According to Ixia, agile development is rapidly becoming business critical, as the time from development to deployment is reducing rapidly. Despite early and continuous testing, products often contain bugs and vulnerabilities that slip through the cracks. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) claims that the annual cost incurred by these vulnerabilities in the U.S. alone is about $59.6 billion.
How does Ixia tackle vulnerabilities?
Ixia Developer states that it generates rich and realistic application traffic along with malicious attacks and automated threats. This enables agile developers to find bugs and vulnerabilities as they write code. It also offers developer-specific functionality, comprehensive built-in debugger, and the ability to import and replay packet captures.
Further, it is easy to automate, embed Ixia Developer in continuous integration (CI) or continuous deployment (CD) frameworks using REST APIs and a rich command line interface. The agile CI or CD model is most effective when teams across service provider, QA, production, development, and vendor streamline discovery and resolution of issues, found in different phases, accelerating time to market.
The company claims that as Ixia Developer is a fully virtualized solution, it can be deployed in minutes and eliminate the need for costly hardware investments from the desktop, to the laptop, to the data center, and to the cloud. Customers using Ixia Developer, can access built-in community features, which include referring colleagues and providing real-time feedback, while receiving monthly updates.
Sunil Kalidindi, Vice President, Product Management, Ixia, says, “The need for speed is understandable, but quality shouldn’t be sacrificed in the process. Ixia Developer allows agile development and comprehensive, automated testing to happen in tandem—presenting the most realistic situations for the best understanding of potential bugs and vulnerabilities in any development cycle.”
Test tool survey
Ixia surveyed 363 developers in April this year and claimed that 95 percent of respondents run at least five security and load tests during the application development process and 87 percent of developers continuously test for security vulnerabilities and track results during the development cycle. However, 65 percent admit to deploying products with bugs and 31 percent said products harbored significant vulnerabilities that required patching later in the cycle. 56 percent of respondents claimed that security testing is the most important component of the application development process, 39 percent do not currently use commercial developer test tools for applications and security.
“As DevOps continues to pervade into mainstream IT, it’s becoming imperative to broaden the testing mindset to include security, which increases IT agility while lowering the impact of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately though, most companies do not yet fully integrate comprehensive security testing earlier in the software lifecycle but instead consider it far too late in the process, even with the most mission-critical applications,” says Donnie Berkholz, Research Director, Development, DevOps & IT Ops, 451 Research.
