Secure Software Development Life cycle (S-SDLC)

It has been increasingly noticed, that software that is created with the aid of the conventional software development life cycle, tends to throw up a large number of security flaws. These defects can, in some cases, manifest themselves as serious architectural inadequacies. It will then translate to tremendous effort from the developer’s side, to fix the defects and in some cases it might even need an entire recoding of the existing software, as well as complete rework of its architecture.

In current times, apart from the architectural inadequacies, another major cause of concern is information security threats. In any organisation, the security of its application host is of primary importance, as the easiest way to break into an organisation is through its application host. So no organisation can afford to have an application host that is susceptible to vulnerabilities, as it poses a major threat to the entire gamut of networks within the organisation.

One of the major causes for such loop holes in security, is that the developers were lacking in adequate security testing. According to industry analysts a whopping 57% of organisations did not impart adequate security training to their developers.

At the end of the day, organisations who deploy the traditional method of securing application, which secures application in the stage between the application’s creation and deployment in the production environment, usually find it very expensive and time consuming. A possible panacea for this problem could be different approaches, where the organisations integrate the security development in the nascent stage of the SDLC or even better, adopt a Secure Software Development Life cycle.

With reported losses from security breaches and growing sophisticated attacks, the threat involved with software applications have also increased substantially. While many of the security threats may be not so severe, there are many that might prove detrimental to mission critical software applications and lead to heavy loss in revenue and customer dissatisfaction. Having S-SDLC enables IT service providers ensure secure software by embedding security concepts early on in the software development lifecycle.