That’s why confidence in healthcare data systems and medical devices is indispensable and must be designed from the beginning. One of the solutions to guarantee high medical systems protection is the adoption of specialized security frameworks.

This post will guide you through the most popular framework examples and a step-by-step approach to their incorporation.

What Is The Feature of Cybersecurity Frameworks for Healthcare 

Jumping headlong into a new tech solution without knowing the basics is a mistake. So let’s consider the essence of such a security layer and why to employ it in telehealth.

Cybersecurity framework or CSF is a mix of values and practices designed to protect corporate systems and communicate security hazards. In other words, security frameworks provide techniques for combating safety threats and assist in supervising confidential info in a way it’s protected. It has a considerable broad appeal to many organizations and can be used across multiple areas, including healthcare.

Why apply frameworks in healthcare?

Telemedicine deals with a significant number of sensitive records (derived from multiple devices), becoming a tidbit for cybercriminals. That’s why healthcare entities face challenges coping with rising cyber threats and data leakage. A large-scale attack on medical organizations may block their operations for medical services. That’s the primary reason clinics integrate security software into their IT systems. 

But how exactly can CSF help hospitals address security matters? They allow for detection, safeguarding, reaction, and recovery from the consequences of cybercrime. It’s not considered strict rules for healthcare businesses, but directions of efficient security information systems.

5 Top Security Frameworks for Healthcare

Here is the list of the most prevalent legislation and frameworks that medical entities should account for when building their data security strategy.

NIST CSF

It is not the certification framework; its criteria were written with the industry’s best expertise for administering cybersecurity risks in mind. And this enables the alignment across various IT compliance frameworks like HIPAA. These criteria are also scalable, making the framework easily tailored to business-specific needs. It initially determined security rules and privacy standards for public and government organizations, but now the standards apply to non-government institutions, including the healthcare sector.

ISO 27000 Series

ISO/IEC 27001 is a broad support international standard that provides a set of regulations for managing data security. This is a systematic approach composed of experts, processes, and technology that help organizations protect and maintain all corporate information through risk management. It focuses on covering three aspects of data: 

• Confidentiality (information isn’t disclosed to unauthorized users) 
• Integrity (data is utter and accurate and safeguarded from corruption)
• Availability (info is accessible and usable by authorized users as required)

HITRUST 

The HITRUST Association is a private firm that cultivates, maintains, and provides access to valuable techniques to facilitate the incorporation of robust data security programs in all-sized companies. HITRUST released the HITRUST CSF, which implies a comprehensive framework that helps healthcare establishments improve information risk management and compliance programs. The high trust CSF is based on nationally and internationally accepted security and privacy-related regulations, such as HIPAA, NIST, and PCI, to build a controlled environment for security control. 

COBIT CSF

This methodology provides guidance on how to organize IT-related activities across all business processes properly and reliably. It assists firms in addressing gaps between technical concerns, business risks, and control demands.

 Here are the critical parts of this framework:

• Process model helps corporations comprehend the nature of all the activities that relate to IT as well as how to arrange them in a way they’re reliably performed (e.g., managing changes)
• Best practice implies providing guidance on what to do in each of these processes in alignment with recognized good practice. It allows for ensuring the proper performance of IT-related activities.
• Management tools allow companies to measure the quality of those processes using capability maturity techniques.  So management can tell whether the activity is at the level required for a given situation.

Critical Security Controls

These are the international principles and proven methodologies for protecting the IT landscape and corporate data against omnipresent hackers’ invasions. These accepted regulations are constantly polished and audited by global tech minds. The significant advantage of these rules is that they prioritize the actions and concentrate on the critical ones that extremely minimize the risk rate.

Things to Consider Before Adopting Healthcare CSF 

Now, let’s see what points should be accounted for before implementing security frameworks into your corporate environment.

Define business needs

The primary step includes determining the key goals and setting business priorities. That’s needed to develop an effective data security strategy and identify the systems and tools enlisted in the chosen process.

Recognize approaches to management

Initially, the enterprises access resources they possess, select the appropriate directive, and seek credible sources. Then, they estimate the overall danger and determine the white spot in their current tools and programs.

Evaluate the risks

Before CSF adoption, appraising the IT landscape threat level is vital. That means scrutinizing the prospects for security breaches and the effects they may provoke.

