Latest news with #HariniShankar
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Balancing Speed And Security: DevOps And Test Automation In The Cloud
Harini Shankar is a technology leader with expertise in quality assurance, test automation, security, devops and cloud-native engineering. getty DevOps has become a foundation of today's fast-paced software development as organizations continue to scale their cloud native applications. But it's becoming challenging to maintain both speed and security. Teams are forced to deliver at a fast pace, but adhering to security and compliance requirements can lead to bottlenecks that slow down the releases. Organizations need to understand that there's a workaround for this. When security and automation are embedded into DevOps workflows and pipelines, organizations can accelerate their releases without compromising cybersecurity. In this article, I cover best practices based on my experience helping DevOps teams balance speed and security while implementing robust and efficient test automation within cloud environments. One of the major mistakes that organizations make is not prioritizing security—it's considered a final checkpoint rather than a proactive part of the process. This mindset often manifests in last-minute security vulnerabilities, forcing developers to go back and spend additional time and effort fixing vulnerabilities that should have been caught earlier. • Incorporate static code analysis (SAST) and automate it to detect vulnerabilities in source code before deployment. • Add automated unit tests and security scans into CI/CD pipelines. • Use test-driven security (TDS) to deny security test cases before actual coding begins. Deployment cycles and releases can be interrupted when manual security testing methods are implemented. When security tests are automated along with functional tests, DevOps teams can maintain velocity without compromising security compliance. • Detect vulnerabilities in running applications with dynamic application security testing (DAST). • Automate infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning to help prevent misconfigurations in the cloud. • Implement software composition analysis (SCA) to identify vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies. Security gates can prevent vulnerable builds from progressing, but you'll need to configure them properly so they don't cause delays. Security gates must be designed to balance enforcement with flexibility. • Compliance checks can be automated by defining security policies using tools like Open Policy Agent or Sentinel. • Implement workflows that have automated approvals to prevent deployment delays. Allow minor issues to be flagged for later review without slowing deployment. • Continuously monitor and adjust security metrics as needed. Just focusing on pre-deployment testing isn't sufficient. Organizations need to pay attention to security and functional validation after releases. Continuous monitoring is critical to detect real-world security threats and performance issues. • Employ real-time logging and monitoring in cloud environments to track security events. • Leverage automated canary deployments to validate security patches without the need for a full-scale application rollout. • Use security tools, such as Datadog, to identify anomalies and any policy violations. Applications are becoming more distributed. As a result, APIs and microservices are becoming primary targets for security threats. Security models developed for monolithic applications aren't able to keep up with the complexity of microservice architecture and may fail to provide enough protection. • Use methods such as contract testing to help ensure that API changes don't introduce vulnerabilities. • Implement automated penetration testing for APIs, such as Postman or Burp Suite. • Enforce stricter authentication and authorization with OAuth 2.0 and API gateways. Organizations that treat security as a proactive approach and not as an afterthought are more likely to succeed. But it must be a seamless part of the DevOps process. When organizations embrace continuous test automation, security scanning and compliance, teams can achieve both speed and security in cloud environments. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Forbes
03-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Why Test Data Management Is An Overlooked Part Of Quality Assurance
Harini Shankar is a technology leader with expertise in quality assurance, test automation, DevOps and cloud-native quality engineering. getty Test automation and DevOps play a major role in today's quality assurance landscape. As we know, software development is evolving at a rapid pace. This requires finding robust ways to invest in automated testing frameworks, performance testing and monitoring tools. An overlooked area that's critical in determining the effectiveness of these efforts is test data management. Poorly managed test data can lead to flaky test results, security issues and compliance gaps. Yet many organizations today treat test data as an optional parameter and rely on hard-coded values, copied production data or manually created data. These can all cause inefficiencies and risks during testing. Test data fuels the performance and efficiency of test automation, so organizations must pay attention and invest in strong strategies for test data management. Many quality assurance teams struggle with test data because of three major challenges: Teams often create test data manually and sometimes hardcode it. This leads to inconsistent test results. Data changes are frequent between test runs, causing test automation scripts to fail unpredictably. Many times, data from production refresh is used for testing. This can expose sensitive information to potential breaches, as it evades privacy and security requirements. Privacy frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA require organizations to mask data to protect user privacy. Anonymizing and synthesizing test data can achieve this. When it comes to large-scale testing, environments need realistic, scalable test data to run tests like performance, integration and regression efficiently. If test data management isn't in place, it becomes very time-consuming for engineers to manually refresh and reset databases. This can tremendously slow down the CI/CD process, thereby leading to slower and bug-prone releases. To deliver successful products as an organization, quality assurance leaders should follow these best practices for successful test data management. Techniques such as data obfuscation can protect sensitive data in production. By masking personally identifiable information (PII), organizations can maintain compliance standards. Effective data masking helps testers work with realistic datasets. In addition, creating automated scripts to perform dynamic data masking allows teams to substitute sensitive fields in lower environments. This preserves privacy while preserving data structure. Synthetic data simulates real-world datasets without relying on actual production data, eliminating security and compliance risks. Datasets are more customizable for diverse testing needs. Testing scenarios such as performance, stress and edge cases benefit greatly from using this approach, as it allows engineers to generate massive test datasets. Automated tools or custom scripts can generate synthetic data to ensure teams have high-quality datasets for efficient test executions. Version-controlled test data maintains consistency and traceability across test runs in order to overcome any failures caused by unreliable or outdated datasets. Maintaining version-controlled test data allows teams to track changes and roll back to a previous state, eliminating test flakiness. Git-based versioning can be very helpful in maintaining more control over test data. Delayed or incomplete access to test data can be very challenging for quality assurance engineers, leading to bottlenecks in both automation and manual testing. The self-service test data approach can help testers feel empowered. It provides access to fresh, on-demand data, and reusable and automated test datasets allow testers to instantly fetch data. This ensures reduced downtime and faster release cycles, thereby enhancing quality assurance autonomy. Organizations must integrate test data management to ensure seamless test execution into their CI/CD pipelines. When test data refreshes are automated within DevOps environments, teams can maintain consistent test datasets across all environments. Organizations can ensure every test run starts with a reliable dataset by automating data provisioning, masking and cleanup strategies. Integrating test data management within tools like Jenkins, GitHub and Azure DevOps can maintain consistency, which can eventually lead to accelerated releases. Organizations that prioritize test data management should be more successful, as they'll be more likely to release high-quality software that is much more stable with fewer defects. Quality assurance teams must move beyond just writing test scripts. They need to think outside the box and identify ways to ensure their tests run on secure, reliable and scalable datasets. Organizations need to consider test data management as a need and not an option, as it will become critical for test automation and DevOps to thrive and succeed. Those who master test data management can expect to accelerate faster and gain a competitive edge, ensuring their software is secure, reliable and ready to scale. This will be the key to boosting them to deliver high-quality software with confidence. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
