Online threats are some of the major concerns plaguing the app development industry today. While businesses are managing to come up with app ideas that fetch millions in the market, solve real-world problems seamlessly and offer users an amazing app experience, what they still struggle to deal with are online threats and tightening the security of their apps.
Every single day, we read about security breaches and compromises of apps of all sizes, purposes and origins. Hackers are becoming smart in coming up with newer ways to detect vulnerabilities in applications and exploit them for data and other valuable entities they deem fit.
In such scenarios, companies should not only allocate resources and revenue on marketing and planning their applications’ launch, but on finding ways to patch loopholes, areas of threats and vulnerabilities and make their apps airtight as well.
Significance of App Security in Numbers
According to statistics, over 70% of the companies in the Financial Times 500 list can be found and accessed on the dark web. These apps are hardly protected with solid authentication and access-control features.
On the detection of an attack, it took an average of 54 days for businesses to figure and roll out patches to low-severity vulnerabilities. For high-severity vulnerabilities, it took companies approximately 34 days.
The primary inference from these statistics is that attacks on your applications can prove to be expensive. The dire consequences could be a bad reputation for your business or in the worst case, the shutting down of your business.
The Rise of IoT
One of the other reasons why application security is of crucial significance is because today, communication no longer happens between users and machines. It happens among machines as well. With the onset of the Internet of Things, devices that communicate with other gadgets and take decisions autonomously have risen. Home automation systems are being implemented across the globe. Hackers simply need access to one single vulnerable device to gain access to all other connected elements in a home.
So, in an IoT infrastructure, a loophole in even one device and its build could compromise confidential data across its network.
But is there a way to optimize app security?
Fortunately, there are plenty of actions you could take right now for the safety and security of your application. Read on to find out some of the best ways you could tighten your app’s security.
5 Ways You Could Make Your App Airtight
Cloud-based Tools
One of the grey areas in app development is that businesses are hardly willing to invest in app security as much as they are ready to invest in marketing and developing one. This usually leads to the absence of dedicated staff or a team who could take care of online threats and vulnerabilities and the absence of necessary tools.
However, there are tons of cloud-based tools in the market currently that offer you access as SaaS. These products are basically monitoring tools that are consistently on the lookout for threats that creep into your system.
As you develop and deploy complex applications, more effective threat monitoring tools will allow you to seamlessly detect anomalies in networks and systems and send out instant notifications to the concerned team. This model is highly beneficial in the long run and keeps your app’s security intact.
Outsource Non-strategic App Components
If there are zero IT security staff in companies on one hand, there is also a scenario on the other where they are overworked. In such cases, it becomes too daunting for the IT team to take care of all arising concerns and keep an app’s security and functionality seamless.
That’s why it is ideal to identify non-strategic components in your app and outsource it to an external team, retaining high-priority aspects of your app’s security to your team. This allows your IT team to prioritize better and focus on non-redundant tasks or threats and work better on more severe cases, breaches and loopholes.
Solid Authentication
If you’ve launched a cloud-based application in the market, you would be aware of the fact that with the right authentication, anyone could access data as it sits on the internet. That’s why solid authentication is key here and we recommend a 2-step authentication feature to safeguard your app.
Penetration Testing
Inevitable for web applications, penetration testing is where ethical hackers try to exploit your web app’s vulnerabilities and use brute force techniques to gain access. This is done to assess the strength of your app’s security and find possible areas of vulnerabilities. Depending on your budget and requirements, you could hire expert penetration testers or roll out a bounty hunt for ace developers to find grey areas in your app.
The end result of this would be optimized security for most common penetration techniques until hackers come up with a new way to enter.
Identify Security Aspects for Individual App Components
To make your app airtight, the most effective strategy is to identify individual components in your application and figure out the best security measures for each. For instance, resources like program execution will generally involve intrusion prevention and detection systems in place and the database will require access limiters that prevent non-app components from interacting with residing data.
Besides, there are also network aspects that allow only authentic and verified users from interacting. When an app is refined into individual fragments and security tightening aspects are identified, anything can hardly go wrong.
So, these are some of the best practices you could implement to make your app safer and more secure. You could implement these actions regardless of your app type – web, mobile or cloud. These pointers should also help you uncover hidden loopholes in app security that your team would have overlooked.
