4 Ways of Incorporating Application Security Testing Into Devops

By CIOReview | Wednesday, January 13, 2021

DevOps practices, agile development methodologies and AI are gradually phasing out legacy approaches. Organizations understand that they cannot cope with the higher speed and the rise in complexity of application categories with single-tiered systems. To meet tight deadlines, DevOps teams have to go into production with applications with minor defects. Hackers with deceptive sophistication and increasing agility can take advantage of these minor defects and can cause costly security breaches to the organization. To fight hackers, enterprises must take a few steps that will remediate vulnerabilities without depleting time and development resources. Here are a few steps to keep hackers at bay.

1. Embedding AppSec

Incorporating application security (AppSec) during the initial process of the development can help an organization save money and resources. Ignoring AppSec until the closing phase of the development process can make bugs challenging to detect and burgeon beyond patch-up. Last-minute code changes can exhaust the development team by rummaging through the code to repair defects and other vulnerabilities. Besides, making changes in the closing phase of the development is expensive and costs more than the changes made earlier in the process.

2. Business-Critical Applications

Generally, hackers are adamant about acquiring organizations' most essential aspects of a business. If an attacker is successful in breaching the security walls, then the company is compromised in different ways. The organization must secure the most vital aspects of application security testing.

3. Automation

Automated tools are valuable time savers; however, they are limited to how much benefit they can offer. Different tools such as static analysis are better suited to identify and fix vulnerabilities such as simple flaws, whether in-house or off shelf. Dynamic analysis is excellent for securing and monitoring different types of web applications.

4. Design a Policy Framework

The organization must create a list of criteria based on risk factors to understand which flaws are urgent. Along with the criteria list, the organization must create a guidance outline for remediation activities that follow a standardized protocol and reduce vulnerability monitoring. The framework must include the scan frequency, which can be revised as the code becomes less vulnerable to threats.

Incorporating AppSec successfully into DevOps is difficult for enterprises as faster and more flexible methodologies demand greater complexity and shorter deadlines.