Is it Safe to use Serverless Applications?

By Bhaskar Deep.

Let’s think like this, Storing our data at an unknown place. Is our data secure? can they access our business data? And the question chain continues…

Who is using it them?  

Modern technologies play a crucial role in the challenging IT world, many companies like Netflix and Adobe started using serverless applications. Many businesses are considering using serverless technologies and the growth of serverless applications has been vastly increased. According to Datadog, 80% of AWS container users adopted AWS lambda.

Why are they using them?

Serverless technology works on two services that explain the architecture. Firstly Back-end as a service where it operates the backend of the cloud which is mostly operated by a third party and functions as a service where code starts running using event triggers. 

The main reason that big industries started using serverless is because of the fast deployment of Products without a customer lock-in but from the developers’ aspect it’s easy to use and deploy, low cost, scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and most importantly better UX for best customer experience.

Security threats 

For any type of technology, the main concern is data security. Traditional computing or serverless computing are facing cyber threats, to understand this let’s see the top threats of serverless architecture.

·      Function data event injection.

·      Broken authentication.

·      Insecure serverless deployment configuration.

·      Over-privileged function permissions and roles.

·      Inadequate function monitoring and logging.

·      Insecure third-party dependencies.

·      Insecure application secrets storage.

·      DDoS attacks.

·      Serverless function execution flow manipulation.

·      Improper exception handling and verbose error message.

Serverless applications are secure to use by continuous monitoring and most important usage of secure coding for your application. We can test a serverless environment by different patterns using a damn vulnerable application that is available in GitHub, which teaches us a secure way to launch our application in serverless 

Is it safe to use serverless?

We can never say that any application is safe, but we can make it safe by following security policies. Yes, we can use serverless applications with the practice of secure coding and continuous monitoring of security risks that are already provided by cloud platforms. The main motto of going live with serverless is #Secure coding.