The security landscape is becoming more sophisticated as the days pass on, while hackers are no way short in exploiting the vulnerabilities in the applications through advanced methods and techniques. With most enterprises going full stream on their customer facing applications and mobile apps evolving to include end-to-end business processes, the complexity is further increased. With the increasing concerns of attacks at the application level and pressure on organizations to comply with various regulatory mandates, there has been a shift in the application security landscape.
While data security and network security have been mature security disciplines, application security is joining the list with Consumerization of IT presenting a great challenge in terms of security for IT decision makers. Most enterprises have increased their focus towards ensuring the security of their applications and there emerged several technologies and processes that cut down the risk of potential threats. The requirement for application security testing is assuming prominence more than ever. It helps enterprises to find out the security vulnerabilities through a wide-range of tests that discover vulnerabilities and evaluates the overall security posture of the applications.
As the potential impact of security issues gets higher as we get deeper into the software life cycle, testing should be involved right from the early stages to ensure security of the applications. There also emerged several tools that evaluate the code and runtime interfaces for exploitable vulnerabilities. While effective implementation of application security testing is quite essential, there is a need for enterprises to take the responsibility of ensuring the security and quality of their applications. Developers often think or claim that they are responsible only for the functionality of the applications, while security is by-default expected out of QA and testing teams performing functional testing. It should be realized that quality is an enterprise-wide effort and not a single person or team’s responsibility.
Enterprises should be fully equipped to face the threats from the hackers. Most security vulnerabilities are often the result of mismanagement and mistakes. While there are several security offerings in the market, they alone can’t get the job done. It requires a mix of right skill sets and right use of required tools to tone down the risk of internal and external attacks. A comprehensive security testing approach that spans the entire application life cycle and evaluates several supporting elements like network, databases, and operating systems, should be implemented. One best and easiest way to focus on the security aspects would be to get onboard a third-party vendor with necessary expertise in security testing.
