5 Reasons why you need Security Testing for your Software

Introduction

Whether you’re developing game-changing software for a particular industry or a web app to improve your staff’s productivity, security needs to be a primary concern. Security is not just a concern during development but throughout the product’s lifecycle. Once developed security testing can be done in two ways within the organization or by a hacker whose intent is likely to be malicious. Here are five reasons why you should be the one applying security testing techniques.

Find Vulnerabilities Before a Hacker

Here an organization has two options. They can choose either penetration testing or vulnerability assessments, while there is a difference, an organization that conducts either or will uncover vulnerabilities before a malicious third party. These testing routines will look at the entire infrastructure of the product be it client-side, databases, networks, and the hardware behind it all to find exploitable security holes. These security holes can be used by an attacker to steal data, install malware, and generally cause a nuisance of themselves that can result in severe financial loss.

Industry Standards and Best Practises

Today’s software developer needs to be aware of several pieces of legislation and best practices when developing software for certain industries, especially within the financial and healthcare sectors. There can be a lot to consider and something can easily be forgotten during development. A good security testing plan can account for these requirements to ensure future compliance. Given that some pieces of legislation can result in severe financial fines, security testing can play a pivotal role in saving you money.

Peace of Mind

Not every organization has staff that fill the DevSecOps role or has the capital to hire such a specialist, however, security testing can be done regardless. Given that web apps, for example, suffer from an average of 22 vulnerabilities at release, going live with products can be a stressful task. That is just on the security side of things. Security testing can help bring peace of mind and allow for the better allocation of limited resources during launch to meet customer demands rather than security compromises.

High Customer Standards

The modern consumer has incredibly high standards for software and security issues are a sure way for the developer to miss such a high bar. Security testing can help iron out security issues before a customer has even the slightest chance of discovering it for themselves and requesting a refund and reporting to the media that your product does not meet their standards.

Improve Institutional Knowledge

Security tests have the advantage of drastically improving the organization’s institutional knowledge. If an issue is found, reported, and then corrected effectively those involved and future employees can learn from the incident and prevent further similar incidents from arising. This can improve future delivery of products drastically.

Conclusion

Security testing has several advantages as seen from the article above but given how hackers can effectively bury a piece of software, such testing should now be seen as essential. If you have no testing plan in place it may be time to develop one. Further, these plans need to be updated over time to counter current threats.