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How do we stay GDPR-friendly for our clients in an outsourcing environment?

by with No Comment About RaznamehGDPRSoftware development

Under the GDPR, data management is carried out by the “controller” and the “processor.” How the personal data of an individual is used is determined by the controller. The role of the processor is to process the personal data on the part of the controller. 

providers play the role of the data processors and the companies that outsource are the data controllers.

Outsourcing firms that want to work with EU-based companies require strengthening their data security and privacy policies in order to align themselves with the standards laid down by the GDPR

In the case of a data breach, both the company and the outsourcing provider can be held liable and penalized heavily. Therefore, both the data controller (company) and the data processor (outsourcing services provider) should strictly adhere to the guidelines laid down by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The following steps can help us in becoming fully compliant with GDPR:

  1. We Know What Is GDPR: 

We know about the GDPR and its effects on our business. First of all, we identify which of our business processes require changes in order to attain full compliance with the GDPR. We make all of our employees aware of the GDPR by providing training to them so that each and every department in our organization knows how to safely handle the users’ data.

  1. We Have A Review Of our Technologies And Business Processes each 3 month 

We review our business processes and look for where they are lacking in following the GDPR standards. Adopt new procedures and, if required, hire specialists so that we are able to meet the standards. Examine the technologies that are actively being deployed in your firm. Check if these technologies are adequately meeting the technical requirements for ensuring data security and privacy as required by the GDPR.

We could implement all the necessities in your product to be GDPR friendy.

  1. We could Set Up A Data Register for your business: 

As part of the GDPR, data protection associations have been set up by the European countries. They have been set up for the purpose of enforcing the GDPR and monitoring compliance. You should create a data register, which is a record of data processing activities. If for any reason, a data breach takes place, you will be required to show the data register to the data protection association.

  1. We will Build A Data Security Roadmap for your product : 

We will prepare a data security road map at the beginning of the projects. It helps us in prioritizing where the greatest security risks are present and in setting up goals and milestones. Data security techniques like encrypting, pseudonymization, etc. can help us meet our security goals.

  1. We could carry Out Periodic Assessments: 

Once we have set up and put into practice the technologies and processes required for becoming fully compliant with the GDPR, our next step is to carry out periodic assessments for ensuring everything is working as expected. Keeping data management and security in order will help you in preventing any sort of data breach, and will, therefore, save you from heavy penalties for GDPR non-compliance.

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GDPR and how do we implement it in the software development process?

by with No Comment About RaznamehGDPRSoftware development

All the companies providing goods or services for the EU citizens will have to adhere to the new data protection rules or face fines of up to 4% annual global turnover or roughly $24.5M. As the GDPR comes into force it will affect businesses all over the world.

What is GDPR? Who needs to prepare for GDPR?

Any organization which gathers or processes EU citizens’ personal data is subject to the regulation. Moreover, all your contractors (including software development companies) need to adhere to the standard for your app to be GDPR-compliant.

How we implement it into your software:

1. Get informed consent from the user

The GDPR states that businesses now have to ask users to agree to collecting and processing their personal information. The request “must be given in an intelligible and easily accessible form, with the purpose for data processing attached to that consent

2.We will minimize the collected data

We will make sure that you are collecting only the information you can’t do without. And, if possible, implement automatic deletion of the data you no longer need. 

3. We will encrypt personal data

Encryption adds an extra layer of security the hacker must defeat before they can access the information. The GDPR Article 32 requires that personal data is protected by the “state-of-the-art” measures. However, the exact nature of those measures is left for the companies to decide

4. We will implement “privacy by design” 

we making sure privacy is taken care of at every stage of the product’s lifecycle. Implementing this idea is a much larger undertaking.

4.1 Two-Factor Authentication

It protects from online fraud and identity theft

4.2 Blocking brute force attacks

If a hacker intends to use automated login/password guessing, these measures can stop them.

4.3 Automatic Log-Off

This feature helps prevent unauthorized access and modification of data

4.4 Separate domain names for Customer and Admin portals

Separating portals helps protect the information and allows securing the admin section without hampering users.

4.5 HTTP Authentication for Web Admin Panel

This feature adds another layer of protection against them.

4.6 SSL Certificate

SSL certificates protect the information transfer between app server and database or between the user and your service.

4.7 Locking Unused Database Ports

New servers are shipped with all the ports open. Lock the unneeded ones so they can’t be used for intrusion.

