What Is Web Application Security? Why Do You Need It?

For a company to stay relevant and competitive in today’s market it must establish and maintain a solid web presence. Web applications are now easy to develop, deploy, and maintain the many frameworks that provide a platform to develop scalable, reliable, and robust web applications. But because these applications are available from anywhere and by anyone, they are particularly vulnerable to attacks.

2018 saw many data breaches and experts say there is no sign of that slowing down. According to the 13th annual 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study: Global Overview from IBM Security and Ponemon Institute the global average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, up 6.4 percent from last year. Data breaches and cyber-attacks on web applications hit companies hard in lost revenue, increased legal liabilities, diminished customer loyalty and damaged credibility.

Thus the emergence of a new specialized industry to combat these attacks, web application security.

What is Web Application Security?

Web application security deals specifically with security of websites, web applications and web services. Specialists in this industry will know what vulnerabilities to look for in the development stack, application code, web network and database configurations. Web application security specialists constantly scan and test for vulnerabilities knowing that the faster a breach is detected and contained the less costly that breach will be for the company. As noted in the study, containing a breach within 30 days yielded a savings of over $1 million versus companies that took longer to contain the breach.

Why Should Tech Companies Invest In Web Application Security Specialists?

Every company should understand the majority of web applications today have at least one vulnerability in them, and a smaller portion of those applications have a severe flaw. It is these flaws that lead to the modern data breaches that cost companies millions. Yes, web application security can have steep costs, approaching $3 million to implement and deploy. But with the amount of customer data collected increasing year after year and the size of data breaches growing an average of 2.2 percent each year, the cost of any data breach will easily dwarf the web application security budget.

While it is impossible to guarantee that your web application and its data is 100% secure, adding web application security best practices to your development life cycle today can help minimize the vulnerabilities that lead to data breaches and send your company’s bottom line and its customer base into what can potentially be an unrecoverable tailspin.