Proactive runtime security transforms releases on AWS

Runtime security vulnerabilities, if discovered in a customer-facing product environment, are far more costly to an organization than if they’re caught in earlier stages of development. Impacts of runtime vulnerabilities range from lost revenue to lost customers, among other things. Additionally, the measures organizations need to take to remediate a vulnerability or attack in a production environment often takes a toll on the teams left searching for where the vulnerabilities are and how to block and protect them in real time.

Expansive infrastructure and complex requirements

For an international oil and gas company that operates at an enormous enterprise scale, the ability to proactively detect runtime security vulnerabilities became a critical business focus. This organization had an extensive AWS infrastructure with myriad microservices they needed a consolidated view of. They also had varying requirements per release that they needed to confidently ensure would not introduce any performance issues or vulnerabilities into their cloud-based applications.

A need for standardization and unified reporting

While the company had relied on several disparate tools and processes on a team-by-team basis, their ability to perform often manual security checks across different points of the software development lifecycle became untenable and unreliable due to their global scale. As a result, they could not create a standardized operating procedure for release management and security protocols. When any vulnerabilities arose, it was all the more difficult to diagnose and remediate due to these inconsistent views.

Moving from reactive to proactive application runtime security

As an existing Dynatrace customer already leveraging the platform’s full-stack capabilities across their AWS environment, Application Security could be easily added for a consolidated and holistic view across their applications in context of other requirements, such as performance within their production environment. Further, the organization took advantage of the pre-production capabilities Dynatrace offers to instrument the validation of the key requirements for each release to quickly identify if a build contains vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities can then be automatically pinpointed and prioritized to help teams address them in short order so as not to delay release cycles or risk rushing to push live with vulnerabilities.

Secure and confident development

For this oil and gas leader, the ability to easily get the real-time contextual view of applications across their expansive AWS environment, bringing performance data alongside security insights in a unified view, addressed their most critical business requirement. But beyond what happens in runtime, using Dynatrace to automate these validations across the release lifecycle and before deployment unlocked a new level of confidence that allowed them to accelerate their releases without sacrificing quality or security. With the unified observability and security that the Dynatrace platform provides, this customer has freed up more time for teams to focus on delivering innovative solutions built on AWS that delight their customers and drive their business forward.

Read more Dynatrace customer stories to learn how other organizations are simplifying cloud complexity and innovating faster and more securely.