Application security fuels secure digital transformation for a global energy leader

What is your secure digital transformation strategy in the cloud?

With the exponential rise of cloud technologies and their indisputable benefits, such as lower total cost of ownership, accelerated release cycles, and massed scalability, it’s no wonder organizations are clamoring to realize these gains. As part of this initiative, however, including migration-ready assessments, organizations must avoid potentially catastrophic security issues.

So how do organizations make this digital transformation to the cloud securely?

Vulnerabilities for critical systems

A global leader in the energy space found itself asking this very question.

For decades, it had employed an on-premises infrastructure running internal and external facing services. These services were critical and, among other things, sent and received communications from the machinery responsible for delivering sources of energy that keep the lights on for millions of people.

While the company recognized that it needed to secure these services, its legacy solution consisted only of static scans. These scans ran intermittently, opening the possibility for a vulnerability or attack to occur in between scans. Additionally, the energy company didn’t have systems in place to engage in automated remediation if an attack occurred.

Unified observability and security

When the company’s expanding portfolio and digital-first innovation began transforming how it went to market, the energy leader made the investment to migrate legacy applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Embracing cloud-native services such as AWS Lambda and EKS became integral to their business strategy and core to its new operating model. However, the distributed nature of cloud services combined with their on-premises infrastructure meant there were more interfaces where services might expose vulnerabilities. This is when they brought in Dynatrace to deliver end-to-end observability for applications and microservices in the AWS cloud.

Among the applications the energy provider migrated were the applications running communications with on-site machinery. Once the company moved these applications to AWS, its scanning capabilities were no longer static. At this time, the company decided to activate Dynatrace Application Security for runtime application security protection and analytics. This decision was easy, as Dynatrace was already across these applications (and more) for monitoring performance and resiliency. With runtime vulnerability analytics and artificial intelligence-assisted prioritization, the company had the confidence they needed to run these services in the cloud.

Achieving a secure digital transformation with confidence

Not only did Dynatrace provide the company with the proactive detection and blocking it required in its cloud-native services, but it aided them in accelerating the migration of services off the former on-premises architecture. Once migrated, the organization knew these services were not at risk of regressing back to previous vulnerable code builds as Dynatrace would immediately flag this with scored priority for automated fixes to be implemented.

Today, this global energy leader continues to carve a new path forward in the industry by bringing new products and solutions to market that meet the needs of our ever-changing world. The ability to securely and confidently adopt AWS services and continue to build new, reliable applications on AWS has become integral to the organization’s secure digital transformation strategy, further accelerated and fueled by Dynatrace unified observability and security.