4.8 Database can be accessed only from API server IP

Allowing only one IP address will prevent unauthorized access and locate data breaches. Cloud firewalls could help with that.

4.9 Database connects to API server via HTTPS

Encryption helps protect the information while it is in transfer.

4.10 Server is accessed via VPN

VPN adds another layer of security to the data on the server.

4.11 Regular Database backup

Back up the information in the DB and store it on an external cloud service. In the event of a data breach, it will help to minimize losses.

4.12 Regular Server Log Backup

All the server logs should be kept and stored externally. It helps locate inconsistencies in case of hacker attacks.

4.13 Adjust Inotify

Set up triggers and notifications to detect intrusion quickly.

4.14 Log all the Server Actions

Logs allow to find out which data was modified.

5.We will implement “Privacy by default”

“Privacy by default” essentially means that if there are privacy settings in your product, they must be set to maximum at the start.

6.We will implement Pseudonymization

Pseudonymization means storing information that can identify a person (e.g. social security number) and the related data (gender, age, location, etc.) separately.

7. We will prepare for the users to exercise their rights

The new European regulation has given people extra rights that companies must grant: Right to be forgotten; Right to object; Right to rectification; Right to access; Right to portability.

8.We will document everything

The regulation requires companies to not only implement additional data protection measures but also document them to be able to prove that they’ve taken the necessary steps.

9. We will prepare a plan for contingencies

No matter how well you are defended at the moment, it pays to be prepared for personal data breaches.

In most cases, you’ll need to notify the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours of detecting a breach. If you opt not to, you must have a valid (and properly supported by documents) reason for it. But if there is a “high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals”, you need to inform your users as well.

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What is the GDPR?

by with No Comment GDPRSoftware development
  • What is the GDPR and what does it stand for?

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation also referred to as Regulation (EU) 2016/679. GDPR replaces the existing protection directive that was introduced in 1995 and has been created by the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission to strengthen and unify data protection for all residents of the European Union.

Additionally, GDPR addresses data protection rules for personal data export outside of the European Union. It also enforces EU data protection laws to guide foreign organizations that process personal data pertaining to residents of the European Union.

In the case of a data breach, both the company and the outsourcing provider can be held liable and penalized heavily. Therefore, both the data controller (company) and the data processor (outsourcing services provider) should strictly adhere to the guidelines laid down by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  • When does GDPR come into effect?

GDPR was approved by the European parliament in April 2016. After a two-year transition period, GDPR will be in force for all organisations that handle the data of EU residents from the 25th of May 2018.

  • What is the purpose of GDPR?

The primary purpose of GDPR is to define standardised data protection laws for all member countries across the European Union.

GDPR will:

  • Increase privacy and extend data rights for EU residents.
  • Help EU residents understand personal data use.
  • Address the export of personal data outside of the EU.
  • Give regulatory authorities greater powers to take action against organisations that breach the new data protection regulations.
  • Simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying data protection regulations within the European Union.
  • Require every new business process that uses personal data to abide by the GDPR data protection regulations and Privacy by Design rule.
  • Who does the GDPR apply to?

Similar to the Data Protection Act, GDPR applies to company data controllers and data processors. If you are the controller, the GDPR places additional emphasis on meeting contractual obligations with the processor to ensure they comply with GDPR.  As a processor, the GDPR requires you to maintain records of all processing activities and personal data use.  This increases the legal liability for processors in the event of a breach.

GDPR does NOT apply to specific activities such as processing under the Law Enforcement Directive, the processing is done by individuals for personal or household matters, any processing carried out for the purpose of national security.

  • What type of information applies to GDPR?

Like the Data Protection Act, the GDPR rules apply to personal data. However, the GDPR extends the scope of what is considered personal data such as an IP address that acts as an online identifier.

The GDPR rules also apply to sensitive data which uniquely identifies a specific individual. This includes categories such as genetic or biometric data.

  • According to the EU, What constitutes personal data?

Under GDPR, the definition of personal data has been much simplified to ‘any information relating to an identified or identifiable person.’

According to the European Commission, personal data constitutes “Any information related to a natural person or ‘Data Subject’ that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer IP address.”

  • Does GDPR apply to companies outside of the EU?

