In today鈥檚 hyper-connected digital landscape, applications are the lifeline of organisations. They enable critical operations, foster smooth customer interactions, and ignite innovation. Whether it's facilitating financial transactions, managing customer relationships, optimising supply chains, or analysing data, applications are the backbone of business processes. Business applications house sensitive data such as intellectual property, customer information, and financial records, making them critical assets that require robust protection.
Business applications are prime targets for cyberattacks, including sophisticated zero-day exploits, injection attacks, cross-site scripting, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and more. A successful attack on business applications could lead to catastrophic consequences such as financial losses, operational disruptions, reputational damage, and even regulatory penalties. In some cases, a single compromised application can act as a launchpad for attackers, enabling lateral movement across the network and escalating the scope of the attack.
Security operations centres (SOCs) have seldom focussed on application monitoring and have traditionally prioritised infrastructure and security components for log ingestion and monitoring. Similarly, the threat detection use cases or the rules are heavily focussed on infrastructure and security component鈥檚 events.
However, as SOCs mature, application security log insights have emerged as one of the most important sources of intelligence. When monitored and analysed effectively, these logs provide actionable insights that empower SOCs to detect threats early, respond swiftly to incidents, and maintain operational continuity. This coverage or visibility also provides consumer assurance in many cases across B2C and B2B applications.
Organisations often struggle with challenges such as the sheer volume, inadequate logging of applications, applications ability to record topics of interest, complexity of log data, the integration of disparate systems, and the need for advanced technology . This document delves into the strategic importance of application security log monitoring, its challenges, leading practices, and emerging trends, illustrating how it is critical in the modern-day security operations.
