Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Gopinath Rebala, CTO, OpsMx
Software that contains security vulnerabilities continues to put people and data at risk. As businesses struggle to minimize these threats they’ve “shifted left” application security so risks can be identified early in the development lifecycle. While this is the right strategy, it has also overburdened developer teams and slowed the pace of innovation with little actual improvement in security. However, the team at OpsMx, a secure software delivery company, has identified three encouraging trends for 2025 that we believe will enable development teams to ensure greater security at less cost.
Automating security from Day 1
In 2025, automating security directly into the software development lifecycle will change how businesses think about application security in their software projects. Top-down security mandates today just overwhelm teams and often increase risks. With increased availability of automated solutions to both assess security risks and guide remediation, security will start in the earliest stages of a project, and then follow the application through the software delivery process. The integration of automated, developer-friendly security tools directly into the development workflow will provide the required security to safeguard code while minimizing the burden on developers, leading to safer applications and faster innovation.
Addressing vulnerabilities in open-source software
In 2025, software development teams will need to confront the security risks in their open-source software (OSS) components. Reports suggest that OSS components are found in between 70% and 95% of all applications, so addressing these vulnerabilities is essential to protect applications while continuing to benefit from the flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings that OSS offers. During the coming year, as security automation and risk prioritization based on exploitability, usage, and potential impact become more common in software development organizations, more teams will extend these practices to OSS. This includes ongoing assessments of open source component security, health monitoring of open source projects, regular updates to existing OSS components, and prioritizing more secure components.
Adopting powerful open-source security tools
In 2025, software development teams will begin replacing proprietary and often costly vendor-supported security tools with powerful open-source alternatives. The move will be prompted by Finance teams mandating that software development organizations stop adding more and more expensive security tools every time there is a need to improve security capabilities. The need to reduce costs will force teams to consider open-source alternatives, but as they do so and see how powerful and capable these tools have become, adoption will surge, and the result will be more secure software at a lower cost.
Conclusion
Ensuring application software security isn’t easy, but these trends will help organizations overcome some of the key obstacles. I am confident that even more security advances will emerge over the coming year.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility software engineering as well as the security and machine learning architectures of OpsMx’s secure software delivery solutions. Rebala is a frequent speaker on security compliance and strategies for security first continuous delivery of software. Rebala also has a strong connection with OpsMx customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations for some of the world’s largest companies.
