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Kavitha R
Kavitha R

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How does test automation help in mitigating compliance and security risks?

The growing technological evolution has created immense pressure on the companies to rethink their operational and infrastructural strategy. The new digital approach allows the organizations to align with/upgrade the existing process with the new trends. Though, the digital strategies improve the process and offer greater business revenue, it has also given rise to cyberthreats and breaches. Hence, it becomes important for the companies to identify any vulnerability or threat in the initial stages and prevent potential attacks from happening.

Compliance and security testing are inevitable part of the risk assessment strategy to mitigate cyberthreats and create a completely secured application. Further, compliance and security testing are critical mandates as per the new regulatory changes. Cybersecurity testing is performed to prevent potential threats, while compliance testing is carried out to ensure that the organization is performing on the prescribed standards.

What makes cybersecurity and compliance testing critical?

To ensure data safety, improved privacy, and eliminate security breaches, it is important to have a strong cybersecurity testing in place. It helps to identify any loopholes in the system that gives room to hackers to easily practice data theft, modification, or any other unauthorized practices. Therefore, security testing keeps a check on issues that pose a threat to the system’s security. On the other hand, compliance testing is the risk-based testing performed to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and usability of the data.

Security testing are of two types - vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. Vulnerability assessments are performed to identify the security vulnerabilities, while the penetration testing carries out system assessment to check the effectiveness of the security systems.

Advantages of using test automation cybersecurity and compliance testing:

  • Effortless identification of potential threats
  • Eliminating the vulnerabilities by thorough testing
  • Efficient identification of flaws in processes
  • Determining the system’s robustness
  • Assisting in the observance of data protection and security legislation
  • Compliance testing mitigates the likelihood of a data breach
  • Robust cybersecurity compliance safeguards the company’s integrity
  • Maintaining data confidentiality

Top automation tools in the market that offers efficient compliance and security testing

Copado: Copado is popularly known for offering DevOps platforms, tools, and resource training. Copado’s test automation for security and compliance enables faster and higher quality release. It involves three steps to perform security and compliance testing – Quick implementation to configure the rules and manage compliance requirements, automatic validation to schedule compliance scans for every release, and real-time monitoring for checking violations in real-time.

Tenjin: Tenjin is a flagship test automation platform of Yethi, a niche QA service provider for BFSI industry. Highlighting Tenjin’s security testing aspects, it takes a standard and comprehensive approach to ensure business security. It performs security testing to identify the risks and enables the organization to achieve comprehensive level of risk awareness. It also constantly examines and evaluates the performance levels to create reliable systems.

As a part of Tenjin’s security testing strategy, it performs vulnerability assessment and penetration testing to identify any critical risk and allowing to take necessary steps to mitigate it. With a team of more than 300 domain specialists and a library of 50K test cases, you can be assured of reducing cost and time-to-market considerably.

Wapiti: Wapiti is an open-source, efficient web testing tool that offers thorough assessment of the system's security. It is designed at expert-level, hence, not suitable for beginners. It has advanced features for testing that includes XSS injection, File disclosure, CRLF Injection, XXE injection, Database Injection, Command Execution detection, and Backup files giving disclose. As this is an advanced-level tool, it requires a complete understanding of the software before using it.

Acunetix: Acunetix is an efficient test automation tool used for performing penetration testing. It has the capabilities to scan and identify nearly 4500 potential vulnerabilities possibly arising during website development. It has a list of advance features that make security testing extremely reliable; it can crawl through thousands of pages without interruption, it can perform deep scans, it has a built-in vulnerability management module, it can easily generate technical and compliance reports, and it has the most advanced SQLi and cross-site scripting testing.

Parasoft: Parasoft offers efficient security testing solutions to prevent potential vulnerabilities. To start with, it develops codes that comply with security standards, all documentation work are carried out by complying with privacy and security standards, it implements the SAST (static application security testing) process to identify any security weakness earlier in the development lifecycle, incorporates security industry risk models from CERT, CWE, and OWASP to understand the risks and identify them quickly, and carry out testing in CI/CD agile environment for better project outcomes.

Strict adherence to cybersecurity testing and compliance standards help organizations to mitigate any risk arising from data breach and potential attacks. Hence, it is important to choose the right test automation tool for security and compliance testing to keep the business up and running without any reputational harm, business disruption, or loss of business.

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