One of the recurring themes that comes up in my discussions with mobile app developers and security professionals is how they can best improve their DevOps processes.
Most dev teams have invested heavily in different systems to automate the development and release of mobile apps. In fact, if you look closely at mobile development, you’ll discover that systems completely dominate the modern mobile development landscape. In building, testing, releasing, tracking and monitoring mobile apps, Dev and Ops teams rely on systems to get the work done and ensure apps are released on time and with the right features inside each app. Build systems like Bitrise, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, GitHub, Fastlane, and more. In fact, Bitrise says that mobile requires rapid release and iteration, and they draw a correlation between speed and frequency of release and high customer rating of each app.
In other words, modern mobile app development REQUIRES that developers use build systems to automate the rapid building, testing, releasing, tracking and monitoring of these apps and mobile app security cannot be effective outside of this automated workflow. But unfortunately, this tends to be the reality in many organizations. While the existing DevOps model is agile, the security model is not. In this blog, we’ll show how organizations can fit their security model into their existing DevOps model, without the need to make changes to their DevOps workflows.
Security is Currently Not Integrated in the DevOps Process
GitLab published a fascinating global Maturing DevSecOps Landscape survey that found that “security is not integrated at all into the development process”. Furthermore, it found while shift-left in security is a big thing, only 2.7% of respondents had actually done so. And shift-left in security was on the top of the list when asked “What aren’t devs working on that they would like to work on”. Not surprising then that same survey found that 42% of respondents said that concerns about security (security testing) occur too late in the development process.
An interesting observation from this survey is that when talking about shift-left and developing DevSecOps standards, the survey talks about testing, not about building security features in the CI/CD pipeline.
Mobile App Security as a Build System
Appdome is a mobile app security build system that connects to all the build systems mentioned above. With Appdome, dev teams can build mobile app security and fraud prevention features to any mobile app, in their CI/CD pipeline and improve their DevOps processes. Appdome allows Dev, Sec and Ops teams to take advantage of all their DevOps tools and gain total visibility, management, and control over the mobile app security release process.
How Mobile App Developers Can Improve their DevOps Processes
We believe that security and DevSecOps teams deserve the same visibility, management, and control over the security release process as the dev team enjoys in other parts of the release cycle. Appdome’s DevOps tool offers cyber security and DevSecOps teams all the features the dev-teams have and more. This includes:
- A system of record to create, store, version control and audit security releases across Android and iOS Apps.
- A build system to generate and build the required protections into mobile apps – no code, no dev required.
- Full control over protection choices including Anti-Fraud, Overlay, Keylogging, Click Bot, Encryption, Malware, Obfuscation, RASP and more.
- Guaranteed Compatibility with the Dev-Team’s systems including CI/CD, Testing Suites, Crash Reporting and more.
- Complete security certification build-by-build, release-by-release, to verify and audit the protections inside apps.
Appdome’s Security Release Management™ features provide mobile app makers the ability to “shift left,” creating security early in the build process, delivering security, anti-fraud and malware prevention features with DevOps speed, and easing the burden on DevSecOps processes to find vulnerabilities in apps.
Security Release Management also provides more control over the security releases with a combination of mobile protection templates, version controls, team workspaces, automated app signing, as well as the ability to freeze and verify security models across Android and iOS releases.
And with each build, Appdome provides a Certified Secure™ certificate, guaranteeing the protections are built into each app to ensure 100% compliance before the app is released.
If you want to learn more about how app makers can build mobile app security in their CI/CD pipeline and improve their DevOps processes, request a demo today.
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