Real-time Apps Both a Priority and Weakness for Organizations: Study

According a new report from Kaazing, real-time applications are both a curse and a blessing for organizations the world over. Kaazing, the company behind the HTML5 Web Socket standard, says that respondents to a recent study listed security as their top benefit and as their main concern, as they move forward with development plans within their respective organizations.

Kaazing interviewed (PDF) 300 IT professionals and developers worldwide in March 2013, and discovered that 86% of them said that real-time web and data communications will be a priority this year. Interestingly, 58% percent of respondents said that the top benefit of real-time Web development was security, but at the same time 67% of the same group listed it as the top concern in their development planning.

That security is both a benefit and a concern is something that should be expected. The development goals listed by those who spoke to Kaazing are focused on monitoring, collaboration, eCommerce, and expanding enterprise applications to the Web. Security is critical for these things, because the application that helps can also be the one that causes severe harm.

In fact, this year alone several private organizations and government agencies have lost valuable data to human error and application coding mistakes. For example, an application error at the US General Services Administration allowed registered users to view other user records, exposing an unknown number of records to unauthorized people.

Inova Health System, after an application upgrade, had employee W-2 information indexed on Google; and a WebApp used by MedAmerica Insurance Companies led to application forms being exposed to the Internet for six months. On top of that, there are the direct attacks to real-time applications themselves that can be costly to an organization, as demonstrated by Anonymous’ attack on Bank of America.

Then again, the respondents to Kaazing’s study may have listed security on both sides of the coin simply because it is the smart thing to do no matter what the organization’s goals are. Earlier this month, SecurityWeek reported on findings from Cenzic, which discovered that 99% of the applications they tested were vulnerable to one degree or another.

Cenzic’s research plays hand-in-hand with Kaazing’s, because while app development is booming – providing the business with a solid blessing – if the developers responsible for these creations aren’t careful, those blessings will turn into curses. “Securing the application layer must be addressed more realistically by today’s businesses,” said Scott Parcel, chief technology officer at Cenzic.

“The exposure that organizations face from the trove of existing application vulnerabilities and from evolving threats has been laid bare this year, however most organizations have not comprehensively acted to defend themselves from these application level threats,” Parcel explained.

“This trend continues to get worse; as the rush to create a multitude of connected mobile apps has led corporations to essentially rip out walls and replace them with unlocked doors, leaving them even less aware of how to secure at scale.”