Mitigating application vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) is critical—and challenging, especially as applications rely more and more on third-party, open source software (OSS). With this type of architecture, teams often don’t know exactly where vulnerabilities exist in their code, which of those vulnerabilities are actively exposed in production services, and which vulnerabilities are more critical to address than others.

Editor’s note: Jeremy Garcia, VP of Technical Community and Open Source at Datadog, explains why fostering an organization-wide culture and practice of DevSecOps is essential for deploying resilient, secure applications and services. Over the past decade, DevSecOps has become a popular buzzword in the tech industry.

Applications frequently need to provide authentication credentials to gain access to cloud services and other resources. However, these credentials present a security risk because they are notoriously difficult to keep out of code. According to a GitGuardian report, 10 million credentials were publicly committed to GitHub in 2022. Leaked credentials such as these are a major cause of data breaches and account takeovers.

Azure App Service is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) commonly used to deploy applications and APIs, as well as functions, mobile apps, and more. It provides flexibility and reliability when deploying new applications and infrastructure, but it also introduces new security risks to your system. In particular, reduced visibility into the infrastructure and deployment of your application leads to a greater chance of application vulnerabilities being exploited by an attacker.

Protecting sensitive data from the threat of exposure is a non-negotiable business imperative for organizations, especially those in highly regulated sectors like government and healthcare. To help organizations keep their data secure, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) developed a set of requirements for the hardware and software components responsible for data encryption.

In order to help organizations more effectively secure their cloud environments, we are making changes to our Cloud SIEM product. As of December 4, Datadog has introduced a new offering in Cloud SIEM: Cloud SIEM 15-Months Retention, which automatically stores logs for 15 months after ingestion.

GitHub is a mission-critical software development and version control platform that is used to store proprietary source code and other sensitive data. Monitoring logs generated by activity in your GitHub environment can be useful, as unexpected patterns of behavior could indicate attacker activity or insider threats.

As government agencies accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies—particularly SaaS applications—they need to adhere to strict compliance and security standards. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) sets these standards for civilian federal agencies, while the Impact Levels laid out by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in their Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide set guidelines for Department of Defense (DoD) agencies.

As your cloud infrastructure scales to handle the weight of new features and a growing user base, your attack surface increases as well. When combined with the steady rise in security threats—more than 25,000 vulnerabilities were identified in 2022 alone—identifying every risk to your distributed system can be a challenge.

Cloud environments comprise hundreds of thousands of individual components, from infrastructure-level containers and hosts to access-level user and cloud accounts. With this level of complexity, continuous and end-to-end visibility into your environment is vital for detecting, prioritizing, and fixing vulnerabilities before attackers can take advantage of them.