Code Itself Is a Growing Security Threat
As the pace of digitization across the global economy accelerates, companies are creating more and more software. This is putting greater pressure on internal teams to deliver on schedule, within budget and to stay ahead of security vulnerabilities.
This pressure falls on software engineers, most of whom are already spread thin balancing the demand for new software with the burden of maintaining legacy software. Developers make mistakes, because they’re human and especially when they are under pressure to move quickly. As a result, the code that creates software often contains significant vulnerabilities on day one; these often go undetected or unresolved until after a major security incident. GitHub recently disclosed that 99% of the repository’s security incidents are the result of human errors.
Other vulnerabilities can stem from neglected code. According to another recent report, there is widespread use of “abandoned” open source components across all industries: a staggering 91% of the codebases studied had open source dependencies that had seen no development activity in the last two years.
Of course, this fundamental link between code and security is not new. But what alarms security professionals is the exponential rate at which new code is being introduced. Every day, there are new vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit. Not to mention, engineers are tasked with spending the majority of their time creating patches, fixing bugs and responding to breaches, which means less time spent creating value for their organization through new solutions.
It is no longer enough to simply be proactive in uncovering vulnerabilities and fixing them with new code. But at the accelerating rate that we’re creating new vulnerabilities, fixing code with code is becoming increasingly futile.
Enterprises Must Address the Code Problem
We have to stop generating new code. Just a few years ago, this might have seemed an impossible goal, but the rapid rise of no-code platforms is shifting that paradigm. No-code closes the door to human coding errors, while also enabling increased security, scale and speed of modern business application development through architecture and configuration. By 2025, Gartner estimates that 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will be built using no-code or low-code, and it’s an opportunity for a new approach to software security.
This approach can feel daunting – a total divergence from how we’ve always done things. But how we’ve done things isn’t working – companies are spending $500 billion every year writing archaic code to build and maintain applications. Talented engineers are spending their days (and nights) on monotonous coding tasks or playing whack-a-mole against an unrelenting barrage of new and old vulnerabilities. Soon, this sand in the gears is going to grind completely to a halt.
Enterprises need a new approach that reduces the complexity of their technology ecosystems, shrinks their expanding technology footprint (especially custom software that does not contribute to their competitive business advantage) and reduces the lines of code written in their environments that unknowingly create exposures that may lead to significant business risk. The rise of no-code is an opportunity to greatly reduce that risk.
