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In the era of soaring use of public cloud by companies, software delivery is moving away from an on-premises install approach to a cloud-based subscription model through software as a service (SaaS).
Customers expect a lot when it comes to SaaS products and services. Whether they are investing in SaaS-first offerings or shifting workloads to cloud-based providers, companies no longer have upfront costs for hardware and related software or a reliance on costly labor to install, manage and secure it. They expect software that is easy to launch, upgrades that are unobtrusive and feature-rich and limitless scaling to meet their changing business needs.
When it comes to security, the cloud-based subscription model significantly changes the paradigm of how software security should be treated. Fortunately for many cloud providers, customers trust that a strong foundational security and privacy posture has been built into to the service by design. Preserving that trust requires a healthy tension of shared responsibility between the security teams demanding it and the cloud providers offering it. A new paradigm shift requires a deeper acknowledgement that an emphasis of the security problem “up the stack” to the application layer is needed.
For security teams, ensuring the protection is built in from the beginning and moves dynamically in lockstep with the workloads requires a much closer partnership with application developers and DevOps teams. This ultimately leads to a richer understanding of the business applications by security teams, creating a more cooperative business-aware and security-minded culture. Getting there will help reduce the tension and improve the overall delivery of secure cloud services regardless of where you sit in the cloud provider/consumer ecosystem and ultimately enables value creation to the business. To get there, a strong partnership must be fostered.
There are obstacles to moving up the stack. In most companies, the reality is that many security teams are not well-aligned to keep up with this change while the business continues to make cloud-based investments, making the problem worse. Security’s comfort zone seems very much still focused on perimeter defense, but this emphasis isn’t optimally aligned to a cloud-first future. Even when forward-leaning security shops realize a need to change, they often get pushback from app developer teams because security reviews can delay deployment and security tools create “noise” and false positives for app developers. Also, traditional security tools often do not work well in cloud environments.
Interestingly enough, the No. 1 concern of app developers is preventing data breaches and cyberattacks, a survey of 500 developers and development managers by Veracode found. Less than one-quarter of developers said meeting customer or regulatory compliance is their top concern, while 21 percent said meeting budget and delivery schedules is their top concern, and 19.4 percent said delivering secure code to pass internal audits is a priority. Furthermore, app developers who work with security teams get “major and tangible business and technical benefit,” according to a survey of 150 security and app development pros conducted by Forrester Consulting. Almost all of the collaborators said that working together leads to major or moderate benefit in customer satisfaction.
Respondents said the more frequently they collaborate, the better the results, “including improved customer satisfaction, business/IT alignment, quality and frequency of releases, and the rate of innovation at their firms.”
By overcoming barriers to collaboration, app developers and security teams can leverage this knowledge to improve their approach and also come to the table with solutions aligned at moving up the stack. First, they can perform code analysis to uncover vulnerabilities early in the app development process. Second, they can work on stronger runtime protection once the SaaS application is deployed. Code analysis can be used to make runtime protection better, and runtime data can be used to improve code analysis. This creates a continuous improvement loop between the two and both teams can work on code analysis and runtime protection together.
To achieve this continuous improvement loop, companies must work to break down traditional work silos that exist because of a mismatch in expectations. App developers, measured for speed, need to receive security information accurately, early and with sufficient context to correct problems during software development. Security pros can benefit by installing security tools in production that understand the security needs of their applications, as opposed to tools that require security pros to write rules, tune the tool and then deal with large number of alerts.
The goal is to fix software mistakes, weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the beginning of the development process rather than after deployment, when liability, revenue and reputational risks are the greatest. It is also important to realize that achieving zero defects in source code is a noble but difficult-to-achieve goal. Instead of focusing on extremes, the goal should be to establish a continuous improvement logic in CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment), where bugs are identified, some are fixed and the remainder have fast and accurate runtime protection.
This shift in thinking and processes will give companies fewer security worries and enable them to more proactively embrace a SaaS-first mentality with higher confidence and trust levels. Companies will reap the financial benefits that come with strengthened industry reputations for rapid innovation capabilities and improved levels of software security.
About the Authors
Manish Gupta is founder and CEO of ShiftLeft Inc. He is a 20-year veteran of the security industry and has led product development, management and strategy at FireEye, Cisco Systems, Intel, McAfee and Redback Networks.
Craig Rosen is vice president and CISO at AppDynamics. He has held leadership roles for more than two decades in the security industry, including at FireEye, Pacific Gas & Electric, TDI and CGI.
