With threats to cloud native applications rising, security leaders feel more pressure than ever to counter an ever-changing risk landscape. But thanks to a rapidly expanding security solutions market, many respond to these growing demands by adding more products. With so many new tools arising to tackle security challenges, it sometimes seems like the right answer is always “one tool out of reach”.
Mastodon, the free open source self-hosted federated social network platform, has been witnessing a surge of interest and new users due to the recent developments on Twitter — specifically that of verifying accounts. One of the interest areas driving users to Mastodon has been the ability to verify their account identity and convey a sense of authenticity for the account. This provides a way to help prevent spam accounts, bots, and other issues related to fake news.
“This is the golden era of application security,” says Founder of Manicode Security and secure coding trainer Jim Manico on episode 26 of The Secure Developer podcast. Ten years ago, Manico says, security training was “a quirky thing to do — something to do on the side.” Now, assessment tools are mature, good literature on assessment makes knowledge more accessible, and a wide range of intelligent people are building secure applications.
Cloud data storage has many practical advantages over traditional data centers, but making a move also comes with many unique security considerations. When moving to AWS, begin how you wish to continue. Companies that transition to cloud data storage must update their approach to information security to protect their data. Setting up proper security practices during migration will help future teams securely and efficiently deliver applications and features.
Despite years of effort encouraging a DevSecOps approach, development and security teams tend to remain divided. For example, according to 2020 research, 65% of security professionals reported that their companies had successfully shifted security left. Good, right? But the same research also shows that almost a third of people believe the security team is primarily responsible for security — despite shifting left.
To improve the efficiency of releasing working code into a production environment, implementing a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is a great practice. These pipelines automate the process of checking that a code change is ready for release and provides tools to automate the release to a production environment. One popular way to do this is to use your existing version control system.
As developers, we often write test cases and comments to explain our code. Commenting improves the codebase’s readability and quality. Detailed comments can remind us why we implemented a specific functionality. They can also help other programmers understand, maintain, use, and expand codebases.
Testing is a crucial best practice when developing software. Unit testing is one of the numerous strategies we can use to ensure our code is functional and optimal. As developers, we can code unit tests to check individual components (units) of the application code, such as a specific method. The idea is to write one or more unit tests for each code section and run them every time a change is made to catch defects as soon as they are introduced into the codebase.
