The information technology field is growing at a rapid pace, with new technologies popping up every day. The mode of communication between two parties is also evolving, providing  more efficient long-distance communication. But this evolution comes up with its own set of challenges with respect to the security of systems. Let's take a look at the challenges that make system security difficult for organizations:

• The increasing amount of data: With most organizations building their systems to leverage AI and ML to provide more personalized experience to their users, they are also gathering a huge amount of information about their users so as to improve recommendations. This huge amount of data storage makes the security of that data more difficult to maintain, because now more and more confidential information is being retained, making the system a lucrative shot for the attackers.
• Distribution of data over public service providers: A lot of enterprises are now cutting down on their storage infrastructure and are becoming more and more reliant on third-party public storage providers, which provide the same amount of storage at much lower costs, along with reduced maintenance costs. This also puts the enterprise security at risk because now the data is governed by the security policies of the third-party service provider, and the owner of the data has very little control over the security policy of the data through which it is protected. A single breach on the part of the storage service provider can expose the data of multiple users of different organizations.
• The increasing number of devices connected to the internet: With more and more devices joining the internet, the attack surface also increases. If even a single device has a weak segment inside it, be it in terms of the encryption standard or because of not implementing proper access controls, the security of the whole system can be breached easily.
• Sophisticated attacks: The attacks have became more and more sophisticated, where the attackers are now using day-zero vulnerabilities in systems and even utilizing vulnerabilities that have not yet been discovered by the organization. These attacks compromise a large amount of data and pose as a huge security risk to the whole system. To complicate matters even more, since the vulnerabilities are new, they don't have an immediate solution, resulting in a delayed response, or at times even a delayed identification that an attack occurred.
• Increase in state-sponsored attacks: With the ever increasing move to the Information Technology powered communication and processes in the whole world, the context of wars is also changing. Where wars were previously fought on the ground, now they are being fought over the network, and this has given rise to state-sponsored attacks. These attacks usually target enterprises to either collect intelligence or to cause major disruptions. The problem with state-sponsored attacks is the fact that these attacks are highly sophisticated in nature and utilize a huge amount of resources, which makes them difficult to overcome.

With this, we now know what are the different factors that make it hard for the enterprises to improve the security of their systems. This is why cybersecurity is always playing a catch-up game, where the enterprises are improving their security against the ever changing attack vectors being used by the attackers to attack the IT systems.

Now, with this knowledge, it's time for us to understand what really affects application security. Only with this knowledge of the different attack vectors can we move forward and make our application secure against attacks. So, let's embark on this journey.