Make a profile

Medical establishments make a thorough risk assessment and determine their present state. The primary objective is to receive a deep insight into current security threats (those that may appear due to security violations). Thus, all the hazards and weaknesses should be detected and recorded.

Define and order the gaps

After recognizing the perceived dangers and their outcomes, it’s time to proceed to safety holes analysis. That’s required actual vs. the target outcomes comparison. For instance, making a heat map will help you emphasize the number-one focus area.

Enforce a series of measures

Lastly, a precise knowledge of potential safety hazards, preemptive measures, objectives, and holes analysis backed up with a list of required acts will allow healthcare establishments to adopt these protection measures.

Find a reliable IT partner

Before cybersecurity frameworks incorporation, it’s significant to choose an experienced custom healthcare software development company. This way, you’ll be ensured all the peculiarities will be taken professionally. There are many hiring platforms available that can assist you in finding competent experts in tune with your budget, time, and expectations. Many entrepreneurs consider outsourced development when it comes to developing telehealth projects. This model entails cooperation with a tech partner remotely. By doing so, you receive a composed team of certified experts needed to integrate CSF into your IT ecosystem. As for the telemedicine app development cost, the price depends on the specialists’ level of expertise and the vendor’s location. For example, software engineers charge $150 to $250 per hour in the US, while consulting rates in North Europe are $50-$75.

Gay Homenick

The post What Is Security Frameworks and Why Apply It In Telemedicine appeared first on Napalm Automation.

Protecting yourself online with so much personal and essential information in the digital world today is necessary.

Below is a list of essential online safety tips you should know. Staying safe online is not hard when you know what to watch out for.

Create Strong Passwords and Don’t Re-Use Them

If you’re using the same password for multiple accounts, it’s time to change that. Hackers can use brute force attacks to guess your passwords based on your email address, name, or birthdate. They can get into all your accounts if they succeed in guessing one of your passwords.

Strong passwords are long, complex, and unique, so hackers can’t guess them. The longer the password, the better: a 15-character password is much harder for hackers to crack than a 10-character one. You should also avoid using simple words like “user” or “password” as part of your password.

Create strong passwords by combining upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols such as !@#$%. The more complicated you make it, the better.

Beware of Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks rely on tricking victims into providing personal information. They may include passwords and credit card numbers by sending them emails or text messages that appear to be from legitimate companies or organizations.

Phishing emails often contain attachments or links that lead victims to fraudulent websites designed to steal their personal information. The attacks can also occur in person if someone tries to deceive you into giving them sensitive information by claiming to represent a company or organization when they do not have any connection with them at all.

Update Your Software Regularly

You need to update your software regularly. If you don’t, you could leave yourself vulnerable to attack and expose personal information that cyber criminals could use.

It’s essential to keep all your software up-to-date as soon as new versions are released. This includes operating systems, browsers, and antivirus software.

The problem is that many people don’t bother with updates because they think it will take too much time or they’re worried about compatibility issues. But the reality is that updates rarely cause problems with existing programs and devices, and they often fix security vulnerabilities that can leave your devices open to attack.

Back-Up Your Data

Like most people, you probably don’t realize how important it is to back up your personal and business data. Recovering from a hard drive crash or other disaster is essential for individuals and businesses. This is why it’s important to keep a good backup of all your documents and files, including those in your email accounts, cloud storage, and other communication tools.

If something happens to your computer or hard drive (or even if you just make changes to your email address or password), there’s no way to recover that information unless you have an exact copy. 

Sometimes restoring from backup can be as simple as copying over the old files onto a new drive or computer. But if that’s not possible, then having an offsite backup will help ensure that you’ll never lose anything again!

Install Antivirus Software

Viruses can wreak havoc on your computer, but they’re often preventable with simple software updates and maintenance routines like antivirus programs. These programs scan for malware threats and spyware, which can be just as dangerous. That’s because it has access to sensitive information about your computer and its users — including users who aren’t even aware their machines have been compromised yet! 

You’ll find free and premium antivirus programs from providers like Avast! or AVG Antivirus (which offers a free version). These programs are easy to install and maintain, so there’s no excuse not to protect yourself from internet threats!

