It’s True: Speed and Security Can Co-Exist in the Application Provisioning Process

There’s a lot of upside to becoming an application-centric business. You can increase collaboration, work more effectively with your data, deliver an optimal customer experience, and much more. One major downside, though, is that your network and security operations teams are under intense pressure to provision new applications both quickly and securely. Despite the business’s […]

There’s a lot of upside to becoming an application-centric business. You can increase collaboration, work more effectively with your data, deliver an optimal customer experience, and much more. One major downside, though, is that your network and security operations teams are under intense pressure to provision new applications both quickly and securely.

Despite the business’s need to move fast, verifying that new applications adhere to corporate security policy is typically a manual process that can cause significant delays. Worse, even after thorough consultation of the SecOps playbook or a spreadsheet-based security matrix, security risks with apps can still arise. And we all know how much today’s attackers love to exploit vulnerabilities in applications.

Here’s a thought: To ease the burden on security teams, increase the speed of app deployment, and improve accuracy in the verification process, why not provide application developers a self-service platform that lets them confirm their apps are compliant?

We believe in making hard things easy, and ensuring that enterprise networks are agile, predictable, and secure. Forward Enterprise is designed to help enterprises speed up application deployment while ensuring security through automated secure application provisioning. Our platform curates firewall security rules and presents them in an easy-to-read matrix that enables rapid compliance assessments, so the teams responsible for developing and provisioning apps can catch issues early and remediate them fast.

And don’t worry — your app developers don’t need advanced networking knowledge to use automated secure application provisioning. Once security teams write an intent check to automatically ensure an application is within policy, developers can use the check to verify their app meets security policy connectivity guidelines. If the app passes the check, they can deploy with confidence. And if it fails, they’ll get details why so they can quickly make the right adjustments.

One tip: Be prepared to condense your timelines for new app deployment after teams start using automated secure application provisioning. One customer we work with said that it allowed them to launch a new credit card business in three months versus one year — talk about acceleration!

To learn more about how this time-saving functionality in Forward Enterprise works, see our use case.

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Fabrizio Maccioni

Fabrizio Maccioni is the Director of Technical Marketing at Forward Networks. Fabrizio focuses on Network Device Programmability, Automation, and Application Hosting.