RSA 2022: Why modern observability forwards application security objectives

Modern observability platforms have become critical to 'shifting left,' and finding code issues in development as well as to 'shifting right,' and identifying vulnerabilities in live applications.

Over the past decade, digital transformation has disrupted numerous industries, and even more so since the advent of COVID-19.

As a result, organizations have come to recognize that they need to digitize various processes to build revenue streams, create customer loyalty, and reduce operational inefficiencies.

But with digital transformation comes increasing IT complexity, particularly in cloud-native environments. Additionally, cloud complexity has introduced security vulnerabilities that compromise sensitive customer and employee data. Consider the 2021 security vulnerability Log4Shell, which showcased pervasive application vulnerability. Log4Shell was the poster child for this problem and highlighted a gap in many organizations’ current security stances.

In this video, Daniel Kaar, global director of application security sales at Dynatrace, discusses how a modern observability platform helps address the security gap posed by application security threats such as Log4Shell.

Not only does modern cloud observability enable developers to identify code bugs early in the software development cycle (that is, to “shift left”) but also, to identify and prioritize issues after applications have gone live (that is, to “shift right”).

This end-to-end observability enlists AIOps, or AI for IT operations. AIOps provides contextual data analysis that identifies precise answers about the source of security issues. It also prioritizes which issues to address first. With Log4Shell-like events, identifying root causes and determining the criticality of issues is key. Further, modern observability can save DevSecOps teams critical time and manual effort in identifying, prioritizing, and remediating security vulnerabilities.

Check out the video above to learn more about how application security and observability converge to combat runtime security issues.

And check out our complete guide to RSA 2022 here.

For more on Dynatrace Application Security, check out our module here.