By Kavita Viswanath,

Every time we go online, we leave a digital footprint of our personal information, interests, choices, health and financial transactions, and more. Same is true for businesses – as the rapid shift of operations to the digital environment enhances their business and operational efficiencies, improves productivity and performance, and increases agility as well as reliability, it also increases their risk surface. This puts mammoth volumes of confidential data – used or generated – perpetually under danger of theft, destruction, manipulation, misuse, thereby risking corporate reputation and revenues.Additionally, many businesses today use mobile apps and web apps, which use different languages and libraries or references from open source, that can potentially let vulnerabilities in, no matter how privacy-compliant they may seem to be.

Any organization today is prone to data breaches, but businesses in sectors such as public administration, healthcare & pharmaceuticals, finance & insurance, education & research, and retail, see a higher degree of cyber-attacks. Always top priority for CIOs/CTOs, ensuring data security and privacy saw added challenges due to the pandemic. As the workforce became remote, it increased the risk surface and consequently challenges for the CIOs/CTOs to keep data secure and private.

In this light, IT security has a cohesive role to play across the entire IT lifecycle to ensure your data remains private. This is the reason why businesses need to create a platform that is secure right from the coding stage.

This is the reason why businesses need to create a platform that is secure right from the coding stage. Enter the role of DevOps-Centric Security. This is an approach that integrates security initiatives at every stage and level of the software development lifecycle, resulting in robust and secure applications. It is a repetitive process that starts with a developer writing code, a build being triggered, the software package deployed to a production environment and monitored for issues identified in the runtime but includes security at each of these stages.

Growing importance of DevOps-Centric Security in the Data World

Here are some specific challenges that DevOps-Centric Security can help secure enterprises against:

1. According to a Tidelift report, 92% of the applications use open-source dependencies, meaning that the source code is openly available for all to use and make changes. Thus, if there is a loophole in the code, anyone could misuse it. Knowing all the dependencies and bringing all the packages and binaries under a single repository manager helps shore up against future breaches.

2. Many vulnerabilities occur in open-source dependencies, with 53% of data breaches occurring because a patch was available but not applied, states a survey by the Ponemon Institute. DevOps-Centric Security helps with regular vulnerability scanning to identify what open-source package was used and replacing it with updated and safer versions.

3. 55% of organizations do not have a common view of applications and assets across teams, just compounding the vulnerabilities. These need to be found and addressed at all points.

It is found that the cost of remediating a vulnerability only goes up as it moves further into the production cycle and can go as high as $7,600. If the same is caught at the development stage, the cost can be as little as $80!, says a finding by the Ponemon Institute. By tackling the aforementioned challenges, DevOps-Centric Security helps enterprises in managing IT costs as well as ensuring data security remains intact.

Moreover, there have been far too many cases of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leaks within code, simply because many companies do not secure their Git repositories. As more sensitive information makes its way into the coding phase, hackers will naturally target code. An effective DevOps-Centric Security system can incorporate privacy concerns into every stage and make these checks automated.

Everyone has a right to keep their data private

Integrating necessary security protocols in each new application development process right from the planning stage ensures that data security is not compromised. It enables immediate and continuous risk management on the application by testing and monitoring, to get insights into possible susceptibilities and finally helping companies achieve fast, high-impact improvement in their security compliance.

Recognizing the critical role data plays in today’s highly dynamic business ecosystem, the Indian Government recently passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, to protect user’s personal data from unauthorized use and make the country’s digital ecosystem reliable, trustworthy, and secure. As government schemes, such as Digital India and Make in India, continue to drive the country’s vision of becoming a digital-first economy, let us not fail the citizens we create these initiatives for in the first place – let us protect data privacy at all costs.

Irrespective of the sector or industry the organization looking to protect its data operates in, or its size, or even if it’s a startup that does not currently store secure data, it is imperative to bring in advanced security features into each layer of data source – be it the company website, applications, or other software programs the organization uses, from the very beginning.

If you are looking to make your IT systems secure and perform without any failures or security breaches, it is vital to collaborate with a professional software development service company that ensures your software is designed from the get-go with the latest innovations in security.