Secure Your Social Media Accounts

Your Facebook profile, Twitter account, and other social media profiles are all public by default. Anyone who knows your name (or at least your username) can see all the photos you’ve uploaded and the status updates you’ve made since signing up for the service. And because most people don’t change their privacy settings when they sign up, anyone can see their entire friends list and private messages.

It’s not just your friends who need to worry about this—if someone with malicious intent figures out your username, they can likely find out who some of your friends are, too, and see any private messages you might have received from them or vice versa. 

To keep yourself safe from stalkers or identity thieves, change your privacy settings so that only people you approve can view certain parts of your profile. You’ll still want to share some things with others (like photos), but there’s no reason strangers should see everything on your page just because they know your name.

Use Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security feature that provides additional protection for your login details. It works by requiring you to enter a code that is sent to your phone or generated by an authenticator app on your phone before you can log in. If someone tries to access your account without the code, they won’t log in successfully.

You may not have heard of 2FA before because it’s not yet widely available. However, many major websites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox have started rolling out 2FA services over the past year — so look out for this service if it’s available on the sites where you use your email address as your username.

Beware of Free Wi-Fi

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t be fooled by “free” Wi-Fi hotspots that ask for your credit card number or other personal information. These APs may be set up by criminals who are looking to steal your information or other personal data by using what’s known as a man-in-the-middle attack. 

A man-in-the-middle attack attempts to fool users into thinking they’re connected to a legitimate network when they’re not; instead, they’re connected directly to the hacker’s computer, stealing their data — all while appearing as if they’re connected normally to their own ISP’s network.

Don’t Share Personal Information Online

Never share personal information online unless you’re sure it’s safe and secure. Don’t tell anyone your name, address, or phone number if you don’t know them well! Also, avoid giving out other personal information such as birth date or place of birth until you are sure who you’re talking to online.

If someone asks for this type of information in an email or instant message, be suspicious because there is no need for them to have it. The same applies if someone asks for money from you — never send money by bank transfer.

Remain Safe!

There is no way to be one-hundred percent safe online, but following these tips will hopefully help you stay safe—or at the very least, alert you when something might be unsafe. It’s also worth noting that most modern browsers offer some added security and privacy settings tools, which could be worth exploring if they are not already enabled.

Gay Homenick

The post 9 Crucial Tips For Online Safety appeared first on Napalm Automation.

As casinos do more and more business online, the threat from scammers remains the same, if not increased before – only the landscape has changed. So instead of chip-switching scams, hidden earpieces and hacking, we’re seeing new methods of:

1. DDoS attacks; 
2. Game hacks; 
3. Fraud using user accounts;
4. Code injection;
5. SQL Injection;
6. Command injection;
7. XSS injection;
8. XPath injection;
9. Mail command injection;
10. CRLF injection;
11. Host header injection;
12. LDAP injection.

Cybersecurity is becoming a growing problem for casino operators, if not more important than security at offline casinos. With a more compressed target and a million and one ways to potentially infiltrate digitized systems, casinos must be more proactive than ever to protect their platforms. 

Our gambling experts recommend that you familiarize yourself with the reliable institutions in terms of security in the published ranking of the Best Casino Websites for Canadian players and be sure that we have chosen only legal online casinos with modern protection.

Basic types and types of cyber attacks on infrastructure

It usually doesn’t matter whether your infrastructure is on-premises or in the cloud. If the data you transmit has value, someone will want it. Attackers’ actions can be divided into two main types – distributed and targeted attacks.

Distributed cyber attacks are the use of a botnet and target a large number of users and company resources simultaneously. As a rule, these attacks use leaked databases of organizations and users.

Targeted attacks (APTs) are a pre-planned “attack” against a specific company or infrastructure. In these incidents, the attacker not only gains access to internal resources, but also remains on the company’s network until they are discovered, which can be days, months, or even years. Targeted attacks are carried out by hackers with high technical competence. They use automated tools, determine attack vectors, exploit 0-day vulnerabilities and certain system features based on their experience.

Cyberattacks pose a danger to both ordinary users and businesses. In both cases, the consequences can be not just unpleasant, but critical. According to 2020 statistics provided by Acronis, DDoS attacks, phishing and videoconferencing attacks topped the list of cyber threats. However, other types of attacks cause a lot of problems for businesses and ordinary users alike. Attackers blackmail messenger users with bots, break into the network via QR codes and exploit vulnerabilities in legal network settings or encryption, as well as resort to the classics of the genre – brute force attacks. In order to better understand cybercriminals’ actions, it is necessary to know what types of attacks on infrastructure exist and their key features.