Yes. Similar to UK compliance post-Brexit, GDPR regulations apply to foreign companies outside of the EU that collect, process and hold the personal data of EU residents, regardless of their location.

  • 9 Key changes under GDPR
    • A single set of data protection rules will now apply to all EU member states. In addition, increased territorial scope means that GDPR will apply to all companies that process the personal data of EU residents, regardless of their location.
    • ‘Right to be forgotten’ – also known as Data Erasure. EU residents will have the right to request that personal data relating to them is erased. This could be based on a number of grounds that include non-compliance, data no longer being relevant to its original purposes, or data subjects withdrawing consent.
    • ‘Right to access’ – Data subjects will have the right to obtain confirmation from the data controller whether or not their personal data concerning them has been processed, where it has been processed and for what purpose.
    • Data Breach notifications will become mandatory in all member states – in the instance that the data breach is likely to “result in risk pertaining to the rights and freedoms of individuals.
    • Consent rules are changing and opt-in requirements for obtaining personal data are stricter. The conditions for consent have been strengthened, as companies will no longer be able to utilize long illegible terms and conditions full of legalese. Organisations are required to ensure that consent is clear, distinguishable and provided in an easily accessible form with the purpose of the data processing disclosed and attached to the consent. It must be just as easy to withdraw consent as it is to give it.
    • ‘Privacy by Design’ – Now part of a legal requirement with the GDPR, Privacy by Design calls for the inclusion of data protection from the onset of the designing of systems, instead of just being an addition.
    • Data Controllers and Data Processors will be required to conduct privacy risk impact assessments for projects that have high privacy risks.
    • Data processing activity notification rules are changing. Under GDPR it will no longer be necessary for Data Controllers to submit notifications/registrations of data processing activities to local Data Protection Officers. In addition, it will no longer be a requirement to notify/obtain approval for transfers based on the Model Contract Clauses (MCCs). This will be replaced by an internal record-keeping requirement. There is an exception to this.
    • The new Accountability Principle in Article 5(2) requires you to demonstrate that you comply with the principles and states explicitly that this is your responsibility.

Security Within Your Development, Staging, and Production Environments

by with No Comment SecuritySoftware development

A typical development workflow has three environments: development, staging, and production. Some developers don’t view staging as an environment, but we included it here to give you a full scope of the process.

Development Environment

A development environment is on your computer. It’s the environment where you’ll conduct all your code development without touching the actual data. In development, you can test upgrades, new features, and improvements without impacting the customer’s view. You may find bugs along the way, but that’s what this environment is meant to discover.

Typical use-cases for a development environment include:

  • Building new features, extending existing features, and code refactoring.
  • Running integration tests. 
  • Debugging.

There are few restrictions on what developers can do in their development environment, and they are free to experiment with code until they are happy with it, at which point they will push it to the staging environment.

Staging Environment

The staging environment is a production-like environment to see how your code will perform. This is the final testing ground before the code is pushed into production. Staging environments are often used for:

  • Quality assurance and performance testing.
  • Vulnerability testing and risk analysis.  
  • Integration testing, to ensure that the code integrates well with services and databases the app depends on. 

Staging environments also give other developers, project managers, and clients an opportunity to examine software before it goes live. 

Because extensive testing takes place in the staging environment, it’s important that it is as similar to production as possible, including both the software and hardware. While it’s fine to host a development environment on a laptop, the staging environment should be on a server with the same hardware it will run on in production. 

Production Environment

In a production environment, systems go live and your developed code is released to end-users. You deploy completed code that has endured proper vulnerability testing and risk analysis. All of the testings are complete and there’s the expectation that you’ll find only minor bugs if any. Once it’s released, you’re relying on it as a profit source, so you want to make sure it’s secure

In theory, major bugs and software vulnerabilities should have been discovered before the code goes to production, but that’s rarely the case for complex software systems. It is likely that at least some bugs made it through testing, so organizations must design and implement network and data security systems that assume the existence of vulnerabilities. 

Importance of Security Throughout Dev, Staging, and Production

With multiple environments comes the difficulty of securely managing them. The best practice is to separate your development, staging, and production environments. This allows each to evolve at its own pace – maybe the development environment is testing out features that won’t be available in production for at least a year – and reduces the risk of cross-contamination. Any bugs discovered in staging, for example, will be contained within that environment and not spread any further. Most importantly, keeping your development, staging, and production environment separate will help protect data.

