Acceleration Services
Many organizations are starting an application security initiative to improve their capability to build secure software applications. These efforts can be challenging, as they involve people, processes, and technology across the organization. Aspect has designed a set of services to help your organization "accelerate" your application security initiatives.
Gaining confidence in your organization’s ability to consistently develop, operate, and maintain applications securely requires a focused initiative. Aspect’s acceleration services provide deep insight into your application security capability by analyzing security-relevant teams, processes, and supporting technologies. This understanding yields a foundation on which to base, plan, and execute enhancement activities.
During our appraisals, we work directly with your teams to identify the key root causes of application security problems in your company. We gather information from a variety of sources, including the applications themselves. Then, we form a clear, justifiable roadmap of enhancements that will improve your capability.
Conducting Appraisals To Establish An Application Security Initiative
Our program will align application security policy, standards, best practices, processes, technologies, and training to create a clear line of sight for executive management. We start with an organizational appraisal that yields a tailored roadmap for your organization. Then proceed with enhancements that might include process improvements, technology upgrades, and education and training.
Organizational Application Security Capability AppraisalsAspect enables your company to understand how security fits into your entire application development process – its strengths, weaknesses, complexities, and risks to your business. This is done in a way that is sensitive to your company’s culture, development processes, and risk management approach.
During the appraisal, we gather information from process documentation, by observing software development projects, from interviews with key roles, and from your applications themselves. We'll evaluate all aspects of your capability to develop secure software. Frequently, we can gather this information as a part of an application security evaluation or a training effort.
Aspect interviews staff, reviews current development (SDLC) documentation, organizational structures, and budgets. We assess development technologies and tools. Additionally, awareness is raised by the interviews.
The appraisal produces understandable scorecards and detailed findings that provide visibility into strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s capability to develop secure applications. We also provide a phased roadmap of implementation activities, resource requirements, and budget implications that will justify and focus your application security initiative in terms of benefits, effort, and budget.
Aspect selects, integrates, and tunes best-of-breed tools to address security as part of development, testing, and deployment. We will work with your organization to introduce these tools and techniques to reliably and measurably improve application security and reduce weaknesses.
Tools and techniques are selected, tailored, and tuned to best integrate with a company’s current investments. Enhancements are specifically selected to complement the company’s software development approach and development environment.
In addition, we can help you design and establish a standardized enterprise security API. The use of a standard security API reduces burdens on developers and improves assurance. We have helped other organizations create standard mechanisms for authentication, access control, input validation, encryption, logging, and other security critical areas.
Based on an understanding of your organization's application security needs, we will tailor best practices from our repository for your organization and develop additional ones as necessary. We will augment your existing processes with application security activities, such as application security requirements, testing, threat modeling, and metrics.
In addition, Aspect will select and tailor application security policies, standards, and programming language-specific guidelines for the organization. By giving developers and testers specific guidelines with examples from their programming environment, we've been successful at changing the development culture.
