Building in Security at Agile Speed

Book excerpt: Today's high-speed and rapidly changing development environments demand equally high-speed security practices. Still, achieving security remains a human endeavor, a core part of designing, generating and verifying software. Dr. James Ransome and Brook S.E. Schoenfield have built upon their previous works to explain that security starts with people; ultimately, humans generate software security. People collectively act through a particular and distinct set of methodologies, processes, and technologies that the authors have brought together into a newly designed, holistic, generic software development lifecycle facilitating software security at Agile, DevOps speed. —Eric. S. Yuan, Founder and CEO, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. It is essential that we embrace a mantra that ensures security is baked in throughout any development process. Ransome and Schoenfield leverage their abundance of experience and knowledge to clearly define why and how we need to build this new model around an understanding that the human element is the ultimate key to success. —Jennifer Sunshine Steffens, CEO of IOActive Both practical and strategic, Building in Security at Agile Speed is an invaluable resource for change leaders committed to building secure software solutions in a world characterized by increasing threats and uncertainty. Ransome and Schoenfield brilliantly demonstrate why creating robust software is a result of not only technical, but deeply human elements of agile ways of working. —Jorgen Hesselberg, author of Unlocking Agility and Cofounder of Comparative Agility The proliferation of open source components and distributed software services makes the principles detailed in Building in Security at Agile Speed more relevant than ever. Incorporating the principles and detailed guidance in this book into your SDLC is a must for all software developers and IT organizations. —George K Tsantes, CEO of Cyberphos, former partner at Accenture and Principal at EY Detailing the people, processes, and technical aspects of software security, Building in Security at Agile Speed emphasizes that the people element remains critical because software is developed, managed, and exploited by humans. This book presents a step-by-step process for software security that is relevant to today’s technical, operational, business, and development environments with a focus on what humans can do to control and manage the process in the form of best practices and metrics.