Security Concerns in DevOps

For organizations that use the DevOps approach, security is an even greater concern. It’s face-based, there’s more overlap, there’s automation – there are many reasons to implement and verify security processes in DevOps.

To preserve high-level compliance practices within your development, staging, and production environments, you can implement configuration management techniques, monitoring, and logging processes, and even integrate infrastructure as code or policy as code. You can set yourself up for success by performing regular code review during the development process, making changes proactively to all environments, confirming that you have limited access to the proper channels, or even engage in continuous penetration testing to ensure no vulnerability is overlooked. These practices will ensure you’re doing your due diligence to securely manage your various environments.

10 elements every production environment must have

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1. Redundancy

Redundancy is probably one of the most important ingredients of a successful production environment. If a system or service is critical to the organization, either by producing revenue or preventing the loss of revenue, there should never be a single instance of it. Use the application as well as system redundancy to ensure you can withstand the loss of an entire server. Power and network connections should also be redundant. Some organizations even have entire site redundancies so they can run their operations in an entirely different location.

Cost is often cited as a factor against implementing robust redundancy, but keep in mind that investing in redundancy, while potentially painful at the onset, can reap hefty dividends down the road — even if only for the peace of mind it provides.

2. Disaster recovery capability

A “disaster” can have an ambiguous meaning. It refers to any unexpected misfortune or failure ranging from a crashed application to the loss of an entire site due to a power outage. Plan for disasters that will impact your ability to run a production environment and ensure you have appropriate solutions in place. Some examples:

  • Perform nightly backups of all systems and confirm restore functionality
  • Ship backup tapes/hard drives off-site (or copy data to the cloud so it will be accessible remotely)
  • Take snapshots of SAN volumes and virtual machines to be able to roll back to a known good state
  • Keep spare hard drives, network cards, and servers on hand for emergency situations
  • Install a generator to guard against power outages

3. Secure access

The incident involving the developer deleting a production database would never have happened had the company followed one simple guideline: only provide production access to individuals who actually need it, and configure permissions to match their job role. Store any system or service account passwords in a secured, centralized password database.

Unless someone is going to directly work in production from day one, don’t give them the key to do so. If they do need the access, determine whether “read” permissions are sufficient so they can’t actually change the data.

If employees with production access leave the company, make sure to disable or lock their accounts. If administrators with production access depart, change all the passwords involved such as root or administrator passwords.

4. Standardized access

There are a variety of methods to access production data; via a web browser, SSH connectivity, remote desktop, a Squirrel database client, secure FTP or various other methods. Ensure users have a standard method for production access involving the same client or portal.

5. Minimalism

Your production systems should contain only necessary services/applications. This means there will be less to troubleshoot and patch, and the simplicity will ensure a more predictable and manageable environment. This strategy will also reduce a potential attack footprint.

If applications or services are no longer in use, remove them.

6. A patching strategy

Speaking of patching, it’s a necessary evil. Develop a patching mechanism to ensure production systems are updated on at least a monthly basis.

Rebooting production systems is never anyone’s idea of a fun time, but suffering a data breach makes it look like a picnic by comparison. Besides, if you’re using redundancy, you should be able to patch and reboot a pair of clustered systems, for instance, with zero user impact. However, make sure to let at least a day or two pass before patching all redundant systems, just in case the patch produces an adverse impact which might obviate the protection you’ve implemented via redundancy.

7. Segregated networks

Your production systems should never be on the same network as your other servers, let alone your client workstations. Put them on their own dedicated subnet and maintain access through a firewall that permits only the desired systems to connect via only the necessary ports. This will help ensure security, as well as help, achieve the minimalism I mentioned above.

8. Change management

Change management is the process of documenting proposed changes and their expected impact then submitting a request for review and approval of the said change. Ideally, the request should list the affected systems, the plan for change, methods to validate the changes (both from a system administrator and end-user standpoint, and a backout plan.

9. Auditing, logging, and alerting

Many of the above steps become less effective or meaningless if you’re not using auditing, logging, and alerting. Every action taken on a production system should be recorded and, depending on the severity, should trigger an alert if appropriate. For instance, logging in as root should send a notification to IT staff and/or the security group so they can assess what’s happening and whether an illegal act is occurring.

The same applies to hardware that might be faulty. There’s a saying that “your users should be the last ones to know when production is down.