DoS & DDoS attacks

Distributed denial-of-service attacks are implemented by using multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. These attacks clog systems with a large number of requests, resulting in reduced bandwidth and systems becoming overloaded and unavailable. In essence, a DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam clogging a highway.

Fishing attacks

Fishing attacks are based on the use of emails that can be disguised as legitimate messages from various companies. In such a fake message, attackers may offer to follow a link, download an infected file or ask to hand over a user’s confidential data – logins, passwords and bank card account numbers.

Brute-force attacks

Brute-force attacks are a fairly simple method of infiltrating an infrastructure and represent “guessing” user accounts. Some attackers use applications and scripts as brute-force tools that try many combinations of passwords to bypass authentication processes. If the password is weak, attackers will only need a couple of seconds, so businesses should enforce a strict password policy.

Bots

This is a software robot that mimics or replaces human behavior and performs simple tasks at a rate that exceeds user activity. Some bots can be useful, and their actions are aimed at supporting users, but there are also malicious ones. For example, they are used to automatically scan websites and look for vulnerabilities, as well as to perform simple cyberattacks.

Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack

In this type of attack, the cybercriminal becomes a “third party” and allows all web traffic to pass through himself. At this point, the potential victim is completely unaware of it, which means that the attacker gets all the credentials he needs to log in. The information obtained can then be used to steal corporate data or unauthorized fund transfers.

What are the risks of hacking or external attack? 

Hacking is a major risk for online casinos from cyberattacks, and it is critical that operators take measures to prevent backdoor loopholes and exploits from being accessed by criminals. If a casino is vulnerable, it could potentially disclose its customers’ personal data to fraudsters, who could then use that data to steal – directly or indirectly from the customer or the casino.

There may also be a more direct risk of payment information falling into the wrong hands – such as credit card information, which could easily be seized by hackers to cause significant harm to the holder.

In addition to casinos’ responsibility to do everything they can to protect their customers, there are several other significant reasons why casinos should step up their operations and take steps to protect against these threats. 

For casino operators in Canada, GDPR rules require public disclosure of any data leaks almost as soon as they become apparent, which is a PR disaster waiting to see if any data has actually been compromised. In addition, there could be licensing problems for those who are found to have done so. 

And, of course, it does nothing to build trust between the customer and their casino if online casinos are vulnerable to this type of attack. This can have long-term consequences for casino operators, and as we’ve seen in the case of high-profile hacks over the years, there’s a real potential to destroy a trusted casino brand. 

Unfortunately, this is not a static picture, as risks and protections in cybersecurity are constantly changing and evolving. As a consequence, it is imperative that casinos take risk seriously and take steps to protect against these threats, both now and in the future. 

Integrity of game data and source code

There is another important point of trust here for casinos. The online casino operator is as good as its games, and if hackers can compromise the integrity of the gaming experience, there is a risk of undermining the broader trust in the integrity and legitimacy of online gambling platforms.

Players want to know that they are participating in a fair game with a legitimate chance of winning. But if hackers can gain access to exploits in the gaming software, the results for players and for the casino could be disastrous. Not only does this compromise the integrity of games that customers trust, but it also opens up casino operators to big losses when their spins are turned. 

Again, it comes down to being one step ahead of the attackers, which is easier said than done. The only option casinos and game developers like Microgaming and NetEnt have is to invest in cybersecurity talent and regularly check and verify gaming software so that there are no obvious pathways. But with ever-changing gates, it’s an ongoing and uphill battle. 

Prevent database and user information leakage

In addition to the safety of their customers, casinos must also take care of themselves. Loss prevention is worth millions to the online gambling sector, and it’s not hard to see why. With an insecure website or mobile platform, casinos are potentially exposed to significant losses. And in some cases, those losses can pile up in the blink of an eye.

An ineffectively secured casino is similar to leaving a bank vault unlocked, and it may be one of the biggest financial risks to casino operators due to cybersecurity issues. Disabling leaks in the system is necessary for operators to preserve their financial integrity and ensure that crooks don’t have a day job at their expense.

