When building apps, some developers struggle to guarantee sufficient security for their products. They either have to spend too many resources on this or take risks neglecting minor vulnerabilities. In this review, you’ll find handy recommendations by enterprise application security experts. You can apply these tips regardless of the scale of your company and the peculiarity of your products.
Don’t Rely Too Much on the Security of the Infrastructure
Each element of the infrastructure you use has its security system. But when building them, their developers were not thinking about the needs and characteristics of your particular project. The in-built security solutions might be either incomplete or inadequate. Some developers might be not eager to publicly disclose the details of their security solutions, especially when it comes to cloud services. Therefore it is recommended to deploy application level security that you can fully control by yourself. The Forte Group experts would add that this piece of advice will come in handy for on-premises environments too.
Each Component of the App Requires Its Own Security Measures
The answer to the question “What is application security?” will be different for diverse components of your app:
- For program execution resources, deploy the systems that detect and prevent intrusions
- Storages and databases need access controls so that non-app components won’t be able to affect data elements
- To approve users and app components that are allowed to send traffic to other parts of the app, use separate access controls
Mind that the level of security of one and the same part of the app might differ at diverse stages of its development. For instance, it might require an open component firewall configuration at the early stages of its creation. But closer to the last phase, you’ll constrict firewall access so that only a limited range of traffic sources will be able to reach the goal.
Install and Configure Security Components in Automated Mode
Previously, developers had to manually audit, install and configure diverse parts and processes of the app. This consumed too much time and effort and made the product too prone to human error. Because of business pressure and urgency, too many bugs would remain unnoticed and an app that would be labeled as “ready” would be rife with errors. Here is a wise recommendation from the web application security best practices: try to automate as many procedures as possible. Yes, this might require certain effort and struggle — but the advantages of unit testing carried out in automated mode are evident. Your apps will be unlikely to have security issues and your team will be able to focus on those aspects that require human control.
Test the Selected Measures
It’s not enough to install and configure security systems once and forever. You should regularly run penetration tests to make sure the chosen solutions function properly and receive impartial feedback from third-party professionals. If you implement security measures but neglect their application policy recommendations they might fail to deliver the expected result.
Delegate Security Powers to Third Parties
In too many organizations, application data security teams suffer from excessive workload and personnel shortage. To save them from stress, you might consider entrusting the security of nonstrategic apps to third-party contractors. For instance, a profile provider might take care of your email, protecting it from potential hacking attacks. Like this, your in-house security team will be able to concentrate on the specific needs of your products.
Rely on Cloud-Based Security Solutions
Thanks to cloud technologies, you don’t need to invest a fortune in purchasing and maintaining forward-thinking tools and programs. If you resort to a cloud service, you won’t have to pay upfront for its license. The team of this service will install and configure it for you as well as carry out its subsequent maintenance at an affordable price. Your benefits are obvious: you save funds on the application development security and your specialists can focus on their immediate tasks.
Monitor Your Level of Security
Sometimes it happens so that the security application is steadily sending notifications but you fail to identify them in the daily avalanche of heterogeneous information. To timely receive crucial news, configure your settings accordingly. The staff responsible for a certain part of development needs to see the alerts about their respective sphere as soon as they appear. A modern application for security has to oversee dozens of aspects of your product and provide a well-structured, relevant, immediate feedback.
Conclusion
Hopefully, now you have a comprehensive answer to the question “What is secure application development?”. The above-listed recommendations will help you to consistently deliver better products while reasonably distributing your time, funds and efforts. The main challenge would be to apply all these solutions and practices in your daily working process. But once you do it, you’ll be more than happy with the result.
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