Articles about code

A new survey of over 280 developers and technical decision makers finds two-thirds dealing with major flaws in homegrown authorization efficiency, security, and app performance. As a result, most organizations (83 percent) plan to invest more into policy as code as a solution.

In case you're unfamiliar with the concept, policy-as-code is an approach to policy management in which policies are defined, shared, updated and enforced using code rather than relying on manual processes.

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Software is immensely pervasive and foundational to innovation and market leadership. You’ve likely heard the popular phrase coined by McKinsey that "all companies are software companies." It’s true that businesses are competing and winning in their markets based on their ability to digitize and innovate. Almost every major enterprise, no matter its industry, relies heavily on software to deliver services, manage operations internally or promote itself.

Software starts with code, which means that secure or insecure code starts in development. As long as we continue to view security as a bolt-on or an after-the-fact fix, we’ll continue to widen the chasm between the pace of digital innovation and security’s ability to keep up. With AI-generated code increasing the volume and speed of software production without an eye toward code quality, this problem will only worsen. The world needs Clean Code. Without it, the performance of software will suffer, negatively impacting the business. 

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According to a new study, 86 percent of software developers and AppSec managers surveyed have or know someone who has knowingly deployed vulnerable code.

What's more the study from Checkmarx shows 88 percent of AppSec managers surveyed have experienced at least one breach in the last year as a direct result of vulnerable application code.

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Code-agnostic development is the future of cloud-native applications. Sure, there are plenty of benefits to knowing a coding language inside and out, but the field is evolving beyond the requirements for deep language expertise. As low-code and no-code platforms abstract complexity, developers can focus on higher-level concepts. The ability to jump from language to language will make them more efficient and adaptable.

Software industries evolve by abstracting complexity of lower-level tasks. If done correctly, this leads to better user productivity and outcomes. This movement in development is fueling the new approach to languages, allowing development teams to operate successfully with coding knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep. The trend of multi-lingual developers will propel the industry into the future. Let's take a look at how these experts developed.

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We have Hollywood movies to thank for the public's somewhat warped perception of coding. We're all too familiar with the bespectacled-super-genius-furiously-typing-as-sleek-but-meaningless-graphics-rotate-on-a-screen trope.

In reality, using code is less of a HIIT workout for the fingers and more scouring Stack Overflow to figure out why your program isn't working. Coding gets a bit of a bad rap -- it's often considered complicated to understand and even harder to get into. But while there are certainly challenges to coding and software development, it can also be a highly rewarding skill to learn.

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Code signing certificates are an essential part of our software world. Every software update is signed with a unique machine identity, combining a time stamp with an encryption algorithm in the form of a x.509 certificate issued by a trusted certificate authority. This allows other machines to know they are authentic and can be trusted.

Developers sign their code with a private key, and an end-user uses the public key from that developer to validate that the code hasn’t changed since the developer signed it. If someone has altered the code, the signature will provide an untrusted alert, in the same way a website with an untrusted or expired certificate does with transport layer security (TLS) machine identities. Without this system of identity, it would be impossible to deliver software. Without this you couldn’t use Windows, Mac, or iPhone let alone fly on a modern Airbus or Boeing aircraft. And it’s quickly becoming the same way in the cloud-native world of Kubernetes.

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IT management has never been easy and the complexities multiply as we seek to adopt the latest technologies and push the bounds of innovation. For instance, as we enable more digital capabilities, by nature, we must increase the number of applications used within our IT environments. However, provisioning the infrastructure resources required to build and manage applications can often be an unpredictable process, causing bottlenecks and performance issues across the entire environment but especially so in one key area, data storage.

Rather than succumbing to the complex, highly manual and time-consuming nature of IT management, new solutions and management frameworks can help to create more simplicity and ease. Modern infrastructure that emulates a cloud operating model is capable of prioritizing flexibility, agility and speed in addition to enabling reliability and performance. What initially began with the prolific adoption of infrastructure as-a-service has now paved the way for infrastructure-as-code.

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