Leveraging Modern Applications and APIs to Get Digital Transformation Right

Accelerating digital transformation with scalable and reliable modern application security, and holistic application visibility and control

In today’s fast-paced and digitalised world, governments often struggle to provide the digital experiences that citizens expect. Like any consumer in the market, user’s expectations and demands for government agencies to provide faster, better and more intuitive services are ever-increasing.

While no two digital transformation journeys are the same, it is evident that APIs have become the foundational building block and element for any organisation undergoing digital transformation.

With the rapid increase in government applications and ever-growing need for data and connectivity, many agencies across central and local government are collaborating through open APIs.

APIs are more than a tool for integration; they enable easier adoption of new technologies and new business models, keeping up with citizen demands at a higher velocity, and packaging useful data for reuse across government systems to improve citizen experiences.

Yet, such digitalisation and new application architectures have also created additional blind spots in perimeter security. As much as software application transforms government, it also expands its potential attack surface as APIs are exposed over a network.

Bake Security into the Process and Tools

In the old IT days, network infrastructure for a security architect could be straightforward; anything outside the firewall would be considered a red zone and everything inside would be the safe zone.

Today, there are no more zones or boundaries. Instead, with APIs, IT extends beyond on-premise infrastructure and firewall to different cloud environments, mobile devices and various internal or external sources and locations.

This makes the security infrastructure protecting applications no longer under the control of in-house or a local administrator. Therefore, most organisations are struggling to provide consistent security across multiple application infrastructure and architecture.

Open data and its sharing standards are often inconsistent and fragmented, and with sensitive and regulated data passing through APIs to interconnect the digital entities, there is no margin for an error for the public sector.

It is crucial to implement security in the early stages of application development. Security must be set as a priority and to be built in at the infrastructure level to control access and protect data as it flows to and from different systems, applications and people.

Make Security a Feature, Not a Barrier

Security is often regarded as a bottleneck in the overall development process and a painful extra step that must be dealt with. Security will sometimes be inconsistent at best and often perceived as “somebody else’s problem”.

Rather than taking an eye off the ball and making security everyone’s problem, it is important to provide appropriate guidance and tools such as templated policies to align the applications with security requirements right from the start so that application security can be made a seamless part of workflows.

Moreover, with the application hosted across the cloud environment and on-premises, it is critical to have a centralised point of control to manage crucial components like API keys or user credentials in the hands of operations or security team, without causing any delays in applications getting deployed in production.

The core question about the application security then becomes: how can we bridge the gap between speed and security (DevOps and SecOps) to provide seamless services without stopping the mandate?

OpenGov Asia is pleased to invite you to an exclusive OpenGovLive! Virtual Breakfast Insight aimed at imparting knowledge on modern application security and best practices to modernise digital delivery of government services efficiently and securely.

This session serves as a great peer-to-peer learning platform to gain insights and practical solutions to understand the value of citizen-centric services and success metrics of a modern application to make a difference in the lives of the citizens while reducing the risk and complexity.

We will be discussing:

• Different approaches to modernise government applications based on the current needs and types of operation
• Identification of key components and building blocks of comprehensive API protection and modern application security
• Importance of incorporating app and API security as part of DevOps
• Interoperability of open data and system
• Integration of new applications into an existing infrastructure to allow sharing of data with citizens and external users
• Key barriers posed by e-government service deployment including legacy compatibility issues, sources of migration cost, privacy implementation and complexity
• Security risks and attack scenarios APIs face, and strategies to mitigate
• Strategies to mitigate current security risks and attack scenarios that APIs

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Chief Digital Officers

• Chief Information Officers

• Chief Information Security Officers

• Chief Technology Officers

• Heads of Information Technology

• Heads of Application

• Heads of Digital Enablement

• Heads of Solution Architect