Under pressure: Managing the competing demands of development velocity and application security – Security Boulevard

Nearly 50% of development teams knowingly release vulnerable code. Learn why vulnerabilities are overlooked and how you can improve application security.

The first software development team I worked on operated on the follow mantra:

Make it work.Then, make it fast.Then, make it elegant (maybe).

Meaning, dont worry about performance optimizations until your code actually does what its supposed to do, and dont worry about code maintainability until after you know it both works and performs well. Users generally have no idea how maintainable the code is, but they do know if the application is broken or slow. So more often than not, wed never get around to refactoring the codeat least not until the code debt started to impact application reliability and performance.

Today that developer mantra has two additional lines:

Ship it sooner.And while youre at it, make it secure.

As with application performance and reliability, delivering an application on time is easily quantified and observed. Everybody knows when you miss a deadlinesomething thats easy to do when your release cycles are measured in weeks, days, or even hours. But the security of an application isnt so easily observed or quantified, at least not until theres a security breach.

It should come as no surprise, then, that nearly half of the respondents to the modern application development security survey, conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), state that their organizations regularly push vulnerable code to production. Its also not surprising that for over half of those teams, tight delivery schedules and critical deadlines are the main contributing factor. In the presence of a deadline, what can be measured is whats going to get done, and what cant be (or at least isnt) measured often doesnt.

However, we dont have time to do it doesnt really cut it when it comes to application security. This is demonstrated by the 60% of respondents who reported that their applications have suffered OWASP Top 10 exploits during the past 12 months. The competing demands of short release cycles and improved application security are a real challenge for development and security teams.

It doesnt have to be this way, and other findings in the survey report point to opportunities that teams have to both maintain development velocity and improve application security. Here are just a few:

Reject silver bullets. Gone are the days of security teams simply running DAST and penetration tests at the end of development. A consistent trend shown in the report is that teams are leveraging multiple types of security testing tools across the SDLC to address different forms of risk in both proprietary and open source code.

Integrate and automate. Software development is increasingly automated, and application security testing needs to be as well. Over half the respondents indicated that their security controls are highly integrated into their DevOps processes, with another 38% saying they are heading down that same path.

Train the team. Most developers lack sufficient application security knowledge to ensure their code isnt vulnerable. Survey respondents indicated that developer knowledge is a challenge, as is consistent training. Without sufficient software security training, developers struggle to address the findings of application security tests. An effective way to remedy this is to provide just-in-time security training delivered through the IDE with a solution like Code Sight.

Keep score. If what gets measured gets done, then its important to measure the progress of both your AppSec testing and security training programs. This includes tracking the introduction and mitigation of security bugs as well as improvements to both of these metrics over time, i.e., who is writing secure code and who isnt, and are they improving?

There are a number of other interesting findings and recommendations in the survey report, and they can help your team manage the competing pressures of release schedules and application security. You can check it out here, and you can also learn more by joining our upcoming webinar, Under Pressure: Building Security Into Application Development, where Ill be interviewing the survey reports author, Dave Gruber, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Under Pressure: Building Security into Application Development

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Under pressure: Managing the competing demands of development velocity and application security - Security Boulevard