As a backbone of software ecosystems, security is a massive driver for acquiring new customers and ensuring they’re able to use software securely. However, maleficent forces have, and will, find their way into applications regardless of how vast or tall security gates are set up.  

Recently, a critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j, a popular Java library for logging in applications, was discovered by industry experts. To be specific, it was a new Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability (designated as CVE-2021-44228) in the Log4j. Upon further investigation, more vulnerabilities were uncovered, including CVE-2021-45046 and CVE-2021-45105. 

By exploiting these vulnerabilities, hackers could gain remote access to a company’s devices or specific applications, potentially enabling them to steal sensitive data or deploy ransomware on servers or devices. This led to security teams working around the clock to identify and patch the Log4j vulnerabilities as fast as they could. 

While the Log4j vulnerability was a gleaming example of how instant and severe security issues can come about in software development, it’s certainly not the first or last vulnerability that security teams will need to prepare for. And, it is critical they solve these issues within minutes or hours, not days or weeks. Every second that software is left vulnerable is money, time and resources lost. 

While it may be nearly impossible to keep all software completely secure from all future vulnerabilities, there is a way to ensure that any compromised software is restored safely and quickly. Organizations should adopt a “security by design” approach and implement the security best practices to catch the issues early on and provide the necessary tooling and training to developers, DevOps and security team to fix them before they go to the production environment. In addition, enterprises have to look to no-code DevOps orchestration as a way to uncover, automate and reduce the impact of product vulnerabilities.  

The armor for software delivery

With the growing complexity of software delivery ecosystems, organizations need an effective way to automate the end-to-end CI/CD release process across all technology platforms to accelerate velocity without compromising security.  

No-code DevOps orchestration allows development organizations to connect all of their software teams, tools, and information to help them accelerate software delivery and address security concerns quickly and efficiently. No-code DevOps orchestration helps to resolve software security issues through the following core functions: 

Automation

Automation is critical when it comes to being able to solve security issues efficiently and properly. Manual code inspection and upgrades is too time-consuming and error-prone. With no-code DevOps orchestration, automated CI/CD pipelines take care of building the code, scanning for vulnerabilities, unit testing and deployment to development, QA and production. The latest vulnerabilities are updated automatically as soon as they are released so that they can be caught and addressed as proactively as possible. 

Insights

It’s one thing to be able to efficiently solve security issues through automation, but unified insights are also required to fully understand the impact of the vulnerability, how and if the team was able to resolve it, and where processes can be improved. No-code DevOps orchestration enables real-time insights to be gathered instantly so that fixes across end-to-end deployment can happen as quickly as possible. 

Visibility 

Software vulnerabilities do not only impact security or development teams, but can have downstream impacts across multiple teams within IT and engineering organizations. When a vulnerability hits, it’s important that everyone across an organization has access and visibility into the details of the vulnerability, the status of its resolvement and how others in the company or customers may be affected. No-code DevOps orchestration integrates all of the tools within the software development ecosystem so that every step of the process is visible in a single-pane-of-glass. 

By utilizing automated security alerts, real-time insights and granular visibility across DevOps environments, organizations can immediately identify if any of their components have been compromised due to a vulnerability like Log4j. While no-code DevOps orchestration won’t stop vulnerabilities from happening in the future, it makes solving for them easier so teams can focus on innovating without delay.