Product Security Explained: Definition, Tools, and Recommendations

The concept of product security, though simple to understand, can be complex when it comes to implementation. To embed an efficient product security framework, you need to explore the key points and have suitable tools.

In this post, we cover:

• Product security definition
• Key differences between product security vs application security
• The main elements of efficient product cybersecurity frameworks
• The categories of tools that can enhance the security of your product

What is product security?

Product security refers to the set of processes, strategies, and actions implemented to protect an organization's infrastructure from cyberattacks, data loss, and other common threats. The measures to ensure product and solution security cover the hardware, software, and services involved in production. Embedding an efficient system means setting protection layers at every stage of a product's lifecycle, from design through development and deployment to maintenance and end-of-life.

Product security vs. application security

Product security and application security are crucial elements of the development process. To understand the key differences between the two, below we briefly explain the main points of product security versus application security to help you effectively apply both concepts.

Application security focuses on the protection of software apps. This includes vulnerability prevention, detection, and patching limited within a particular application. App security aims to enhance sensitive data protection, cyberattack prevention, and stable functioning of the solution. In a world where cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, observability is essential for maintaining a robust security posture. By complementing traditional security practices, observability helps ensure that applications remain secure, resilient, and able to adapt to evolving threats while providing a seamless user experience.

Product security, on the other hand, is a wider field. It involves ensuring security at every stage of the development cycle, starting with project design. This means app security falls under product security, which also includes secure coding, proper testing, and regular policy reviews. Integrating cybersecurity risk management in product security ensures that potential risks are continuously evaluated and mitigated, preventing potential threats from escalating into full-blown security breaches.

To sum up, both product and application security have a critical role in ensuring stability, functionality, compliance, and protection of the solutions under development and maintenance. However, app security focuses on protecting particular apps and fixing their known vulnerabilities. Product security is more about preventing potential vulnerabilities before malicious actors use them to harm the product and its users.

Product security framework: key points

Product security implementation requires building a thoroughly processed set of workflows. You can start by considering the following key elements of the product security framework:

• Threat Modeling: Efficient security starts with understanding and outlining threats for your product. By modeling typical threats beforehand, you can better predict risks and vulnerabilities that malicious actors might exploit in particular cases. With this knowledge and understanding, embedding efficient measures to counter threats and ensure product security is much simpler.
• Secure Design Principles: Secure design is about shifting security left, which means starting to implement protection workflows at the earliest design stages. Secure coding, encryption, enhanced authentication, and other practices fall into this category.
• Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL): The SDL concept supposes introducing security solutions and workflows into every development stage in addition to the design phase. Security audits, flexible protection adjustments, and secure coding play a major role here.
• Secure Deployment and Configuration: You can enhance product security at the deployment and maintenance stages with PoLP, system hardening, responsible configuration management, and optimized app and infrastructure protection.
• Vulnerability Management: This involves regular vulnerability scans and security monitoring throughout the entire supply chain. Therefore, you need appropriate contacts and workflows to efficiently react to new security challenges and vulnerabilities both inside (with the team) and outside (with third-party partners and suppliers) the organization.
• Incident Response: Security incidents can happen sooner or later; the key here is to be prepared and to know how to react. Consider embedding detailed incident response plans for various disaster scenarios. Such plans should describe the workflows to detect, analyze, mitigate, and avoid further breaches.

Product and solution security tips

Product security relies on a proper understanding of threats, data, and infrastructure protection requirements. Below, we explain some basic security recommendations that you can apply regardless of your product, industry, and environment complexity or size.

Train employees

Human error is involved in the majority of successful data breaches. Among the main cybersecurity disciplines, employee education and training stand out. An employee aware of cyber threats, protection measures, and the main tactics of malicious actors is less prone to social engineering attempts or phishing attacks. Employees with appropriate training can recognize malicious links, non-typical software behavior, or suspicious activities in their accounts. Moreover, such workers can understand when they unintentionally take an unwanted dangerous action and notify IT security experts about it in a timely manner.

Limit data access

Ensure that sensitive product-related data is isolated. Intellectual property and data subject to government compliance regulations must have strictly regulated and monitored access settings. You might also want to apply specific access limitations to mission-critical workloads and storage, in general, to enhance product security throughout the environment.

Use strong passwords everywhere

This point is challenging for IT security professionals to control but still crucial. A password is the first and last basic defense solution that stands between a protected environment and a breach.

Strong passwords are those that hackers can't easily guess or brute force. Such passwords contain a non-logical sequence of 12 or more characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols. The more symbols, the better.