10. Appropriate documentation

Knowledge is a powerful thing, but the ability to properly share it with others is even more powerful. Staff turnover is a fact of life, and employees who depart with critical information about the production environment stored only in their brains represent a significant company loss.

Documentation of the production environment should be comprehensive and kept up to date. It should include hardware, software, networking details, vendor information, support information, dependencies upon other systems or applications, and any other details necessary to maintain order. Conduct quarterly reviews and ensure all staff responsible for the production environment are familiar with the documentation, and that it is safely backed up in the event of a disaster.

DevOps Capabilities

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DevOps defines 8 capabilities that cover most of the important aspects for ensuring successful DevOps in practices, these capacities are:

  • Continuous Planning
  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Operations
  • Continuous Quality
  • Continuous Security
  • Continuous Collaboration
  • Continuous Improvement

Continuous Planning

This ensures that planning for software releases is not something fixed and can change by time according to the delivered value. During the planning, all team members are actually involved in planning the work that needs to be delivered, prioritizing what is important to be in the next release or sprint. This capability including its practices is the best fit with Agile methodology to ensure incremental value creation through sprints.

Continuous Integration

The main idea of continuous integration is to minimize the time between code developed by one of the team members to be integrated with the main code repository for the whole software. So, each team member is integrating his/her work more frequently.

The benefits from that are huge, for example, ensuring that actually, the code is working with other components, nothing is broken, minimizing the bugs and errors that can be found during the code integration process, also minimizing the time to recover from issues as well, and other benefits too.

Continuous Delivery

It is mainly the frequency of software releases after the testing to be deployed to the production for usage by the end-users.

Most of us can relate this experience with massive daily updates in mobile applications, each day, I found at least 5 to 10 apps need an update. This implies how those applications’ owners are rapidly adding daily new features and enhancements to their applications.

Most of the legacy systems require manual deployment steps and if one step fails, it may require repeating the whole time-consuming process and it was a nightmare for the operations team and can take days and maintenance notice for customers which disrupts the business and harms companies revenue and in most cases produces huge losses.

When the final production deployment step needs to be triggered manually, we call this a Continuous Delivery, if the production deployment is automated without manual triggers and through automated pipelines, we call that a continuous deployment.

Continuous Quality

This capability needs an entire culture shift in how the organization is managing the software quality, it is about instead of assuring quality to continuous quality by not waiting until the acceptance test to ensure quality but embedding the quality early in the process which is known as Shifting left quality. This left-shift does not mean that we will not perform the normal testing process but it is important to balance them and start early in the process by ensuring requirements quality, code quality, and test automation across all types of testing, for example, unit, integration, system, regression, …etc.

Using a framework like Test Driven Development can enhance the quality of written code and also ensure that the requirements and user stories are testable. This will require also shared quality responsibilities between teams not only the testing team, so the quality is becoming each team member’s job.

Continuous Operations

Continuous operations is a capability to make sure that the organization is avoiding system downtime and outages due to any issue, fault, or damage. How will the system be resilient and reliable to be used? And how to maintain the system without affecting its operations and usage from the end-user.

Updates from operating systems, security patches, and integration services are almost changing every day. Managing these kinds of updates with even new deployments are important to ensure system availability without interruption. Technologies like cloud computing helped in achieving that.

Some important practices to achieve this capability are auto-failover, applications monitoring, and auto-scaling. Blue/green deployment is one of the famous practices to prevent having any downtime while upgrading or maintaining the system.

Continuous Security

The secure development life cycle is more important than ever, similar to the quality the security requires also a mindset shift and to become each role responsibility. This also needs to shift these security procedures, standards, policies, and assurance to the left of the life cycle. So, not having the security testing and code scanning at the end of the development.

Now, many tools can detect vulnerabilities in code while developing to highlight any security risks and ensure that the security policies and standards are followed. Not only that but even how to design the system from architecture, used technology, infrastructure, and data to be secured.

Continuous Collaboration

As we saw earlier that having all of these capabilities in place, will need strong team collaboration and alignment, from planning, testing, deployment, operations, …etc. to create this harmony. Most of the DevOps tools are now equipped with different collaboration tools and can integrate with other tools.

the collaboration on planning, task assignment, providing wikis for teams for the faster onboarding process. This will enable the involved team members to respond to the required changes even faster and prompt the interactions between them.

