With the increasing security breaches in businesses, combating cyber-threats becomes a daunting task. There are millions of records compromised by threat actors across various industry verticals that have caused huge losses to enterprises. There are too many threat actors and risks for companies to avoid a 100% compromise of their sensitive information. In addition, humans fail at adhering to security standards as they fail to presume short and long term risks. So it is time for businesses to invest in a good security testing company to place security checks at the forefront of their business processes. They should take proactive decisions to improve security stature. It is extremely important to identify the risk tolerance of a business, limit exposure to risks, and attack vectors by automating whatever is possible in order to avoid human errors. Most of the organizations require a shift in thinking about security operations, applications, and IT culture amongst the employees.
Trying to Achieve Higher with Little Resources
Most organizations assume that their biggest threats are external but usually, breaches occur due to human errors. It does not imply that employees are not doing their job effectively, but that they have a lot to do. This happens because networks have evolved over time and expanded in size, scope, and complexity. There are traditional systems that run applications critical to certain areas of a business. Security teams are making the most of their resources and trying to stay ahead of new vulnerabilities in an environment where developers work fast and are expected to release applications faster than they used to in the past.
Let’s have a look at the following strategies that an organization should follow to remain on the right track with respect to security:
Utilizing Automation for Security and Compliance
In order to maintain a secure environment through manual testing is not practically possible. Although automated testing does not achieve 100% compliance it is the closest solution to ensure maximum app security. It is important to consider what manual tasks are being performed and how often they need to be performed. The next step is to design and implement an automation testing strategy that is robust and flexible. It is true that the more a company automates, the greater return on investment they earn.
Testers can use automation in the following areas:
- Configuration management
- Package management
- Continuous security and monitoring
- Vulnerability management
- Compliance policies
- Remediation efforts
- Workflows management
Getting Started with Automation to Boost App Security
There may be a lot of things to automate, so make sure you start small. We understand automation is a huge cultural and technical shift, yet a security testing company can assist in achieving the business goals. The main aim is to automate as much as possible, but starting off with too many things at the same time can be daunting. Here are a few things that can help you with automating testing with respect to security:
Work in Interactions – Use the CI Approach
Businesses looking forward to achieving a good security testing strategy should implement continuous integration (CI) principles for their applications. They can use tools like Jenkins and achieve their desired results. This may take a few days on a single project, but it can process all the things correctly in a CI pipeline.
When you automate everything in a CI pipeline, make sure that you also automate the creation of audit documentation during each step. It will help in the successful implementation of all these steps and help in expanding automation further.
Ensure All Tests are Reproducible
Make sure you want to build automation in the right way. For which it is important to ensure that all the processes are verifiable and auditable and that it can be managed by anyone in an organization.
Share the Knowledge
When you learn expertise and knowledge on how to implement automation, you should communicate it with the rest of your teammates. It is important to ensure that security is everyone’s job and it does not only belong to the security teams.
Focus on the Cultural Change
In addition to the technical challenges that security teams face, there are cultural challenges that occur due to the implementation of automated testing tools. Most of the people fear that introducing automation will replace the need for manual testers. So it is important to ensure team members that automation is only being performed to automate the tedious jobs so that they can work on other crucial business tasks.
