Is Your DevOps process aligned with your Mobile Security Strategy?
The fast pace of mobile innovation and development has put enormous pressure on enterprise and consumer app development groups to compress development cycles and move towards a continuous release model. In fact, the goal of most DevOps teams is to be agile enough to handle rapid sprints and weekly or even daily builds. While these groups have worked hard to put the right tools and processes in place to meet these deadlines, one crucial element of any mobile app development strategy is being neglected: security.
Most companies realize that the “rush to release” compromises security. According to the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2020, even before the pandemic hit, 43% of app developers said they knew they were cutting corners on security to “get the job done.”
So this leads us to the following question: Is Your DevOps At Odds with Mobile Security Strategies? This is a significant problem for any enterprise – and its customers.
Why Are Mobile Apps More Vulnerable?
Today’s mobile apps are subject a huge variety of attacks from all sides, plus a large and diverse set of vulnerabilities that no enterprise app developer can handle alone. There are user-facing threats – such as fake WiFi access points, man-in-the-middle attacks, mobile malware, app-specific trojans (eg: mobile banking trojans like Eventbot), phishing, and the list goes on. Then there are attacks on the mobile app itself, like tampering, reverse engineering, and malicious debugging. Such attacks are particularly troublesome because they usually occur behind the scenes AND they are conducting using the exact same tools that mobile developers use to build apps; that makes them very hard to detect and prevent.
Then there’s OS-specific issues, as well as vulnerabilities in 3rd party libraries and plugins which represent areas for hackers to attack, and developers or enterprises may not even know they have these vulnerabilities.
And hackers are attacking mobile apps with increasing frequency, and on top of that, they are using automated tools to conduct their attacks.
This should frighten any enterprise that has a mobile app, high-value assets and important data to protect.
So how do organizations reconcile agility and security?
A Smarter Approach – Automate Mobile Security
When industry experts examine the Verizon report, they may conclude that the problem originates from developers cutting corners to meet their deadlines.
Most of the time, that’s simply not the case. Mobile app development teams are using best-practice secure-coding methods wherever possible. However, these techniques no longer offer adequate defense against today’s complex threat landscape.
To resolve these issues within the DevOps paradigm, it’s clear that mobile app security needs to be integrated into the mobile app development lifecycle, not an afterthought.
Instead, development teams need to find mobile security strategies that achieve the following:
- fit within their accelerated sprint cycles.
- don’t require code changes or developer training.
- cover the complete range of mobile app attack vectors and offer protection against consumer, app, and enterprise threats
- can be applied in minutes after the code has been tested, hardened, and cleared for release.
Clearly, companies need a stronger defense strategy for their mobile apps – one that can be deployed within the compressed timeframes that DevOps and DevSecOps groups deliver apps. Companies cannot afford to skip any security option if they want to stay ahead of hackers. Yet, that doesn’t mean they need to compromise release dates either. With the right mobile app security strategies, companies can satisfy the needs of the business and still protect their users and their valuable mobile data.
Are you looking to build advanced mobile app security into your DevOps processes? At Appdome, we built our no-code mobile development and security platform from the ground up, specifically to solve these challenging problems for mobile app developers.
Check out our Developer’s Guide to Mobile App Security.
We’d love to hear your thoughts.
In the meantime, Stay Safe, and keep your mobile apps and users safe too!
