Today, it’s not enough to secure the network and the OS. The threats have changed and security must change too. With the strong focus on the network, attackers have become more sophisticated and adept at focusing their attention on databases. This brings application security right to the forefront.
The best way to protect your application is to build it securely in the first place. Security can no longer be an afterthought–something that is done after the build and left to the security team to test during a testing phase. We have to shift-left with security, embracing secure development practices that lead to higher quality software.
We have to think about security more holistically, evaluating the interaction between privacy and reliability.
In short, privacy provides us with the policies to which we must adhere in order to be compliant – often this carries legal ramifications. Security provides us a suite of technology and methodology to enforce compliance whilst reliability provides us with guideposts and benchmarks to reach in order to keep the system up and running efficiently. The aim of these objectives being to achieve software of the highest quality.
With that said, how do you sell secure development practices to management and stakeholders who may not be close to the development effort? A good place to start is to highlight some of the benefits of secure development.
Reduce rework
Developing software that is secure from the outset of course takes time, effort, and more resources. But that effort and investment is repaid in the long run as it means you are less likely to need to spend time later patching vulnerabilities, reworking code, and providing security updates. This means a couple of things. Firstly it frees development time and effort to work on new features and enhancements that customers actually care about. And secondly, if you are able to focus more time on additional features and functionality that customers find valuable, that will improve your customer happiness and also go a long way to winning over new customers. In a competitive space, the vendor that can innovate and supply high value products faster and more securely will do better than one that spends their resources fixing bugs in their system.
Protect your brand
Breaches are expensive. They cost time, money and most important of all, they can cost you your reputation. If your software is successfully attacked and exploited because you didn’t build it securely enough (e.g. hackers get access to customer data), you can land yourself a hefty fine from a regulator depending on what industry you’re in. On top of that, you will have to employ cyber security experts to help remediate the issue which will not only detract from your operations but also accrue added costs. Most of all, the reputational damage of losing customer data is not something you may survive. There is a direct correlation between building secure software from the outset and protecting your brand.
These are just a couple of the benefits associated with adopting a secure development process. In today’s threat landscape, it’s no longer an option. We must shift left with security, investing the time, effort and resources to write clean code and develop inherently software from the get go. Not doing so, could be catastrophic for your customers, business and your brand.