Use of modern encryption technology

Technologies such as Cloudflare can protect against DDoS attacks by directing and filtering traffic through the cloud network, and even a simple VPN can make you a harder target. CAPTCHA is another popular solution that helps reduce the damage from DDoS attacks because it offers every user a simple solution.

DDoS attacks use bots, and while no single solution provides 100% protection, each one forces hackers to use more bots, make them smarter, or keep the attack longer in order to succeed. All of this makes the attack attempt harder and more expensive.

The best defense against SQL injection is to encrypt databases. These attacks mostly target companies with outdated or poor infrastructure, so if you’ve invested in security, the risk of damage is greatly reduced.

How to be safe online

Not a day goes by without headlines about a new online scam, a hacking method, or a massive leak of sensitive data. If this has happened to you, you can fully understand the anger, panic and frustration this can fill you with. For those who are already unfamiliar with the online world, getting hacked or using the Internet can cause them to avoid digital platforms altogether, which can be very isolating these days. 

The problem of online fraud, hacking and theft will never go away – in the past, people have always pulled the same scams, just over the phone or through the mail. While hacking and scams will never stop, you can learn how to protect yourself, your assets and your information and help your loved ones stay as safe as possible online.

Stop, think and wait before you send the data

Scams and hacking attempts come in many shapes and sizes, but one of the most popular are phishing emails. Phishing emails are essentially random emails prompting you to click a link. Once you click the link, you may be redirected to a page that appears to be official, and you will be asked to enter some personal information, which the scammer will then use to steal additional information or money.

We are notoriously bad at identifying when an email is phishing, but there are some obvious signs: look at the email domain, check for spelling errors in the domain and the rest of the email, look at the link itself to see if it seems odd, and ask yourself if the email creates a sense of urgency. If the email has any of these telltale signs – be careful! You can report it as phishing or ask a friend’s opinion, but don’t click on the link.

It requires you to stop, think, and wait. Scammers want you to react suddenly, rashly, and click the link without thinking. So much of what we do online we do without thinking, and you can hardly blame us for that! When you work at your computer all day, it can be difficult to carefully examine every email.

Play online games safely

One of the most popular industries for hackers and scammers is the online gambling and sports betting industry. There are thousands of secure betting sites and platforms, but some scammers have created fraudulent online casinos solely to steal unsuspecting users’ personal information and money.

Secure online casinos operate all over the world. Canada is one of the countries that really takes its cybersecurity seriously, and the country has introduced detailed data protection legislation specifically to protect its citizens. Germany is a great example for all industries because they take cybersecurity and protection very seriously.

Canadian players look for the best no deposit casino bonuses, for example on various online gambling sites and every online casino will experience the same level of care as online casinos have to adhere to the same principles and take the same precautions as other online service platforms. Canadian users are advised to be aware of the casinos they use, including the licensing that is in place for each casino. This is a responsible model that countries around the world should adopt to increase digital security.

Be careful when communicating with suspicious users

When you communicate with someone online, it’s easy to let your guard down, especially if you feel like you’ve made a connection. Nevertheless, you need to be actively cautious and mindful of safety when communicating with others online. In practice, this means that you should not share personal information with strangers online and be careful about who you communicate with. You never know who someone really is.

Safety is the main thing

Another great way to protect your information and finances online is to take passwords seriously. Try to come up with great passwords that are hard to guess – with numbers, special characters and the occasional use of capital letters. Users should also opt for two-factor identification where possible. Two-factor identification means that you can’t access a particular online account, such as email or e-wallets, without first entering your password and then confirming that you’re logged in either by entering a code that was sent to you in a text message or by using an app. confirm.

Vigilance at online casinos is never redundant

If you have been hacked and lost money or personal information, you probably feel helpless, frustrated and overwhelmed with anger. Before you do anything, take time to reflect on what happened and accept the fact that everyone is either being hacked or having something stolen at one point or another.

The Canadian CCCS has great advice on what to do if you think you’ve been scammed, as well as how to report a scam. Don’t blame yourself or think you’re stupid, it happens to literally everyone. Just follow the CCCS guidelines and tell your friends and family to beware, too.

Gay Homenick

The post Why cybersecurity in Canadian online casinos is so important appeared first on Napalm Automation.

