Overview

Until recently, organizations have only had two options when developing software — Fast and Risky or Slow and Safe. In the “Fast and Risky” approach, businesses use reactive processes such as code scanning and compliance audits to discover vulnerabilities once coding is complete. This requires them to make a difficult decision: remediate the vulnerabilities, which is time-consuming and expensive, or accept the risks and release the code to meet timelines. On the other hand, the “Slow and Safe” approach employs proactive processes to run manually-intensive activities like threat modeling, risk assessments, and generation of secure coding guidelines upfront that compromise time to market.

Security Compass offers a third option for developing software in today’s digital world – fast and safe. This approach is called Balanced Development Automation (BDA). The SD Elements platform is the first BDA platform, expediting the development of thousands of applications while building in security and compliance from the start, enabling strong security without compromising time to market. SD Elements can be deployed as SaaS or on-premise.

Key portions of proactive security and compliance processes are often skipped because they are manual, inconsistent, siloed, and expensive. Through BDA, SD Elements automates these processes to accelerate software releases, improve product security, save operational and remediation costs, as well as enable better utilization of scarce security experts.

By identifying and addressing risks earlier, remediation costs are significantly reduced and security is built into all applications from the beginning which significantly reduces vulnerabilities. Organizations can also get real-time traceability of security controls that have been implemented. Ultimately, this approach allows organizations to align security, compliance, and risk priorities with business needs.