Continuous Improvement

Improvements are always required and most of the time, the team is very busy to pause and take some time to think about what needs to be improved.

So, this capability is important for the team to look over all the processes and practices used and spot what needs to be improved. Without proper measurement, you will not know exactly what needs improvement, so Defining proper metrics is important for continuous improvement.

What is DevOps?

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DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

The DevOps workflow consists of 6 different phases:

  • Planning the next iteration of the product’s development
  • Building the code
  • Testing and deploying to the production environment
  • Delivering product updates
  • Monitoring and logging software performance
  • Gathering customer feedback

Let’s review The Benefits of DevOps.

Speed

Move at a high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficiently at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.

Rapid Delivery

Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build a competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Reliability

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end-users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Scale

Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.

Improved Collaboration

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time

Security

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.

DevOps Security and DevSecOps

DevOps security, more commonly referred to as DevSecOps, refers to the discipline and practice of safeguarding the entire DevOps environment through strategies, policies, processes, and technology. The DevSecOps philosophy is that security should be built into every part of the DevOps life cycle, including inception, design, build, test, release, support, maintenance, and beyond.

Traditional security operates from the position that once a system has been designed, its security defects can then be determined and corrected before release. With the change to a DevOps model, traditional security practices occur too late in the development cycle and are too slow for the design and release of software built by iteration. Thus, they can become a major roadblock to delivering applications and services at speed.

With it, security becomes the focus of everyone on a DevOps team. DevSecOps has the goal of implementing security decisions at speed and scale without sacrificing safety. DevSecOps involves ongoing, flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams. The concepts of “speed of delivery” and “building secure code” are merged into one streamlined process. Security testing is done in iterations without slowing down delivery cycles. Critical security issues are dealt with as they become apparent, not after a threat or compromise has occurred.

What is blockchain?

by with No Comment BlockchainSoftware development

Blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system.

A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger. The decentralised database managed by multiple participants is known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Blockchain is a type of Distributed Ledger Technology in which transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash.

This means if one block in one chain was changed, it would be immediately apparent it had been tampered with. If hackers wanted to corrupt a blockchain system, they would have to change every block in the chain, across all of the distributed versions of the chain.

There are many different types of blockchains like:

  • Public blockchains: Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin, are large distributed networks that are run through a native token. They’re open for anyone to participate at any level and have open-source code that their community maintains.
  • Permissioned blockchains: Permissioned blockchains, such as Ripple, control roles that individuals can play within the network. They’re still large and distributed systems that use a native token. Their core code may or may not be open source.
  • Private blockchains: Private blockchains tend to be smaller and do not utilize a token. Their membership is closely controlled. These types of blockchains are favored by consortiums that have trusted members and trade confidential information.

All three types of blockchains use cryptography to allow each participant on any given network to manage the ledger in a secure way without the need for a central authority to enforce the rules. The removal of central authority from database structure is one of the most important and powerful aspects of blockchains.

When data is recorded in a blockchain, it’s extremely difficult to change or remove it. When someone wants to add a record to a blockchain, also called a transaction or an entry, users in the network who have validation control verify the proposed transaction

The Benefits Of Applying Blockchain Technology In Any Industry could be :

#1 Greater Transparency

Blockchain’s greatest characteristic stems from the fact that its transaction ledger for public addresses is open to viewing. In financial systems and businesses, this adds an unprecedented layer of accountability, holding each sector of the business responsible to act with integrity towards the company’s growth, its community and customers.

#2 Increased Efficiency

Due to its decentralized nature, Blockchain removes the need for middlemen in many processes for fields such as payments and real estate. In comparison to traditional financial services, blockchain facilitates faster transactions by allowing P2P cross-border transfers with a digital currency. Property management processes are made more efficient with a unified system of ownership records, and smart contracts that would automate tenant-landlord agreements.

#3 Better Security

Blockchain is far more secure than other record-keeping systems because each new transaction is encrypted and linked to the previous transaction. Blockchain, as the name suggests, is formed by a network of computers coming together to confirm a ‘block’, this block is then added to a ledger, which forms a ‘chain’. Blockchain is formed by a complicated string of mathematical numbers and is impossible to be altered once formed. This immutable and incorruptible nature of blockchain makes it safe from falsified information and hacks. Its decentralized nature also gives it a unique quality of being ‘trustless’ – meaning that parties do not need trust to transact safely. 