The pandemic and mass move to a remote location helped a little in this regard: it has become unnecessary to be present in the office, to be listed among employees to be in the team. Outsourced IS services have become more popular, especially in narrow areas, including secure development and DevSecOps. In this piece, Ethan Taylor, a leading architect at a cybersecurity company, will talk in detail about whether it is realistic to build a proper and complete secure development process by outsourcing, as well as what options even exist in this field.

And we’ll look at three options: 

1. Building a process completely outsourced;
2. Completely outsourcing to DevsecOps using the company’s own resources;
3. A combined approach. Let’s estimate the advantages and disadvantages of each of them and find out together which one is optimal.

Approach 1: Process completely outsourced

This variant seems easier by default. The advantages are immediately obvious: there is no need to look for internal resources and spend time on finding highly qualified personnel, spend the budget on a new team, there is no need to train or “grow” anyone, and so on. We immediately get a full team of specialists who are ready to build for us all the necessary processes and automate all the integration with the development. It sounds like an ideal plan, but in fact it is somewhat different.

To begin with, an outside company does not know all the nuances of your internal processes and will constantly stumble over seemingly elementary things that you have already done a thousand times. As an example, the restriction of network connectivity between systems, even located in the same network segment, which applies to different organizations. People from the outside with a lack of experience can be difficult to work with, you can not immediately and fully fill out an access request, to describe the architecture and the network diagram in the format of the client company, and so on and so forth.

And this is just one technical point, but the most important role in DevSecOps is the process that involves the interaction between the participants, in which difficulties can arise in communication and escalation of problems (yes, it’s not uncommon). And this is where an external company will have the most difficulties, because information security processes must be seamlessly integrated into the software development life cycle, which is organizationally and technically arranged differently in each company, with its own nuances and peculiarities.

Next, costs. This approach is the least expensive in terms of human and technical resources, but pay in money will have a lot. After all, a company that will do absolutely everything, and will cost accordingly – the team on the project is allocated a large (about 5-10 people, ie from 30 000 to 42 000 CAD monthly, and this in turn, about 495,000 CAD per year – only on direct labor costs), the services themselves due to their uniqueness are also worth a lot (hardly less than 30 – 50 thousand CAD per month, ie even plus-minus C $ 620,000 per year) plus associated costs (meetings, business trips, processing, etc.). The process takes more than one month (over four, and can last up to a year), so that all this will cost several hundred thousand Canadian dollars.

It turns out that it is unlikely to completely outsource the secure development process, even in a large company, and it is better not to do this if you want to build a truly working and efficient implementation. Those with experience in such outsourcing projects most often dissuade businesses from them.

It’s worth looking at another option. To which we will now turn.

Approach 2: The process is completely in-house

So you’ve decided to build the entire process entirely in-house. This may indeed seem logical. In-house specialists who are familiar both with the processes inside the company and with the toolstack of technologies used in development, can implement the secure development process much faster and more efficiently. After all, they don’t need to explain how to fill out requests, by what rules development lives, who to escalate problems to if something happens and other things. Everything seems to be fine, what can go wrong? And the devil, as usual, lies in the details.

The main problem has already been mentioned – the specialists. There are few of them, especially those who are looking for or want to change jobs. They are expensive enough, but how many of them are needed to implement the necessary project in, say, a medium-sized company with 500 developers? At a minimum, you need a line manager who understands the goal, who has a complete vision of the finished process, how it should look and what it should be. And at least a few people for each major area within the process, and there are at least seven at the very beginning of the journey:

• Static analysis (SAST);
• Dynamic analysis (DAST);
• Open source component analysis (OSA/SCA);
• Mobile application analysis (MAST);
• Container analysis (CA);
• Tool integration (conditionally DevOps);
• Server administration and keeping tools up to date.

And that’s really just for starters, when we’re plugging in the first teams. Why so many people, you may ask? It’s very simple: the minimum range of work at the beginning, in order to launch the process properly, is enormous. First of all, it is to understand and describe the strategy of the safe development process, which is the basis for everything. It is it that will provide the basics of the processes, lists of tools and justification for budget planning. 

