Security Compass today defined a new market category for DevOps tools that enables organizations to build secure digital products without compromising time to market: Balanced Development Automation (BDA).

Until now, business leaders only had two choices when building software - Fast and Risky or Slow and Safe. In the "Fast and Risky" approach, businesses use reactive processes such as code scanning and compliance audits to discover vulnerabilities once coding is complete. This requires them to make a difficult decision: remediate the vulnerabilities, which is time-consuming and expensive, or accept the risks and release the code to meet timelines. On the other hand, the "Slow and Safe" approach employs proactive processes to run manually intensive activities like threat modeling, risk assessments, and privacy reviews upfront that compromise time to market. Balanced Development Automation enables a third option - "Fast and Safe."

Key portions of proactive security and compliance processes are often skipped because they are manual, inconsistent, siloed, and expensive. BDA automates these processes to accelerate software releases, improve product security, save operational and remediation costs, as well as enabling better utilization of scarce security experts. SD Elements, the industry's first BDA platform, expedites the development of thousands of applications while building in security and compliance from the start.

"Organizations are under intense pressure to continuously delight customers, release products faster and gain a competitive advantage; but too often, this means security and compliance cannot take priority. Balanced Development Automation is an approach that enables organizations to build digital products nearly as fast as if they were developed without any security or compliance - yet are inclusive of critical security controls," said Rohit Sethi, CEO of Security Compass. "Business value and risk management have been on a collision course for years. In response, Security Compass pioneered the world's first BDA solution to help organizations manage both delivery speed and security."

Competitive pressures make it essential for organizations to release software faster while regulatory requirements mandate it to be secure and to protect privacy. The SD Elements platform is the first solution that enables organizations to adopt a balanced development approach for rapid and secure application development. Similar to how a GPS application knows where a driver is, and at the right moment provides instructions, SD Elements acts like a guide through every step of software development and delivers security and compliance instructions for each part of the work.

"Organizations need to standardize their approaches to evaluating security design requirements, compliance and privacy in the requirements and design phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC)," said Dan Kennedy, Research Director, 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, in a video presentation commissioned by Security Compass. "When they do, everyone is running from the same playbook - the way you're approaching this is repeatable from different resources and that allows your application security folks to increase their breadth of coverage across the enterprise and projects."

"In an age where a security breach can be disastrous not only in terms of financial costs but also to brand reputation, organizations have no choice but to take a proactive stance to software security. Today, we call on our industry peers to foster a Balanced Development Automation approach and make it the new standard for building software applications faster with fewer vulnerabilities. Together, we can go fast and stay safe," added Sethi.