#4 Improved Traceability

With the blockchain ledger, each time exchange of goods is recorded on a Blockchain, an audit trail is present to trace where the goods came from. This can not only help improve security and prevent fraud in exchange-related businesses, but it can also help verify the authenticity of the traded assets. In industries such as medicine, it can be used to track the supply chain from manufacturer to distributor, or in the art industry to provide irrefutable proof of ownership. 

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Why using a company for your software development?

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Choosing the right type of development partner is very important. You can hire a freelancer or a development company to build your software.

The main benefit of hiring freelance developers is affordability. You can find freelancers who can develop your app at a low rate. But, there are some serious disadvantages to hiring freelancers.

Building an app isn’t just limited to writing a few hundred lines of code. Many things need to be looked into, such as design, UI, UX, Architecture, Documentation, Security, Performance, DevOps.

If you decide to hire freelancers, you’ll need to find freelancers for your project’s different aspects. You might also need to manage the team all by yourself. But you won’t receive high-quality work and on-time delivery. And sometimes it cost you more because sometimes your projects may fail and you need to redevelop them.

On the other hand, a local app development partner can provide you with a slew of benefits. The main advantages of working with a development agency include:

  • Quality assurance
  • Efficient project management
  • All-inclusive services
  • Schedule and discipline
  • Deep involvement
  • Ease of communication
  • Accountability
  • Better architecture
  • Better performance
  • Better security
  • Extendibility of the software in the future
  • Standard and clean codding that help your product extend more easily

As for the cost, freelancers generally cost less but take longer, and in the long-term usage of the software and growing your business, you will cost more and sometimes it puts your business at fail risk when the number of the users will grow. while the local development firm may cost more at first but produce higher quality and faster results and in the long term, you will save the money and you will put yourself on the safe side

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Outsourcing Vs. In-House: What’s The Best Approach?

by with No Comment Software development

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a digital agency, or an enterprise planning for digital transformation, you must have found yourself at this crossroads. A crossroad that leads you to either of the two- hiring an in-house development team or taking your operations global through outsourcing. 

Let?s review the Pros of In-House Development

They are the people working beside you in your establishment. No matter what the issue, you can just rush to them and get things sorted in real-time. Working under the same roof, they have a greater understanding of what you want in the software development project

If you have a good hiring team and good managers then an in-house team could Fit Your Corporate Culture more They know exactly what the company wants to deliver or solve through the product being developed. 

You could get Real-Time Inputs From Team In case there is a critical project or a task that needs some changes.

You could have Face-To-Face Communication. There are minimum chances of misunderstanding and the results come out to be more effective and as expected.

Let?s review the Cons of In-House Development

With close communication and better cultural fit, there come some unavoidable cons as well. You require the overhead cost of setting up the required space and IT equipment for employing the team. 

You have to pay Greater Cost. For companies that are running on a tighter budget, hiring and setting up a team of developers could cause a fund crunch. Hiring The cost of expanding the space, putting up the techs, installing hardware and software could burn a hole in the company?s pocket. You might also have to include other expenses of hiring like sick leaves, training, employee benefits, etc.

They will be Limited Skill & Tech Stack. they might just not be up to the mark when it comes to the latest techs. You employ them and in case a new tech comes up, you either need to train them or let your competitors make better use of the technology.

You will face Higher Developer Turnover. The market is looking out for talent and developers would seize any opportunity that comes knocking on their door. The employee turnover in the developer community is thus, pretty high. Companies might have to chip in extra funds to retain the developers whom they have trained.

Let?s review the Pros of Outsourced Development

You will save Cost From Employee Hiring & Retention. The biggest cost for in-house development comes while headhunting and then when trying to retain the talent they?ve found.

You could Reduced Stress On The Core Resources. Outsourcing cleans out the work from their hand so that they can focus on the core competencies and work towards bettering the company?s main offerings.

You could hire an outsource company when you have a need.  If you want to develop your product or you want to add a feature when you need it then you could make a contract. You can not just hire or fire in-house team as per the requirement or performance

You could Delivery your product Quicker to Market. You no longer have to spend manhours in finding the right developers and then training them for the required tech.

You will access to different skills and technology experts part-time or full-time. In the software development process, you need different skills in your team. Hiring all of them full-time in an in-house team model is too hard. But with the outsourcing model, you access to all of them when it is needed.