Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

The patching treadmill: Why traditional application security is no longer enough

read original get Cybersecurity Software Suite → more articles
Why This Matters

The article highlights the limitations of traditional application security models, emphasizing that reactive find-and-fix approaches are increasingly ineffective in a fast-paced development environment. As continuous deployment accelerates, security must evolve to integrate into the code creation process itself, reducing vulnerability backlogs and improving overall resilience. This shift is crucial for the tech industry to keep pace with evolving threats and deliver more secure software to consumers.

Key Takeaways

Dmitry Nogaev/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

ZDNET's key takeaways

Continuous deployment makes old security models feel obsolete.

Vulnerability backlogs are overwhelming development teams.

Application security needs to move toward code creation.

For all the time I've spent exercising on treadmills, I've always found them faintly demoralizing. You thump-thump-thump over and over again, but get nowhere. It's a lot of effort. You always work up a bit of a sweat, but ultimately feel unfulfilled. This feeling is reinforced the next day, when you have to do it all over again.

In many ways, application security is like that treadmill. Once the coding is done, security teams (or customers) find flaws. Scanning tools also find flaws, often resulting in reports that seem never-ending. Coders are constantly yanked away from new development to re-learn what they wrote, locate bugs, patch them, and release fixes.

Also: 77% of IT managers say their AI agents are out of control - 5 ways to rein in yours

But then, like on the treadmill, the cycle repeats when new code, new dependencies, and new vulnerabilities appear. Because, of course, they will.

... continue reading