Developers need to work speedily but can cybersecurity catch up? Source: Shutterstock

Developers need to work speedily but can cybersecurity catch up? Source: Shutterstock

Staying resilient: Is cybersecurity a burden to agile development?

Cybersecurity challenges are nothing new to organizations that are pretty far ahead in their digital journey. Various initiatives and technology solutions have allowed organizations to continue to scale their digital offerings and grow their capabilities alongside relevant talents.

As they move forward, organizations understand the need to quickly develop new business applications and services as well as scale current projects or systems to satisfy the ever-evolving demands of the market.

Agile development has allowed organizations to launch applications and digital platforms at speed, in incremental stages. Instead of announcing a new digital offering and waiting for a long period of time to launch it as a whole, agile development means releasing the offering in small bits and building it to maturity as time goes on.

This method is preferred because it enables organizations to scale their growth, delight customers, and gain a competitive edge for their development speed. However, a common issue is cybersecurity.

Organizations must prioritize cybersecurity with every step of the development — and that can be pretty challenging. This is primarily because developers do not have the capacity to fulfill cybersecurity requirements with every new application, whereas information security teams might stall developers’ pace to ensure everything is secured.

For that reason, it’s common to find siloes between the developer and cybersecurity teams. Both have different objectives and answers to different needs during the development process.

Developers thrive on uninterrupted speed in order to produce quality digital offerings that can fuel revenue growth and drive businesses forward. Often, their work revolves around improving applications and systems as well as providing access to certain services as the system requires — which can be hindered by security compliance.

Developers certainly cannot afford to wait for information security teams to give ‘clearance’ in order to move to the next development process — that would only impair the quality of their final product.

Security teams, on the other hand, need to test the applications and systems to ensure that they are not susceptible to threats and are compliant with cybersecurity requirements.

It is important that every application is authorized and encrypted accordingly to avoid cyberattacks — which would otherwise waste developers’ efforts and further burden them with new workloads.

Additionally, security teams need to have clear visibility over the entire operating network systems to ensure the best cybersecurity measures are leveraged. Understandably, this would require developers to be compliant — but that doesn’t have to be so hard.

Organizations can help both teams by leveraging automated security solutions that can specifically regulate cybersecurity measures within developers’ operational network environment.

Specific security configuration tools can be utilized to ensure safety and protection at every stage without disrupting the workflow of both, the developers and security teams.

Cybersecurity does not have to be — and should never be — a burden to developers. At the same time, it’s important for developers to understand that ensuring security means safeguarding their work and enhancing the quality of their final product.

Security can be agile too, just like an organization’s development processes. It’s all about the mindset and the ability to recognize agile security solutions in the market.