10 Web Application Security best Practices for 2020

We all know how important Web Application is in today’s business world. Web applications continue to make a huge impact on the way businesses are thought about and taken forward. But with every innovative web application developed, it is also very vital and important to keep it secured in the best possible ways from data hackers as well as numerous different types of viruses. Let us take a look at the various new options for web application security best practices, this year 2020 has, to suggest to us.

Options to empower Web Application security Best Practices

With web application development, being one of the key resources, in every organization’s business development strategies, it becomes all the more important for developers to consider building a more intelligent and more secure web application. Also, since any new technology becoming outdated in a matter of months, a continued focus on web application security is of paramount importance.

The early years saw the use of the intranet on a large scale with critical company data being stored in local data servers, placed in the house. Now, with both users and applications, spread all across the world, and critical data being very vulnerable to hacking, web application security is more important than ever. Also, with every innovative mind behind developing a website, there also exists an equally creative mind, finding out ways and means to get into critical data.

So, what are the best practices that can be followed in 2020 to ensure a strong web application security? Let’s find out.

Follow Secure Coding Practices

It is very important, for every web developer to think about web application security, write from the development stage itself. Though it is understandable that more focus is laid out to make the application work, developers would do a great job, if they can simultaneously include security features like authentication and password management, access control, communication security, and data security, while they build the application. This will save a lot of time and efforts while they test their first prototype at a later stage.

Grant Minimum Permissions

The company would do well to limit the permissions and access granted to critical data, especially to new team members or members taken in from other project teams. This can help the company to study the new additional member in greater depth before sharing access to critical data, thereby minimizing chances of security breach.

Automate Security Functions

Automation can help in a big way. It would be a good and best web app security practice, to check the application through an automated process check, at every development stage completed. In addition to testing the web application for its performance, it can also be tested for vulnerability against cyber-attacks.

Generate a mock attack and test for stability

A very good step which any organization can take towards ensuring a good web application security is to practice the art of creating a mock cyber-attack in-house and then try to debug the case. This will be a test of endurance for the applications as well as developers and it can expose the developers to different types of security issues, which can crop up at various stages.

Strengthen the Web Servers

Web servers play an extremely important role and all of us are aware of the critical impact they have on any project. In addition to safeguarding the application itself, it would be a good practice to think about securing each and every network component itself, which is associated with the development process. Web servers form an integral part of project development and it is always a safe practice to strengthen those servers against being vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Inspect All Traffic

With the amount of data being sent and received every day, it becomes crucial to try and identify suspicious traffic and block it immediately. This is best done by setting up firewalls and frequently testing the abilities of those firewalls as well as designing methods to improve their performance. This is an extremely critical practice which companies must resort to at any cost to save critical data from falling into the hands of hackers.

Encrypt all data

Protocols form the way data is exchanged between web clients and servers. Hence, it will be good practice for organizations to implement data transfer by the usage of the most secured protocol systems, for example, HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. However, many more ways to encrypt data at the highest level can be explored and are available.

Be knowledgeable about new types of vulnerabilities

There is no better practice than keeping yourself updated on new types of vulnerabilities and ways and means to tackle them. Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s also pretty risky. As such, what you are not aware of can hurt you. To protect your applications from attack or unanticipated failure, it is a good practice to learn the latest threats to your application environment.

Focus on Key Threats

Though keeping a track of the latest types of threats will surely help, it is surely a challenge for you to, personally follow up and try to find out solutions to all of them. Hence, it would be a good practice to focus more on the key threats that would need continuous monitoring. It would also surprise us to hear than more often than not, the problems which we would have already heard about earlier and solved, could come up again and throw a different type of challenge!

Formulate a strategy and document your solutions

This is an extremely important practice. It makes complete sense to document your study of either a persisting problem or a new problem and your solution for that. The methods adopted and the troubleshooting process could be very useful at critical junctures when customer pressures run high.

Conclusion

Web Applications are a critical resource and skill, the most favored resource for companies to protect themselves and their products to the global audience. However, at the same time, it is vital that these applications are secured at all times and free from any attempts to get hacked and misused. The above suggestions if practiced can go a long way ensuring just that.

Original Source: DeveloperOnRent