Canonical welcomes the .NET development platform, one of Microsoft’s earliest contributions to open source projects, as a native experience on Ubuntu hosts and container images, starting in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
In the mobile app development world, security often takes a backseat to developing features and delivering the app. In fact, the 2021 Verizon Mobile Security Index found that 45% of organizations sacrificed mobile security in order to “get the job done.”
It really shouldn't come as a surprise. Certainly, it seems counterintuitive that mobile app development organizations would spend so much time and money to create an exceptional Android or iOS app and then fail to protect it against rooting, jailbreaking, reversing, hacking and other kinds of malicious manipulation. But the average mobile developer releases 12 apps each year, a frenetic pace that requires development to take place in parallel, without ceasing. Schedules and budgets are tight, and competition is fierce. Coding security into an app is both expensive and time consuming, increasing the risk of a delayed release or budget overages.
In many organizations, if security is implemented into a mobile app at all, the process takes place during penetration testing. That's too late, and it's extremely inefficient. Waiting to implement security after development and delivery are essentially finished will anger developers, because now, they have to dive back into their code to make complex changes to work they had thought was finished. The code is no longer fresh, so it's going to take more time than it would have if security implementation had taken place during the development process itself.
But integrating security into the development process is no simple task either. Imagine two friends are spinning a couple of jump ropes. Jumping in the middle without stepping or tripping on either of the ropes while they are moving is difficult. Each time a security feature is introduced into a mobile app software development lifecycle (SDLC), the person building the security could step on the rope. Building security features takes time, and they are hard to build and maintain.
Our Oversimplified Model of DevSecOps
To solve this problem, DevSecOps was introduced to resolve this conflict and overcome the challenge of integrating security into the mobile SDLC. The idea is that organizations can develop features and incorporate security simultaneously. So far, much of the emphasis in DevSecOps has been focused on the processes development, security and operations that teams use to build, protect and release apps. People have done heroic work creating cultures of security and secure coding practices, which has moved the industry forward towards more secure mobile apps for everyone.
Let's take the jump rope analogy a bit further. One friend holding the ropes is the development and engineering team, while the other is the ops-release team. The ropes each represent an iOS and an Android app. In most organizations, the ropes are moving at blazing speeds, as apps are churned out one after the other. Meanwhile on the sidelines, there's the security team, whose job it is make sure the ropes meet security objectives, jumping in where needed, all without stopping the ropes from spinning.
The trouble is that each group has different skills and objectives. Developers aren't typically security engineers, and security teams don't typically have developers. Neither group has the resources or skills to meet the needs of the other, and whenever they try, one of them trips on the rope.
Mobile DevSecOps, Meet Continuous Security
The only way to keep the current breakneck pace of app releases going while simultaneously providing security is to introduce as much automation as possible. AI systems can fuse security to an app more cost-effectively and consistently, complete with validation that the features required have been implemented. It's different from code scanning, which occurs after the app is built and leaves remediation to the dev team. I'm proposing that implementation of security itself be automated.
The growing threats to mobile apps are too significant for development teams to ignore, but so are the market pressures that force such short delivery timescales. The only way out of this dilemma is extensive automation. Otherwise, the dev and sec teams will keep continuously stepping on each other's ropes.
Industry News
Veracode announced the launch of the Veracode Velocity Partner Program.
Render announced a new monorepository feature that enables its customers to keep all of their code in one super repository instead of managing multiple smaller repositories.
Gadget announced Connections, a major new feature that gives app developers access to building blocks that enable them to build and scale ecommerce apps in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.
Opsera is on the Salesforce AppExchange to help enterprise customers shorten software delivery cycles, improve pipeline quality and security, lower operations costs and better align software delivery to business outcomes.
Virtusa Corporation earned the DevOps with GitHub on Microsoft Azure advanced specialization, a validation of a services partner's deep knowledge, extensive experience and proven success in implementing secure software development practices applying DevOps principles and using Azure and GitHub solutions.
Companies looking to reduce their cloud costs with automated optimization can now easily procure CAST AI via Google Cloud Marketplace using their existing committed spend.
Granulate, an Intel Company, announced the upcoming launch of its latest free cost-reduction solution, gMaestro, a continuous workload and pod rightsizing tool for Kubernetes cost optimization.
Rezilion announced the availability of MI-X, a newly created open-source tool developed by Rezilion's vulnerability research team.
Contrast Security announced its enhanced application programming interface (API) security capabilities within the Contrast Secure Code Platform.
Mirantis made it even easier to integrate Mirantis Container Cloud into developer workflows and provide developers and operators with easy access and visibility into the Kubernetes clusters with the Mirantis Container Cloud Lens Extension announced today.
ArmorCode announced an integration with Traceable AI which will bring its data into the ArmorCode platform and improve Application Security Posture from code to cloud.
Quali unveiled enhanced features for its Torque platform to unify infrastructure orchestration and governance.
Veracode announced the enhancement of its Continuous Software Security Platform with substantial improvements to its integrated developer experience.
Normalyze announced General Availability for its Freemium offering, a self-serve, free platform that democratizes data discovery and classification in all three public clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).