The challenges that we’re living through will eventually leave the public consciousness. But its effects on the economy and on business cultures and operations will likely be felt for at least the next decade. Now more than ever, organizations are seeking to automate business processes to improve resilience, enable new services to support customers, and drive digital transformation to allow longer term transitions to remote working. And while some of those efforts to digitize may not last long term, most will — we are looking at an acceleration of the digital phase shift, and software development is going to be at the heart of that transformation.
Developing secure software is more critical than ever, but saying “it’s easier said than done” is a significant understatement. Embedding security into software development is more or less a state of nirvana to most organizations. But why is this idea of ‘secure by design’ so difficult to achieve?
One major challenge is centralizing the governance of the separate functions as required in software development — including security.
In many modern application security programs, there are an assortment of teams dedicated to specific functions. For example, you might have one team for Static Application Security Testing (SAST), one team for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and one team for Software Composition Analysis (SCA). When a team of developers works on an application, they coordinate with each of these teams individually to ensure security tests run against the application.
However when these individual teams are centralized, there are a series of significant benefits:
- Visibility: centralizing live information into a single location that can be viewed by all parties on-demand
- Integrity: enabling change tracking to ensure historical changes are legitimate and sensible
- Consistency: maintaining a universal format leveraged by all parties
While the business takes stock of its processes in the new reality, security teams have a unique opportunity to integrate with the centralization of development operations, through the use of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.