Ensuring secure applications for the public sector

From the corridors of our county governments and municipalities to golden-domed state capitols to the nearly 700 federal office buildings in Washington, D.C., public sector leaders and their teams are progressing steadily toward the next chapter of their digital transformation. Ensuring secure applications amid rising complexity is a crucial part of this journey.

Innovating with software is happening faster than ever. This is due to a number of factors, including the rise of cloud infrastructure, automation, and an abundance of prebuilt open-source libraries and third-party/supply-chain products.

However, this approach can pose significant risks. These libraries and products may contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. The traditional practice of scanning for vulnerabilities before production is insufficient because vulnerabilities can emerge at any point in the software supply chain. As a result, teams must maintain secure applications throughout runtime. Neglecting security during the development process or at runtime when new threats can emerge could lead to disastrous consequences. Agencies cannot afford to sacrifice security for innovation.

For example, just one application security gap could jeopardize an entire mission, triggering a wide range of consequences. Thousands of veterans may not receive benefits notifications. Traffic lights on a busy stretch of road could go dark. An Army unit may lose communications with an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drone tracking enemy movements.

Dynatrace AppSec is FedRAMP and StateRAMP authorized at the Moderate Impact Levels

Dynatrace has responded to these challenges by significantly enhancing the Dynatrace for Government platform with our Application Security Module, which allows agencies to safeguard applications at runtime for automatic and continuous protection. This gives public sector teams the best of both worlds: peak-performance applications without vulnerabilities, made possible by a highly scalable application security solution.

Dynatrace Application Security is now FedRAMP and StateRAMP authorized at the Moderate Impact Levels. Agencies are already using it to detect vulnerabilities such as the Log4j vulnerability, giving themselves an advantage over other agencies that struggle to find all of these issues.

Dynatrace Application Security helps public sector teams secure applications and instantly benefit from the following capabilities, enabled by advanced observability, AI, and automation:

• Attack detection and blocking based on code-level insights and transaction analysis. This helps identify when malicious user- or machine-generated inputs are sent to vulnerable application components, thus supporting essential zero-trust tenets.
• Visibility into pre-production and production, enabling both runtime vulnerability analytics and runtime application protection.
• Vulnerability management from detection to closure, with automatic runtime detection and real-time visibility into the evolution of vulnerabilities.
• Automatic updates with the auto-detection of changes in application environments.
• Reduction of false positives and risk prioritization with automatic and precise impact assessments.

At Dynatrace, we work as fully dedicated partners of public sector agencies. We strive to help them unleash their full potential for innovation while protecting them from vulnerabilities that could result in crippling attacks. Our Application Security Module for the Dynatrace for Government platform represents the latest product of our commitment.