What is AI Application Security?
AI application security represents a collective of best practices, functionalities, and/or features that can be integrated within an organization’s software to help guard against and remediate threats from cyber attackers, data breaches, and other sources; Application security is not a technology. Organizations can utilize a variety of application security services, programs, and products; For example, firewalls, antivirus systems, and data encryption are a few scenarios of application security taken to keep unauthorized individuals from accessing an application or its resources. Organizations may develop specific application security policies to predict access for a group of sensitive data sets. Application security can occur in multiple phases; however, the development phase is where the best practices of AI application security are created the most often. In addition to development, organizations can still use other services after developing an application. In general, there are hundreds of security tools, services, and programs available to businesses but all serve a specific function. Some solidify code changes, while others look for coding threats or establish data encryption. Organizations can even decide between more specific tools for each type of application. Types of Application Security Application security may include a variety of capabilities and technologies. Following are some of the most popular categories of security procedures: Securing Applications with Multiple Technologies A good application security solution will employ most, if not all, of the above technologies. They all combine to form a wall of defense around an application to safeguard the data as much as possible. For example, a user wishes to log into a mobile banking application and type in their username and password on the login page. With the password and username, the system takes on that the individual is who they claim to be—but a lot of organizations are moving towards multifactor authentication (MFA), which involves an added step at login. In addition to possessing the username and password to the account, MFA will prompt a code to the person’s phone or email for further confirmation that it’s the correct person. After the code is entered by the user, the system gives the user authorization to access the system. Everything that the user types in is encrypted so it can be transferred across networks and to remote computers without being accessible to anyone reading it. Any activity that the user performs inside the application is tracked—either to refer back to later if there is ever a breach in the data or to detect odd or suspicious patterns, which would then notify an administrator. Benefits of AI Application Security Companies depend on applications to drive almost everything they do, so it is not negotiable that they must be kept secure. Some of the numerous advantages of investing in AI application Security are listed below: AI Application Security: Challenges and Best Practices Cloud application security Cloud application security may become complex due to the following reasons: 1) cloud environments are distributed and shared, 2) cloud services are often complex, and 3) cloud deployments are dynamic. Your cloud applications must remain secure without affecting their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. The most prevalent challenges (and solutions) for cloud application security are as follows: Shared Responsibility Model: In the cloud, you do have some security responsibilities regarding your applications, and your cloud provider does, too. Every provider might be a little different, but generally, the cloud provider is responsible for securing the cloud infrastructure and the underlying processes, and you are responsible for securing your data and applications. Your responsibility would also include virtual machines and operating systems. The answer here is to ensure you have a good, clear understanding of where your security responsibilities start and finish and what responsibilities sit with your cloud provider. Also, carry out regular security training and awareness sessions with teams like DevOps and app dev teams to check that the proper security controls and governance practices are in place as they should be. Distributed nature of cloud application data: It’s not at all unusual to have application data stored and processed in more than one place on cloud platforms—or even across multiple clouds. That can make it difficult to maintain consistent availability, integrity, and privacy of the data, but you must do. Solutions to this problem include encryption of data in transit at rest, and in processing. Data classification and access control products can further assist you in determining the most sensitive data and ensure that security controls are uniform across platforms and sufficient for the type of data it is. Cloud providers typically provide users with geo-replication capability and data residency products, which can further assist you in remaining compliant with data security, privacy, and sovereignty laws. Limited visibility into cloud data and risk of misconfiguration. Solutions to overcome this are automated configuration management tools, which are commonly built or part of cloud services. They can detect discrepancies from pre-defined policies and conditions and inform you about possible issues. Another best practice is regular, ongoing monitoring and logging of all the cloud resources. Once again, you’ll be able to detect anomalies or suspicious activity which can allow you to correct vulnerabilities before they become actual issues. Identity and access management: The cloud’s nature is that large numbers of people can access data and applications that have been stored anywhere, but that convenience then also presents the challenge of figuring out who should have access to what and when. Too often, users can have unfettered access to data that they don’t require or for users to maintain access to cloud resources after leaving the company or no longer requiring them. One key solution to this problem is to implement the principle of least privilege, whereby users and services are given the minimum set of permissions necessary to perform their work. A cloud-specific plan must define how your company will contain the attacks, analyze threats or attacks, and recover data and operations. There are several cloud-native solutions you can use for threat detection and response. Web application security Security for web applications is