Another important layer is describing the initial business processes for each practice, drawing up the requirements for the tools that will be piloted, and directly selecting, initially setting up and operating them. The next significant step is not to drown in the number of triggers from the tools, which must necessarily be parsed, transferred to the development teams, and then to control the correctness of the corrections, once the teams start to drive into the process. All this takes time, people and resources. And it’s often very difficult to get such a large team together at once.

And you have to understand that if you’re doing everything yourself from scratch, it can also take quite a lot of time, even more than if you’re outsourcing. There are a lot of examples of such projects where it took about 2-3 years to launch the three main practices (SAST, SCA, DAST) and a lot of work and effort.

Summing up, we note that the human and technical resources here occupy the main place, in contrast to the first approach, because all the work is entirely on the shoulders of staff and available tools. In terms of financial inputs, this approach is less expensive than the previous one, if we compare the first year, because in fact the main costs are the salaries of employees. Here you can try not to go beyond 1.5 million a month, which will give 30-35 thousand CAD a year. 

However, in three years (if that much will be spent on DevSecOps implementation) this expense item may take at least C$1,500,000, as the team will grow and develop, and then the total cost will be even higher than for a year of outsourcing. However, your trained super-team will stay with you to maintain the secure development process, you won’t need to call in outside experts again and again. In addition, over time, you can start offering outsourced experts yourself, nurturing the specialists internally. And so cover a significant part of the costs.

So, here too there are pros and cons, so where is the perfect balance? And it is, as always, somewhere in the middle. And below we will consider a combination of the first and second approaches, in the hope to collect more pros and get rid of cons.

Approach 3: Combined

So, we need to collect all the pros and not make any bumps, right? Then we take and combine everything in the right proportion. How’s that?

The point of the proposed approach is that, on the one hand, do not refuse to help outside companies that have extensive experience in implementing such projects, but in no case forget about the internal component and your own competence. Yes, no matter how obvious it may sound, but still you can’t do without an internal driver and own specialists, it is an integral part of the successful process. Let’s see how everything can be organized.

Within the company, there is an understanding and desire to implement a secure development process. To begin with, it should be headed by someone from the organization who understands (at least in general terms) what is needed to get out of the process. At this stage, an external company together with an internal driver will help define more precisely the goals and objectives of the project, describe the concept, the top-level business processes. A plan will also be made to hire people to the team (both forming from scratch and expanding the current team, if it already exists). Symbiosis here is very important, because you need to combine experience, an ideal model from best practices with the real life of the organization. After that, the internal and external teams together begin the step-by-step implementation of the secure development process, in which the external company, as the bearer of “sacred” knowledge, generously shares it with the internal team, teaching them the various nuances and intricacies of the process.

The ideal in this case is for the company to help from outside in the implementation, training employees, gradually building up their competencies. In other words, the ideal form of interaction is mentoring. The internal team trains in combat conditions, the external team guides, corrects, advises. In rare cases, if something does not work at all, the gurus can transfer the tasks completely to themselves. And then, when the process is established, the transition should be made to a support format, when external people are involved “on the pick-up” when their own forces are insufficient. For example, to deal with technical debt, customization of tools, in general, for point tasks that require a lot of time and resources.

Yes, not all the outside companies are ready to give their knowledge and competence to the customer, because it is much more profitable to hold everything in their hands and “steer” the process, but, as a rule, it is possible to come to an agreement.

And now about resources. This approach is balanced not only in description but also in terms of costs. After all, all items are divided between the internal and external teams, which means that time, budget and human resources can be distributed more smoothly. To be more specific, the startup and startup time for the combined process is quite low, the whole project may take about a year and a half, the cash costs are shared between teams, which means that the payroll and external company costs will be less (it is possible to do with the total project costs of 600 to 800 thousand Canadian dollars).

To conclude the article

Of course, each organization decides for itself which way to choose, everything is thoroughly studied. Nevertheless, the combined approach here is the most advantageous, because it not only allows to balance the resources and time, but also to extract the maximum benefit. After all, if this option is implemented, both the team and its competence will grow in the process. And this is one of the most valuable resources a software development organization can have. And then, of course, the transition to DevSecOps can be limited in time, but in general, you cannot suddenly stop dealing with security when creating software. The interaction and mutual development of these two areas is an integral part of a successful business.

One hacker can do as much damage as 10,000 soldiers!

Gay Homenick

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