Why You Need Vulnerability Management for Business-Critical Applications: Part 5
This blog is the final of a five-part series on the importance of securing your business-critical applications. In the previous blogs, we share how rapid digital transformation projects, cloud migration, and the rise of cybercrime have left organizations’ most critical systems vulnerable to new risks and why a defense-in-depth strategy isn’t enough to protect your enterprise’s crown jewels. In this post, we go over how even the most well-staffed security teams are challenged with finite resources and time-consuming processes.
Read more in our whitepaper: Five Reasons Why You Need Vulnerability Management for Business-Critical Applications
Reason 5: Even the best teams are challenged to do more with less
Finite Resources
Despite the general trend of growing global budgets for application security,1 budget and teams are finite. And cybersecurity professionals are often at a disadvantage as they play a cat and mouse game with cyber criminals. Additionally, spending more doesn’t always mean spending enough in the right places. Cybersecurity budget owners often think inside out, from the viewpoint of defenders. Organizations should budget and evaluate from the viewpoint of a threat actor and look for blind spots that are unmonitored and unprotected.2 One such security gap that businesses often overlook are the business-critical applications needed to run an enterprise.
Cybersecurity Blind Spots
ERP, SCM, CRM, SRM, PLM, HCM, and BI applications support essential business functions and processes of the world, including supply chain, manufacturing, finance, sales and services, and human resources. Traditionally, security and IT teams believed these applications to be “safe” from threat actors as they were on-premises, behind network protection, and out of reach for attackers. That is no longer the case. Recent research from SAP and Onapsis shows conclusive evidence that sophisticated cyberattackers are actively targeting and exploiting unsecured, business-critical SAP applications through a varied set of techniques, tools, and procedures.
Considering 77% of the world’s transactional revenue touches an SAP system and 92% of the Forbes Global 2000 uses SAP, an orchestrated and successful attack on unprotected SAP systems could have far-reaching consequences. Appropriately allocating resources to protect the crown jewels of your business is vital.
Cybersecurity Skills Gap
While it’s well understood that budgeting to staff the right cybersecurity team is essential, there simply aren’t enough cybersecurity professionals to meet the market’s need. More than 57% of organizations have been impacted by the cybersecurity skills shortage,3 with the number of unfilled positions at 4.07 million worldwide.4 One of the top three areas of significant cybersecurity skills shortage is application security.5 With cyberattacks on business-critical applications like SAP only becoming more prevalent, this is a concerning reality.
Manual Processes
Even a well-staffed team is challenged with limits on their valuable time as they prioritize workloads. Keeping up with complex security notes for multiple vulnerability patches per month is challenging, especially for enterprises running multiple business-critical applications and systems. Manually managing all of these patching efforts is a time-consuming and error-prone process. There isn’t an easy way to identify which systems are missing patches, often resulting in a rushed patch management process where critical patches might be deprioritized. As a result, enterprises face a growing backlog of patches and often lack the tools to prioritize based on criticality. And, this is only one part of managing business-critical applications. Organizations don’t have an easy way to validate if their applications are following best practices for configurations or user privileges, leading to unaddressed risk and open attack vectors
There’s a better way to protect your business-critical applications.
A breach of any of these systems can have a critical impact on your business. Organizations must prioritize business-critical application security, despite budget and resource constraints. The right application-based vulnerability management solution can provide organizations with deep visibility into the application landscape, automate assessments, and reduce remediation times for teams to achieve a greater risk reduction with less effort. Learn more about why you need a vulnerability management solution to secure your business-critical applications.
See some of the ways Onapsis Assess for Vulnerability Management is able to save our customers time and money:
- Harden SAP against internal and external threats: “A threat to our SAP applications is a threat to the patients that rely on our products. We can now prevent performance, stability and data loss issues before they happen, further reducing our risk exposure and saving our Basis team a ton of time.”
- Ensure compliance and security standards are enforced: “With Onapsis, we can be more confident that the changes we’re making aren’t going to cause disruptions or performance issues and address security and compliance at the same time. It’s a win for everyone.”
- Get visibility into cloud environments: “Only Onapsis provides visibility into the SAP HEC operational environment so we can ‘trust, but verify’ that our system is secured to our standards. We can now continually monitor risk, ensure the integrity and security of our supply chain and protect our business.”
- Accelerate digital transformation projects: “We could have waited to implement security after the migration, but it would have been too expensive. We were better off doing it as part of our ‘build’. As a result of our investment in the Onapsis Platform, we were able to decrease the project timeline and significantly reduce our estimated budget.”
Onapsis Assess provides comprehensive vulnerability management for organizations’ most business-critical applications such as SAP and Oracle. Onapsis Assess provides deeper visibility, automated assessments, detailed solutions and descriptions of associated risk and business impact. Learn more about how Onapsis Assess can play an integral part of your vulnerability management program.
More Reasons Why
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Reason 1: Digital Transformation
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Reason 2: The Shift to the Cloud
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Reason 3: The Increasing Risk from Bad Actors
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Reason 4: Existing Defense-in-Depth Security Deployments Do Not Protect Business-Critical Applications