While application security is crucial and essential to the state of cybersecurity at a firm, it is also important to embed and sustain a healthy application security program in spite of urgent code changes and crucial application deployments.
Application security is essential to the viability of any product-developing firm and it presents these vital elements:
- Compliance: For almost all organizations that own or develop technological products in various industries, there are certain regulatory requirements that have to be met to sustain the business. Most security certifications require that the application security program of the firm is current and in practice.
- Testing: Application security tests are carried out against industry standards and it helps to identify areas of concern before the product, feature, or change is pushed live to production. It maintains a healthy application that customers can trust, although a hack-free application is not guaranteed, it only makes the process more difficult and technologically complex when the right tools, and processes are in place.
- Risk Mitigation: Application security helps to identify risks that are associated with emergency code changes. Due to an application security program in place, risk managers can process the application flow, identify possibilities of threats, device a risk treatment plan, and follow through mitigation strategies.
This list is not limited to other benefits such as security awareness, promoting an overall organizational security culture, and more.
With emergency code changes, there are strategic processes and steps that can be taken to maintain a healthy application security program while pushing emergency code to production. These steps will help your team to identify, define, and re-strategize your application security program to include emergency code changes that work for the change management team and all stakeholders within your organization.