Protection and resilience of applications and infrastructure against cyber threats

September 9, 2025

Digitalisation has transformed every industry. In the banking and insurance sector, applications enable instant transactions, mobile operations and 24/7 services, but they require robust security to prevent fraud and API attacks.

In healthcare, electronic health records and telemedicine systems offer faster patient care but require the protection of highly sensitive data and compliance with strict privacy regulations.

In retail and e-commerce, applications have become the face of the business, handling massive traffic peaks that must be managed without downtime, while ensuring the security of customers' payment data.

In the public sector, digital transformation is bringing services closer to citizens—but it also exposes critical infrastructure to constant threats.

Across all these sectors, applications have become the core of operations. They are a driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth, but also a prime target for attackers seeking to compromise the supply chain, exploit weak configurations or breach underlying infrastructure. Securing them is a strategic necessity.

Securing applications and infrastructure is not optional—it's a strategic necessity.

Visibility: the starting point

One of the biggest challenges in modern security is the lack of real visibility. Many companies and organisations don’t even know how many applications are exposed to the internet, which open-source dependencies contain vulnerabilities, or what network configurations and permissions are active in their cloud environments. This lack of awareness creates blind spots—“shadow IT”—where unmanaged services become open doors for attackers.

Visibility is not just about creating an inventory; it also means being able to link assets to their criticality, understand dependencies and assess risk in real time. Without a complete map of the environment, any security strategy ends up being reactive—always one step behind the threat.

You can’t protect what you can’t see: visibility is the starting point.

Continuous scanning: beyond static snapshots

For years, security relied on one-off audits or occasional code reviews. But in today’s dynamic environments, where changes occur hourly, that’s no longer enough. Applications constantly integrate new third-party dependencies, cloud configurations change daily, and new vulnerabilities (CVEs) emerge at a relentless pace. An environment that was secure yesterday could be exploitable tomorrow.

This is why the trend today is toward continuous scanning. Static and dynamic analysis tools (SAST/DAST), dependency vulnerability scanners, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) reviews are being integrated directly into CI/CD pipelines. This allows issues to be detected before deployment—and ensures continued monitoring of what’s already in production. Security stops being a static snapshot and becomes a continuous surveillance flow.

What was secure yesterday may be exploitable tomorrow.

Hardening: strengthen from the ground up

Hardening is the art of reducing the attack surface to a minimum. It’s not about installing more tools, but about properly configuring what already exists. At the application level, this means applying the principle of least privilege, protecting secrets with dedicated managers, encrypting data both in transit and at rest, and disabling any function or port that is not strictly necessary.

At the infrastructure level, hardening involves securing operating systems, containers and network services. It means strictly configuring access policies in Kubernetes, segmenting production and development environments, and ensuring that deployed software meets recognised benchmarks such as CIS.

Hardening isn’t about installing more—it’s about configuring better.

The main challenge here is cultural: in the race to deliver faster, many organisations overlook basic security, leaving gaps that become much more costly to fix later.

Runtime security: defending the unexpected

Even with good hardening practices and continuous scanning in place, there will always be uncertainty about what happens at runtime. That’s where runtime security comes in: detecting and stopping malicious behaviour in real time, before the impact becomes critical.

Runtime security spans multiple technologies:

A WAAP (Web Application & API Protection) can block real-time attacks on applications and APIs, mitigating injection attempts, bot abuse or unauthorised access.
A CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform) combines CSPM, workload protection and compliance capabilities to provide continuous visibility and defence for cloud-native applications.
Runtime vulnerability management helps identify which vulnerabilities are actually exploitable in a specific environment and prioritise them based on real-world criticality.
Microsegmentation enables granular control over network traffic, preventing attackers from moving laterally between systems.

The challenge is not just having these technologies, but integrating them in a way that generates useful and actionable alerts. Security teams can’t handle thousands of false positives—they need contextual intelligence to distinguish noise from real danger.

The key isn’t generating more alerts—it’s generating more contextual intelligence.

Regulatory compliance: from checklist to continuous practice

Regulatory pressure is not uniform: it varies by sector and the type of data each organisation handles. In the financial sector, regulations such as DORA in Europe require digital resilience, incident recovery capabilities and strict third-party governance.

Standards like PCI-DSS are essential for protecting cardholder data in banking and retail. In healthcare, regulations like HIPAA in the US or GDPR in Europe focus on the confidentiality and traceability of medical data.

The public sector in Spain and the EU must comply with the National Security Framework (ENS) or directives such as NIS2, aimed at securing essential services and critical infrastructure. Compliance is no longer a checklist—it’s a continuous practice.

The challenge is not just to pass audits by preparing paperwork and showing reports, but to make compliance a continuous operational practice.

This means automating evidence collection, embedding security controls into development and operational processes, and generating real-time reports for auditors and business stakeholders.

Compliance is no longer a checklist—it’s a continuous practice.

An organisation managing thousands of financial transactions can’t rely on quarterly reviews—it needs live security that can demonstrate compliance with applicable regulations at any time. Only then can compliance become a trust enabler for customers and partners, rather than a burden.

DevSecOps culture: security as a shared responsibility

No technical solution will succeed without a cultural shift. In many organisations, security is still handled by an isolated team that acts as an auditor at the end of the development cycle. In a world of continuous deployments, this is unworkable—it becomes a bottleneck and stifles innovation.

Security is a shared responsibility—not the job of an isolated team.

The DevSecOps approach integrates security from the start as a natural part of the software development lifecycle. Developers should have simple tools to identify flaws in their own code, SRE and DevOps teams should have visibility into the infrastructure, and security analysts should act as collaborators—not gatekeepers.

The key is to stop seeing security as a blocker and start seeing it as an enabler: the earlier a flaw is detected and fixed, the lower the cost and risk.

Conclusion

Securing modern applications and infrastructure is no longer about perimeters—it’s about end-to-end resilience. Organisations that want to stay protected must invest in full visibility, continuous scanning, hardening at both application and infrastructure level, real-time protection through advanced technologies, built-in compliance, and a mature DevSecOps culture.

In a landscape where cyberattacks are inevitable, the difference between a vulnerable and a resilient organisation lies not in whether it will be attacked, but in its ability to detect, contain and respond in time.

■ Want to learn more about how to protect not only your applications but also the infrastructure that supports them? More information →