--- layout: markdown_page title: Product Stage Direction - Defend --- - TOC {:toc}

Protecting cloud-native applications, services, and infrastructure

GitLab Defend enables organizations to proactively protect their cloud-native environments by providing context-aware technologies to reduce your overall security risk. Defend is a natural extension of your existing operations practices providing security visibility across the entire DevSecOps lifecycle. This empowers your organization to apply DevSecOps best practices with visibility from the first line of code written all the way through monitoring and protecting your applications deployed into operations. ![Defend Overview](/images/direction/defend/defend-overview.png) ## Stage Overview The Defend Stage focuses on providing security visibility across the entire DevSecOps lifecycle as well as providing monitoring and mitigation of attacks targeting your cloud-native environment. Defend reduces overall security risk by enabling you to be ready now for the cloud-native application stack and DevSecOps best practices of the future. This is accomplished by: * providing Security Dashboards enabling your organization to have full visibility from the first line of code written to your application deployed in production * protecting your applications and services deployed within your cloud-native environment by leveraging context-aware technologies across the entire application stack * monitoring for misuse within your GitLab deployment—including its associated runners—and alerting when anomalies in usage are detected ### Groups The Defend Stage is made up of two groups supporting the major categories focused on cloud-native security including: * Threat Insights - Holistically view, manage, and reduce potential risks across the entire DevSecOps lifecycle as well as monitor misuse of your GitLab instance. * Container Security - Monitor and protect your cloud-native applications and services by leveraging context-aware knowledge to improve your overall security posture. ### Resourcing and Investment The existing team members for the Defend Stage can be found in the links below: * [Development](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/?department=defend-section) * [User Experience](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/?department=defend-ux-team) * [Product Management](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/?department=defend-pm-team) * [Quality Engineering](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/?department=secure-enablement-qe-team) ## Guiding Principles ### Listen and record first, then act In line with our [Security Paradigm](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/secure/#security-paradigm), Defend features will inform and report threats that occur as a first step. Once you explicitly tell GitLab to block traffic, users, or devices, we will record these decisions and then block and drop actions by those bad actors. This is valuable to you because it means that you can introduce and configure security for your app gradually over time without disrupting your end users. Examining the information about what GitLab Defend reports in your app helps you ensure that the security settings are appropriate for your app and business will not introduce more false positves nor permit more potentially bad actions than you are comfortable with. Having recorded evidence of threats and your response ensures you can easily achieve your compliance goals and requirements. ### Inform action for other stages One of GitLab's key advantages as a single DevOps platform is that all of our stages are integrated and tightly connected. Defend will identify and protect against threats as they happen, but we will strive to be informative to other stages to give you actionable next steps to close a vulnerability or point of exploit, not just defend it. Not only does shifting left and acting on results earlier give your apps better security, it helps [enable collaboration](/handbook/product/#enabling-collaboration) with everyone at your company. We believe that security is everyone's responsibility and that [everyone can contribute](/company/strategy/#mission), and informing other stages is a powerful way to do this. ### Emphasize usability and convention over configuration Defend capabilities will be pre-configured to provide value to protecting your applications. Rather than require you to read documentation manuals and provide complex configuration files, [GitLab will always provide reasonable defaults](/handbook/product/#convention-over-configuration) out of the box. We will provide the ability for advanced and customized configurations, but these will only be needed based on your specific use case and when you feel comfortable doing so. <%= partial("direction/categories", :locals => { :stageKey => "defend" }) %> ## Upcoming Releases <%= direction["all"]["all"] %> <%= partial("direction/other", :locals => { :stage => "defend" }) %>