Application Security Testing is an area to be given high importance, as most of the applications possess highly sensitive personal or financial data. Increasing cybersecurity threats over time are undermining the trust of many companies to speculate in the consumer market. Therefore, applications need a strong security mechanism and strategy that makes the application more resilient by reducing the possibility of attacks. Hence, enterprises are considering Cloud-based Application security testing to validate the apps and ensure quality with high-level security.
Why is Application Security Testing critical?
All or most of the applications are now hosted in the Cloud. Security is one of the major issues in applications.
It is getting important to ensure that the application is secure and the data that it holds shouldn’t get leaked is getting much more critical. As per the statistics, Cybersecurity threats are on the rise, which is deteriorating the confidence of several enterprises to invest in the consumer market. In the digital space, security testing activities bring in software, hardware, and procedures to safeguard applications from any potential threats.
Over the recent years, application security testing is gaining a lot of significance. Traditionally, it was an aspect that could get overlooked in the software design. But today, there is no scope that security testing can be missed. Applications are more accessible over networks nowadays, which makes them prone to cyber threats. There is a need for a robust application security strategy and mechanism that makes the application more resilient by minimizing the possibility of attacks.
How to prevent Any Malware from Accessing, Manipulating, or Stealing Any Sensitive Data?
In the current scenario, there is a possibility that all the active enterprise applications are being hosted on the Cloud. In the current scenario, there is a possibility that all the active enterprise applications are being hosted in the Cloud. This poses another set of challenges in enterprise applications for security testing; right from ensuring accessibility of the application to discovering its scalability across different features.
The Cloud-based Application Security Testing convinces a different perspective. On the cloud, the security testing explores the feasibility of hosting for testing the cloud applications
This is not new, but a relatively latest process for conducting application security testing. With cloud-based testing process, the applications are tested by hosting the tools/solutions on the cloud. Enterprises moved to Cloud-based testing model to make the process much more scalable, faster, and even cost-effective.
Similarly, the focus should be shifted from just ensuring the security of the applications to fast-tracking the testing activity. Cloud-based security testing has been considered to solve many such queries and subsequently make security testing hassle-free and much more flawless. Meanwhile, we try to estimate the key factors that Cloud-based security testing techniques should consider.
Essentials to consider for Cloud-based Application Security Testing strategy
Cloud-based testing has its own set of challenges such as constructing distributed computing capabilities, standardization of processes and procedures, ensuring the security of applications hosted on the cloud, accessibility of the data stored in the cloud, and many more. Hence, any Cloud-based testing activities need to have a set of key fundamentals.
These basics must be specifically considered while choosing and implementing a solution or tool for cloud-based application security testing. These basics can help you to further develop a strategy and ultimately make it much more outcome or result-oriented.
Looking at Speed
One of the key objectives would be to bring speed and speed up the testing process. Cloud-based application security testing must help in faster scanning of the software for any potential errors and shorten the turnaround time. Thus, the selected tool or solution should have the capabilities to run parallel scans even from distributed locations.
This could be much more applicable in DevOps and Agile setup, where teams could be co-located. This will bring speed to the testing activity and also capability in the security testing process, resulting in faster development.
Need Scalability
The testing activity must bring scalability to the testing process. This clearly implies that the solution implemented must be scalable and expand as organizations grow. On the other hand, if scalability becomes an issue, it can hamper the testing process and generate issues in terms of speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
Ensuring Accessibility
In an Agile set-up, global teams are co-located and all the teams work round the clock to bring on the application. Hence, the tool/solution has to be available online across the browser at any point of time. The tool/solution must also provide a centralized dashboard, which offers features to collaborate seamlessly in the security testing process.
Bring Cost-effectiveness
All global businesses need cost-efficiency to keep launching fresh proposals for the customers. This aspect of ensuring cost-effectiveness goes down to all levels of application development. Any solution or tool applied to security testing should pull down the testing costs and bring higher RoI. Parallel execution of tests and rapid scanning of the devices will certainly bring down the testing efforts as well as the costs.
Monitor Quality outcome
We have decided to mention this at the end as this is the ultimate achievement point for any team. The solution or tool must provide specific quality metrics for continuous monitoring. This has to translate into executing accurate scans, resolving issues, and contextual reporting, test cases and code tracking and many other parameters.
Minimizing risks
The focus of application security testing is to eventually result in minimizing risks and thereby building robust software. To achieve this, the parameters related to risks must be defined in to ensure that nothing is overlooked. Even when the solution or tool is chosen, it must be ensured that all the identified risk areas are covered in the security testing strategy. Hence, this can be a foolproof way to keep a track of threats and ensure the quality of the application.
Conclusion
Application security testing is a vast topic and there is a lot of scopes to explore and experiment to bring the risks down. Cloud-based solutions or tools can prove to be successful and applicable if the process is well-planned. Rationally, it begins by defining the security testing parameters and subsequently taking the next steps.
