Why Businesses Should Be Using Serverless Security

Cybersecurity is an industry that’s valued at over $60 billion USD for a reason – cybercrime is a huge threat. With an attack every 39 seconds, data breaches are becoming incredibly common for businesses across the globe.

After a data breach, alongside leaking private documents and customer information, the company historically goes on to underperform by 15% for three years after the incident. This huge impact on your business should be enough for many to want to move to a safer solution. With millions of data breaches yearly, how can businesses get around this?

Over the past few years, a new safety solution has been developed. Serverless security is a relatively new technology, but it has a range of benefits that push this system to be something that businesses around the globe are trying out.

In this article, we’ll explore what serverless security is, demonstrating exactly why your business should make the leap. Let’s get right into it.

What is Serverless Security?

The concept of being serverless has arisen in line with the rise of cloud computing. Instead of relying on managed services, which would need additional security infrastructure, management staff, and continual patching, businesses are now going serverless. This means that they hold their applications within a combination of cloud services as function-as-a-service platforms.

This is one of the largest technological shifts that businesses have experienced over the past few years. While typical security involves firewalls and infrastructural defense tools, serverless systems base their service on permissions, strong coding, and behavioral protection programs.

Typically, there are three levels to serverless security:

  • Permissions—Every user and application within the server is assigned a limited number of functions that they can perform. This ensures that applications can only perform exactly what they are intended for, limiting their access to only what they need to see. Equally, users have specific routes that they can follow, navigating only a set path within a company’s data.
  • Protection during Runtime – Runtime protection is a continuous sequence that will detect any malicious entities or events that are in the system. If anything seems like an anomaly to this system, it will be limited, unable to function until a network engineer investigates further properly. With this, any attempts at penetration are stopped in their tracks, creating a secure system.
  • Vulnerability Scanning – Alongside the system, the code with which the system is built is regularly scanned on serverless platforms. These scans look for configuration errors or a miss-delegation of permissions to certain applications. If a third-party software tries to alter permissions, this will kick in and ensure that they cannot process any further.

With these three systems working together, serverless security is an incredibly strong system that helps.

What are the Benefits of Moving to Serverless for Security?

Every single day, businesses produce huge quantities of data, creating systems through which their employees can analyze and draw conclusions. Much of the time, this data is incredibly precious, not just to the business but to its customers as well. Data breaches are much more common than you would think, with 47% of U.S. businesses suffering a data breach last year.

With data breaches comes a loss of customer trust, the leaking of private documents, and the corruption of confidential information. However, a serverless approach helps to boost the security of your system in four ways, helping to reduce the possibility of a breach.

Serverless security can help your company’s security in these ways:

  • It’s Automatic – As you’re relying on a cloud-based solution to security, you no longer actually have to worry about this part of running your business. Instead of having to battle through intensive security courses and hire teams of cyber experts to set up defenses, security is out of your hands in the best way possible. These cloud businesses have one sole purpose – to protect your data. Due to this, they have advanced teams and an incredible range of security suites at their disposal. By moving to the cloud, your data is safer than ever.
  • Zero Trust – Everything that is newly introduced into a serverless system is given a ‘Zero Trust’ metric. This means that when something new is updated or uploaded, it doesn’t have permission to do anything on your server, meaning it’s useless until someone sets it up. While this means setting up applications will take a few minutes extra, it also means that ransomware, malware, or other malignant entities that enter your system can’t do any harm to your business.
  • Serverless Security Permissions – The threat of a cyberattack is a constant for modern businesses, with millions of companies a year suffering some form of attack. Yet, when moving to a serverless security solution, the change of falling prey is significantly decreased. This is because this format of security works on an application-application basis. Instead of putting whole security systems on your platform, every single aspect of the platform itself is assessed with security. This fine-grain approach, instead of a blanket security methodology, ensures that every application and file within your server can only do exactly what it’s meant to do.

Serverless security will help keep your business safe. Instead of suffering data losses and exposing both your own and your customers’ data sets, you’ll be able to move to this new system to keep everything as secure as possible.

Final Thoughts

While embracing any new framework is always overwhelming, the benefits of moving to serverless security heavily outweigh the cons. This system relies on permissions and individual analysis to ensure security, instead of taking a firewall defense approach that traditional cybersecurity uses.

As a business, the data you hold is one of your keys to success. By keeping it safe, you’re able to focus your company on growth, management, and working towards success. What’s more, these solutions ensure that you never have to think about security again, delegating it to the cloud system and ensuring you save on your cybersecurity budget.

With serverless security, there’s a lot to love.

Alex
 

Alex is a small business blogger with a focus on entrepreneurship and growth. With over 5 years of experience covering the startup and small business landscape, Alex has a reputation for being a knowledgeable, approachable and entrepreneurial-minded blogger. He has a keen understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing small business owners, and is able to provide actionable advice and strategies for success. Alex has interviewed successful entrepreneurs, and covered major small business events such as the Small Business Expo and the Inc. 500|5000 conference. He is also a successful entrepreneur himself, having started and grown several small businesses in different industries.