While this approach benefitted some organizations, it also resulted in “accidental multi-clouds,” made up of public and private clouds that likely have ineffective security measures to support them.

 

According to Fortinet’s 2021 Cloud Security Report, the majority of organizations

have a hybrid or multi-cloud deployment, and 76 percent utilize two or more cloud providers. This, in turn, has resulted in an explosion of cloud and application edges—all of which contribute to a greater threat landscape.

 

Ninety-five percent of organizations are moderately to extremely concerned about cloud security. Evaluating where your clients are in their application journeys across its build, run and deploy stages can help to effectively adjust the strategy and investments. The result can be better digital acceleration outcomes and reduced complexity.

 

Understanding Cloud Security in the Application Lifecycle

In simple terms, the application journey is a continuous lifecycle comprised of three stages: Build, Deploy and Run. Together, these stages solve for key security concerns including loss of visibility, ensuring data protection and integrating security functions.

 

Stage 1 - Build 

In this stage, your clients seek greater efficiency and speed when delivering application experiences. Accelerating time to market often comes at the cost of having misconfigured controls, poor visibility and exposure to security risks. Application security testing tools can help identify potential security shortfalls so that they can be fixed early.

 

Stage 2 – Deploy

As your clients build and migrate their applications to the cloud either via “lift and shift” or by deploying cloud-native applications, you need to secure their various environments including cloud, hybrid cloud or virtualized data center platforms. Some of the security features required during this phase include:

 

• Virtual firewalls

• SD-WAN

• Segmentation

• East-west traffic inspection

• Visibility into anomalous traffic

• Secure connectivity across clouds

• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) prevention

 

Stage 3 – Run 

At this stage, your clients have deployed their applications into the cloud or virtual data center and provided their customers with access. Application quality is key, as is scalability and reduced latency. At this critical stage, it’s essential to have the following security measures in place:

Fortinet Security Fabric Delivers an Integrated Approach to Cloud Security 

Fortinet Cloud Security reduces deployment friction and simplifies your clients’ application journeys. At the center of its solution is the Fortinet Security Fabric—a comprehensive, automated, cybersecurity mesh platform that works together with Fortinet Cloud Security to harmonize security across cloud platforms and technologies. This unique combination of capabilities empowers organizations to securely deploy on any cloud or virtual data center with consistent policies, centralized management and visibility and security automation and orchestration.

 

Download your copy of Fortinet’s latest eBook to learn how you can secure your clients’ application journeys.