Segment networks

A unitary network can be transparent and allow hackers to quickly spread malware and reach sensitive data after they breach through the external protection perimeter. Network segmentation enhances product security by isolating critical infrastructure elements and controlling internal traffic. A network with multiple firewalls, protected routers, and encrypted transfers can be the reason for bad actors to refuse to attack your infrastructure.

Product security tools

Below, we mention five crucial tools you can use in your organization's IT infrastructure to empower product security. Consider implementing them in your product security framework to enhance data protection, infrastructure resilience, and overall reliability of your IT environment.

Firewalls

Today, the development of a product and maintaining proper functioning and service require constant data transferring from and to the organization's network. Employees need stable access to the IT environment to perform job duties, and, depending on the product, clients may require access to your servers to get the appropriate user experience and service level. This means that numerous devices from various places connect to the network you build to develop and serve the product.

A firewall can be among your first product security tools here. Up-to-date Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW), such as Web Application Firewall (WAF) or ConfigServer Firewall (CSF), can monitor traffic that comes in and out, performing in-depth analysis of the packets. With such solutions guarding your network's entry points (plus, you can consider setting internal firewalls to segment the network), you gain additional protection from relevant cyber threats.

Email security solutions

Although communication solutions have evolved to become faster and technologically advanced, emails remain the main tool to send critical data both inside and outside organizations. At the same time, emails are among the most frequent cyberattack entry points. Implementing email scanning and warning security solutions, along with endpoint protection systems, can reduce the threat level to some extent. However, the overwhelming use of smartphones and other mobile devices for business communication is a more difficult challenge.

To ensure proper product cybersecurity levels, employees need to have enhanced email protection on their corporate (and, in most cases, private) smartphones and tablets. The mobile data management (MDM) solutions can help you ensure authorized access to device contents in general and corporate mailboxes in particular. Also, you might want to consider applying anti-theft measures to portable gadgets that have access to the internal network of the organization and can carry sensitive data.

Data encryption

Nowadays, data interception malware has spread across the internet. Any user with minimum IT knowledge can download a packet theft tool, connect to a public Wi-Fi hotspot, and become a man in the middle. In such conditions, transferring unencrypted data through online channels means handing that data to malicious actors.

Data encryption can help organizations prevent unauthorized access to data, theft of login credentials, and other sensitive records. To ensure maximum product security and encryption efficiency, consider also encrypting data at rest (throughout retention). This enhances data security and privacy even in case an employee loses the device due to an accident or theft.

Access control

Insider threats are among the most dangerous to product cybersecurity and IT infrastructure production. Proper access control enables organizations to protect their environments against both malicious insiders and external breaches. The industry-accepted, role-based access control (RBAC) practice enables administrators to provide employees only with the access they need to fulfill job duties.

This approach is the way to keep up with the principle of least privilege. Thus, a particular employee's account can grant access to read, modify, and delete only part of the organization's data. If compromised, accounts restricted with their roles are less likely to trigger a global data loss disaster when manipulated by malicious actors.

Data backup: Product security cornerstone

The specifics of IT systems put organizations in a defensive position, which means that attackers are always one step ahead of IT security experts. A malicious actor can find a way to bypass the existing protection measures regardless of how advanced and effective they were in other circumstances. When the breach has already occurred, the data is lost, and production is down, the only way to ensure product security is to use a relevant backup solution for MSP's, SMBs, or enterprises for recovery. MSPs, in particular, benefit from such solutions as they offer the scalability and flexibility needed to manage multiple clients with different infrastructure setups.

A specialized data protection solution can help you create automated backup and recovery workflows. Initiate backups on-demand or run them by schedule. Store data copies onsite, offsite, on tape, or in the cloud to ensure data availability and avoid a single point of failure. Consider enabling immutability for local or cloud backup copies to protect the data from alteration or deletion.

The set of flexible recovery options enables you to restore separate files, workloads, or entire infrastructures while meeting the tightest recovery time objectives. Moreover, modern data protection solutions have sets of functions to create recovery plans for different disaster scenarios. You can run such recovery presets within seconds to restore production, and provide proper service and compliance required for reliable product security.

Conclusion

Product security refers to the set of measures that organizations implement to protect their products from cyber threats at every stage of development and support. The main tools for security include firewalls, email protection solutions, data encryption, and access controls. IT experts might also want to train all employees about cybersecurity threats and ensure network segmentation and reliable passwords at all infrastructure levels. Lastly, consider embedding a reliable backup and recovery system to restore data and production in case your other security measures fail.