Lack of visibility into attack surfaces and vulnerabilities

Seventy-three percent of technologists in the retail industry report that their current security solutions work well in silos but not together , a higher figure than any other sector . This means that IT teams are unable to get a comprehensive view of their organization ’ s security posture .

To address this problem , IT teams need to implement tools that are capable of integrating performance and security

Security

monitoring , so that they can understand how vulnerabilities and incidents can affect end users ( both customers and employees ) and the business itself . Technologists need to be able to understand the code , and everything around it , with continuous detection and prioritization , so that they can detect and block exploits automatically , maximizing speed and uptime while minimizing risk . run times and outages that dent digital experience , erode customer trust and brand reputation and , ultimately , reduce revenue .

Encouragingly , the research highlights how IT teams are looking to evolve their approaches to application security in order to get to grips with a complex risk landscape and support the shift to modern application stacks . Retail technologists are looking to implement a security approach for the full application stack , moving to a DevSecOps model where application security is integrated throughout the software development lifecycle , and embracing artificial intelligence ( AI ) and automation to cope with soaring volumes of security threats .

In order to expedite this shift , technologists must urgently address these six key application security challenges :

Anybody that has worked in an IT department in recent years will know the extent to which technologists are now being constantly bombarded by an overwhelming volume of security alerts from across the application stack . Sadly , most of them don ’ t have any way to cut through this data noise to understand which alerts pose the biggest risk to customers and the business . Tellingly , 59 percent of retail technologists admit that they are operating in ‘ security limbo ’ because they don ’ t know what to focus on and prioritize .

In response , business transaction insights are critical to enable technologists to measure the importance of – and to prioritize – threats based on severity scoring . These scores factor in the context of the threat , meaning technologists can see which issues are likely to affect a business critical area of the environment or application .

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