Incredibuild Team
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Fast software development is a priority for any application developer today. Unfortunately, the price for speed is often security. In this article, we explain why security and compliance are critical, and how DevSecOps can pave the way for quick, secure, and compliant development.
Why Security Is a Must-Have for App Development
It’s hard to imagine life without at least a few apps today. This fact makes them a prime target for cybercriminals who prey on vulnerable software for personal gain.
However, targeting an application directly is often too difficult or time-consuming. So they instead target the app development companies, app developers themselves, and even the entire development process in hopes of breaking in before defensive measures are implemented.
The development process is very vulnerable. Risks and threats that aren’t detected and properly mitigated during this phase often persist into the final deployment, at which point, they might be too difficult to address. Bottom line: It’s much easier, cheaper, and less cumbersome to implement security early on.
A sudden discovery of a fatal flaw can also significantly delay or prevent a launch from happening at all, as releasing defective software can result in financial losses, permanently ruin the reputation of your company, and completely diminish user trust.
Moreover, application vulnerabilities can lead to malicious actors targeting your overall business. One breached app can, and often does, turn into a full-scale attack on your company.
The Importance of Compliance in App Development
Security and compliance go hand in hand. Adherence to compliance guidelines is very often mandatory, and companies must factor in mandated requirements during the development process. This is especially the case with apps that handle sensitive data, with regulations such as PCI-DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA in force.
For those companies for whom following these standards and rules is mandatory, non-compliance results in severe consequences. Your company could be at risk for security breaches, business disruptions, and lost productivity and customer trust; you could also face hefty fines and costly legal actions—or even imprisonment for those found guilty of negligence.
However, even for businesses that aren’t required to follow any standard, obtaining a compliance certification is often considered a must. Why? Because it builds user trust and acts as a guarantee that you’re following the best security practices.
Top Practices for Combining Speed, Security, and Compliance for App Developers
There are numerous guides on tricks and tips you can use to combine speed, security, and compliance, but most share the same pitfalls. Most tutorials promise a lot, but they rarely deliver. That’s because they usually focus on symptomatic treatment, instead of approaching the problem at its core.
Times have changed. DevOps is still a great methodology, but it doesn’t factor in the need for security, which has exponentially grown throughout the years. Nowadays, companies have to evolve their DevOps into DevSecOps to stay competitive. Although this requires a change in mindset and approach, the results are real—and definitely achievable.
Think Earlier, Act Faster. Shift-Left Your Security.
Traditionally, security was placed at the very end of the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—after the app was built by developers and tested by QA engineers. The critical problem with this approach was that instead of solving security concerns when they were in their infancy, they were left to grow.
Once the code finally reached security teams, safety issues could no longer be easily discovered due to the code already on top of them, leaving internal logic critically dependent on flawed solutions. Fixing those looming threats became incredibly difficult, often impossible, without major rewrites or hacky workarounds.
Applications that seemed ready to release were going back to the drawing board over and over again. Iterations, often fixing one thing and breaking a few others, consumed more and more time and effort. The solution? Shift-left.
Shift-left is not just about moving tests earlier in your workflow. Security has to be woven into the application at every stage of the lifecycle. It entails a security-conscious approach to design, risk-aware implementation, thorough verification, and secure integration.
Integrate Security Testing into Your Workflow
Static/dynamic application security testing (SAST/DAST) tools can be easily implemented in your development process—both manually and through automation—for apps and infrastructure.
Static analysis helps pinpoint potential risks and vulnerabilities before the code is even deployed, while dynamic analysis provides security insights about already running applications.
SAST/DAST tools are invaluable prevention measures. Their insights allow developers to address issues much faster, significantly improving an application’s security posture throughout the software development workflow.
Many static analysis tools can be integrated into your workflows before changes become a version control commit through pre-commit hooks, or before they become a part of your main codebase through merge request CI/CD pipelines.
Thanks to the advances in virtualization and containerization, provisioning temporary environments is far easier. It’s also less costly and less resource-intensive, which means dynamic testing is no longer as cumbersome to execute.
Security testing tools are a great example of shift-left in action. With these toolkits, developers can:
- Run security analysis by themselves
- Consult with the security team regarding the results
- Collaborate on finding the best solution
- Push secure code upstream
This significantly reduces incidents and scary discoveries later on. Plus, you won’t spend weeks trying to figure out how to address the problem with that one vulnerable library, which would be easy to deal with if not for the thousands of lines of code developed later on depending on it for basic functionality.
In terms of available solutions, there’s a scanner for every programming language and framework out there, both commercial and free. Most popular technologies have dozens, if not hundreds, of tools. Whether your next application is built on Node.js, PHP, Django, Ruby, .Net, or any other technology, you can—and should—implement security testing from your first line of code.
Improve Your Observability for Faster Development, Mitigation, and Prevention
Visibility is a significant factor for both security and speed—and a huge focus point for DevSecOps. Developers can pinpoint, debug, and resolve issues they can trace faster, while security teams need observability to monitor against threats, take precautionary measures, and swiftly react to incidents.
Application observability tools can significantly lower time-to-remediation, with days or weeks of investigation turning into minutes. Instead of blind guesses, you can conduct a differential diagnosis, crossing out false positives and innocent suspects, and quickly pinpoint the true root causes—often well before they escalate into a real problem.
The role of observability in ensuring security cannot be understated—both during development for easy prevention and after the application is in the hands of your customers for faster threat identification and mitigation.
Security vs. Speed: Does Your Team Have to Choose?
No, they do not. Nowadays, speed and security are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they’re connected. Well-thought-out security will not slow you down. On the contrary, it can significantly accelerate software development.
An insecure development process will produce an application vulnerable to looming threats. Putting security first alleviates the potential for these negative consequences and lets you solve issues before they grow in scale and difficulty—after which they will take far more time to resolve.
A security-first approach also means less time and effort spent in achieving compliance and maintaining it over the long term.
FAQs on App Development
What is secure software development?
Secure app development is a methodology of application development in which security is factored into every part of the software development lifecycle, starting from the very beginning. Secure software development emphasizes that instead of addressing security considerations at the time of final release, the app should be secure by design.
What are the basic requirements for app development?
The most basic application development requires a concept, programming experience, or a team that knows how to develop an app, along with assets such as images or icons. In later stages, you might also need additional infrastructure, personnel, further assets, and licenses.
How can you speed up app development?
Many factors can speed up application development. You can hire more developers, embrace methodologies such as Agile or DevOps, automate certain parts of the process, shorten release cycles, reduce the initial scope of the project, or optimize build and deployment times. Which of those measures to apply mostly depends on the current problems and bottlenecks limiting velocity.
What is compliance in app development?
Compliance in application development is the adherence to requirements posed by regulatory and information security compliance frameworks, such as NIST, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 2700, FedRAMP, and CIS. Depending on an app’s given use case, and any relevant laws the app must follow, this adherence might be voluntary or obligatory.
How can you maintain security as an app developer?
Follow frameworks such as OWASP and SOC2. Thoroughly monitor the security posture of your development process, implement security scanning as part of the workflow, and stay up to date with current cybersecurity threats.
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