Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Top Trends Impacting Your Applications

It’s always important to take a pause to evaluate your software security – and what better time to do that than during Cybersecurity Awareness Month? To help get you thinking, we’ve compiled a list of cybersecurity trends that are happening now and will likely continue throughout the next several years.  

1. Ubiquitous Connectivity: We are quickly moving to a world where everyone and everything is connected. Most software is internet-connected, as are most devices. Everything is talking to everything. So as data flows between enterprise applications, cloud-connected or SaaS software, and IoT devices, business risk is growing exponentially.   

2. Abstraction & Componentization: Software and technology continue to be the backbone of modern society. As a result, businesses are constantly seeking methods to innovate and build software faster. To move faster, many development teams are turning not only to the cloud but to microservices. With microservices, development teams can break down comprehensive applications into the smallest possible reusable blocks of logic in order to stitch them together into business processes or workflows. 

3. Hyperautomation of Software Delivery: Hypercompetitiveness in the market is driving the need to attain speed-to-value and wring out all inefficiencies in processes, including software development. As a result, software development – and all processes that interact with software delivery – must also adapt and become hyperautomated. 

4. Evolution of Open Source Libraries: Open source libraries provide teams with common functionality that can be easily incorporated into code to dramatically increase efficiency. Unfortunately, according to our recent State of Software Security: Open Source Edition report, 79 percent of developers never update third-party libraries after including them in the codebase. Since open source libraries are continuing to evolve, not updating third-party vulnerabilities is becoming a significant cause for concern. In fact, almost one-third of applications now have more security flaws in their third-party code than their first-party code.  

5. New Cybersecurity Policies: To try and combat increased risk, there are new industry and government regulations coming into play. For example, the Biden administration recently released a new Executive Order on Cybersecurity. The Executive Order will set supply chain standards that all organizations must follow in order to provide software to a federal agency. The standards – aimed at driving down systemic risk – will likely start trickling down to the public sector as well. We expect to see minimum standards for scanning tools, developer secure-code training, and flaw remediation – all areas our products and services are able to support.  

To sum up the trends, if you are looking to future-proof your software, you should be paying attention to your attack surface, adopting cloud architecture and microservices to improve speed to market, scanning your open source code regularly, and leveraging a unified platform with multiple AppSec testing types to aid compliance efforts.   

To learn how Veracode can support your software security goals, check out our products and services. 

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