What is security testing? Why we need it in 2022
Conventional methods of security testing are incapable of meeting the high-speed requirements of the modern application development landscape. They lack the ability to provide real-time feedback, and they are also complex to implement and prone to error.
Keeping pace with today’s fast-paced environment requires development organizations to automate security testing and improve the ability to respond to changes with agility.
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What is automated security testing?
Automating security testing allows teams to automate various processes in the realm of security testing. It also sets the foundation of a development environment where incremental and near-continuous product changes are made with great ease. By accelerating the speed and accuracy of security testing, teams can release code to production multiple times a day to meet business requirements.
Automating security testing has become fundamental to supporting the time-to-market demands of modern application development environments. It helps in baking security into the SDLC, allowing teams to get notifications on security issues and act on them – before code is committed. Such integration aids in reducing the impact and probability of security breaches while also allowing teams to support application delivery at DevOps speed.
Why do you need Security Testing?
Security vulnerabilities are emerging as one of the leading causes of data breaches. The pressure on development organizations to ensure the highest level of security is growing. At the same time, government and industry regulations across various compliance requirements have become increasingly stringent.
Automating security testing safeguards products (and the business) against security attacks and ensures security is integrated by design into applications. In the long run, such testing can help
- Reduce manual error and associated human error
- Enable early security intervention
- Streamline the development process
- Ensure repeated and comprehensive security checks
- Receive fast feedback on issues and challenges
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Why automating security testing be a priority for 2022?
Automating security testing allows development organizations to detect common bugs that hinder performance. It helps identify unexpected software behavior due to poor quality code or inefficient processes. It also allows teams to drive greater value from their products – without constantly worrying about the impact of their decisions on security.
In 2022, as software development teams look to sufficiently protect products against external hackers and ensure that they comply with regulatory requirements, the need for automating security testing is grave.
So, here’s why automating security testing should be a priority in 2022:
End-to-end automation
Organizations in 2022 are increasingly looking to bridge department and technology silos and set the foundation of a secure and connected enterprise. Automating security testing allows teams to integrate automation across the tech stack. Being business process-focused, automation also helps in end-to-end quality assurance – throughout the length and breadth of the business.
Quicker time-to-market
It is flexible to implement modern automated security tools with zero coding, making it easy for teams to accelerate time-to-market. Since these tools are powerful to handle real-world security challenges and complexities, teams can easily and quickly bring products into the market – without security being a major obstacle.
Enhanced scalability
Businesses today need to be extremely agile and should be able to respond to fluctuating market demands with ease. Today, automated security tools are extremely intuitive and can make deployments faster and optimized. Since testing happens in tandem with development, teams can meet the growing needs of their business – with speed and quality.
Better quality lifecycle management
Product quality is increasingly becoming a core differentiator in today’s age. Automating security testing allows teams to manage all facets of quality and reliability with efficiency. Hence, this unified approach for test design through continuous change management paves the way for accelerated quality testing – across every phase of the software development lifecycle.
Best practices to follow security testing
It is possible to automate a majority of security tests to varying degrees throughout the software development lifecycle. Here are some best practices to follow:
- Begin by conducting a software audit to discover any significant risks existing in the product. Moreover, it will allow you to integrate security automation into current workflows more easily.
- Automate and integrate security testing at the beginning of the development process. This helps to detect and correct bugs while writing the code.
- Instead of automating every task, identify software testing activities that stand the best chance of benefiting from automation.So focus on those that are extremely repetitive, error-prone, and data-intensive.
- Also, make it a point to automate application-level security testing to ensure applications aren’t carrying out any malicious actions.
- Use tools that continuously analyze all changes and edits to the code to get immediate insight into potential security issues.
- Make sure to match the pace of automated security testing with the pace of development to avoid wasting time and resources if several changes to source code are not being made.
- Even when you automate security tests, make sure to include some human intervention to triage alerts, add context, prioritize issues and find flaws in application logic.
- When automating this type of testing, ensure minimal disruption to processes. As far as possible, make sure automated tests do not create new processes or slow down existing ones.
Conclusion
The pace of business change and also the frequency of security attacks and breaches are compelling organizations across the world to embrace test automation concepts across the development lifecycle. Identifying security defects in code as early as possible is critical to avoid damage caused by compromised applications and get full protection against evolving attacks.
Automating security testing is a great way to detect potential flaws and weaknesses in software code – without delaying development or delivery timelines. By revealing programming errors at the very beginning, such testing ensures applications being developed deliver the expected results while safeguarding the business and customers from attacks.
Nidhi Achhaa | Content Specialist at ACCELQ
Nidhi specializes in technology-based content and strives to create a unique, customized, and compelling piece with a flavor of SEO. A writer with a love for words and a storyteller at heart.
