The importance of speed in security cannot be overstated. In today's rapidly changing threat landscape, security professionals need to be able to respond quickly and effectively to new and emerging threats. One key factor in achieving this is the ability to quickly and easily deploy security tools. In this blog post, we will explore why fast and easy deployment is so critical for modern security, and what benefits it can bring to security professionals.

Instant Value means Less Wasted Time and Effort

The first and most obvious benefit of quickly deployed security tools is the ability to get value quickly without having to spend significant time and effort.  In the past, it was not uncommon for security tools to take weeks or even months to deploy.  Wasting time trying to get a security tool to work without having a clear idea of whether that tool will provide business value is not a great use of time.  With cloud native or serverless tech stacks, however, security tools can be up and running in a matter of minutes. This means that organizations can detect and respond to threats much more quickly, reducing the amount of time that they have to spend trying to get something working that doesn't help them.

Beyond just the ability to respond quickly to threats, fast and easy deployment of security tools can also bring about cost savings for an organization. It's quite common for large organizations to have a dedicated Platform team, who is responsible for managing and deploying security tools. When tools take a long time to deploy, this can consume a significant amount of the Platform team's resources which can quickly become a burden especially when that same team is also responsible for performance and reliability of mission critical systems.

For security professionals, expending political capital with the Platform team to get a security tool deployed is hard - and nearly impossible when the the amount of work that the Platform team needs to do is on the order of days or weeks.

Finding those Pesky API Specification Files

One of the security professionals we spoke with at a large gaming company had a very hard time finding API Specifications within their organization.  Although in theory, API specifications should be built into an organizational development process and easily accessible by anyone, the reality for this security engineer was that their engineering organization had developed a large number of APIs without documenting them completely or using API specifications to define their interfaces.  As a result, this professional wasn't able to do a proper risk assessment on their business' attack surface, understand how the API was designed, or have context as to what the API was supposed to do.

To solve this problem, this security professional built a script that crawled their code repository searching for API specification files in .YML and .JSON documents, which took three weeks of development to design, build, and roll out.  That's three weeks of wasted time spent looking for something that should be easily accessible, for a busy security professional that should be solving security problems not implementing a source code crawler.

Flexibility improves Time to Value

At Impart we are super focused on practitioner experience, which means that we want to make it as easy as possible for our users to get their jobs done regardless of the workflow they use or tech stack they have.

For example - Finding API specifications is a job to be done for which we've taken this approach.  For security users who don't know what their API spec is (which is much more than you might think), we have created multiple ways to do this, whether it is looking at source code, analyzing logs, or running detection algorithms on live API traffic.  What makes this work well is that all of these methods are unified by our full lifecycle API Security platform which provides central visibility, management, and control to their security posture.

There are many other examples - whether it's gathering data to analyze, creating management reports, or responding to threats for which we've taken a flexible approach.  What our users love about this approach is that they can better navigate their organization and their tech stack more holistically, without requiring adoption of tooling in all places that may be difficult to get integrated.  As a net result - this yields faster time to value for everyone.

The ability to quickly and easily get security value  is table stakes for modern security tools.  Modern tools allow security professionals to respond to threats more quickly, adapt to changing threats, save on costs and increase the level of security.

As cyber threats continue to evolve, the need for fast and easy deployment of security tools will only continue to grow. With the increased complexity and sophistication of attacks, it's more important than ever for security professionals to have the ability to quickly deploy and use the tools they need to protect their organization. Organizations that invest in fast and easy deployment of security tools will be better positioned to respond to threats and keep their sensitive information safe.

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