Open source libraries have become an indispensable part of modern applications. Approximately 90 percent of organizations use open source software to support their services, but monitoring these dependencies can be difficult when environments run thousands of ephemeral services.

Editor’s note: This is the final part of a five-part cloud security series that covers protecting an organization’s network perimeter, endpoints, application code, sensitive data, and service and user accounts from threats. So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of securing an organization’s network, its application components, the endpoints that support those components, and its application data.

For organizations in highly regulated industries, any misconfiguration in their cloud environments can be detrimental to customer trust and privacy if overlooked. To mitigate this risk, DevOps and security engineers follow recognized compliance standards to quickly surface issues in their AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environments. Organizations can take this work a step further by developing detection rules tailored to their unique business or security goals.

Cloud environments, in all their dynamic complexity, demand careful monitoring by DevOps and security teams. But the sheer abundance of telemetry data associated with the thousands of resources, users, and roles that comprise these environments can make monitoring a formidable task, causing security risks and other issues to be all too easily overlooked.

Identifying and evaluating security vulnerabilities is essential at every stage of software development and system management. New vulnerabilities surface all the time, demanding ongoing vigilance as well as effective methods of assessment and response. And recent data shows that this is increasingly the case.

Open source libraries have become an indispensable part of modern applications. Approximately 90% of organizations use open source software to support their services, but monitoring these dependencies can be difficult when environments run thousands of ephemeral services. The complex nature of modern applications, in combination with the challenge of keeping a competitive edge in a fast-moving market, can make it difficult for organizations to identify and remediate threats in a timely manner.

Securing modern-day production systems is complex and requires a variety of measures—from secure coding practices and security testing to network protection and vulnerability scanning. Scaling these solutions to keep pace with the speed of development teams can be difficult, resulting in sprawling workflows and disparate sets of tooling.

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of securing an organization’s network, application components, and the endpoints that support them. In this post, we’ll look at the following best practices for protecting the different types of data that flow through these components. But first, we’ll look at how modern applications process and manage data, as well as common weaknesses and security threats to these systems.

As your business grows and your services scale in number and complexity, it’s difficult to maintain a rapid pace of innovation while keeping your applications secure. It’s particularly challenging to respond to attacks, as DevOps and security teams need to collaborate to understand each attack’s root cause and remediate the vulnerabilities that enabled it.

Organizations are scaling their environments at a rapid pace, deploying thousands of cloud resources, services, and accounts. Because of their size and complexity, these environments are more susceptible to compliance issues—a misconfiguration in a single cloud resource can lead to costly data breaches. For that reason, organizations are prioritizing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management to ensure that their environments are configured appropriately.