloud-native architectures based on microservices. Such an approach brings many benefits. Applications can scale quickly. Companies can easily change or update a small aspect of a larger application without impacting the rest of the app. And businesses can make use of new technologies. For example, a business can add a new front-end or implement more sophisticated AI or machine learning modeling.
Such a development approach can introduce potential blind spots and complexity. In particular, modern applications built using cloud-native architectures and microservices introduce new challenges. The loose coupling of such applications, their distributed nature, and increased complexity makes it harder to understand vulnerabilities. As a result, traditional cybersecurity approaches break down. They miss the interactions and inter-dependencies of the many elements that comprise modern applications.
Furthermore, traditional security monitoring solutions can be limited. For example, visibility often must be split across tools resulting in insecure platforms or situations where relevant data is not even used in monitoring.
Adding to the security challenges is the widescale embracement of low-code/no-code development methodologies. Such technologies open development up to business units and citizen developers. These groups can build sophisticated applications, often with little oversight or guidance. As a result, apps may be created by assembling building blocks that may be outdated, unpatched, or simply have vulnerabilities.
DevSecOps needs security observability
With all these trends, it is not surprising that businesses are exploring new approaches to security. Just as quality assurance was melded into development processes using automated testing, security ops are being meshed with development. Hence, the rapid implementation of DevSecOps methodologies in organizations today.
While security issues can grow when using cloud-native development methodologies, there is a lesser-known security benefit. Applications and services constructed using APIs and microservices have an advantage over other systems because developers and security staff can more easily observe what’s happening inside them. In addition, businesses can add links to the APIs and microservices and use tools to collect the details of such operations.
Given this wealth of data, security observability expands on monitoring. Rather than just detecting vulnerabilities and incidents that raise compliance issues in the development process, DevSecOps using security observability, seeks to identify issues and automatically take corrective actions.
Moving forward, businesses should expect more adoption of DevSecOps and more automation based on security observability. This will only serve to strengthen security and compliance across systems and applications.
