Page 112 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

Visibility: The Problem You Didn’t Know You Had (But Attackers Do)

And if you can’t see these exposures, neither can your firewall, where most organizations get blindsided.

They deploy a firewall thinking they’ve secured the infrastructure, but their actual attack surface lives in
code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and transient environments.

Modern firewalls can integrate with runtime environments, but that’s not enough. You need visibility into
the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), including proactive secrets detection, monitoring of build
artifacts, and continuous verification.

Always-On Firewalls Demand Continuous Data—and DevOps Control

An always-on firewall isn’t about passive 24/7 monitoring. It’s about automated enforcement that
continuously adapts to dynamic environments—no human intervention, no waiting for incident response.

But this only works if the firewall has continuous access to relevant data:

• Workload telemetry from ephemeral containers and microservices that spin up and down in
seconds.
• Signals from your CI/CD pipeline, including version control, builds, and infrastructure
provisioning events.
• Identity-aware context, tying policies to service accounts, IAM roles, and third-party
integrations—not just IP addresses.
• Without this data, even an AI-driven firewall cannot effectively block unauthorized connections,
enforce least-privilege access, or isolate threats. DevOps teams need to treat firewalls as part of
their infrastructure—not as an external layer managed by security teams:
• Define firewall policy as code, version-controlled and deployed through automated pipelines.
• Automate secrets detection across code commits, build artifacts, and logs to prevent credential
leaks before they become attack vectors.
• Expose firewall telemetry directly to developers, shortening feedback loops and enabling fast
remediation when workloads violate policy.

Teams that embed them into their deployment workflows build more secure, scalable, resilient systems
without trading off speed.

This Is the New Baseline, not a Future Vision

Cloud-native, AI-driven, always-on firewalls are already in production in forward-thinking teams. They’re
not a trend but the minimum viable security for organizations that take cloud-native architecture seriously.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 112
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