Cyber Security Challenges: A Strategic Model for the Software Development Organizations

초록

Security is the process of providing protection to the software development industry to mitigate various kinds of threats such as cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks are increasing rapidly at an unprecedented rate in the software development industry. Due to rapid increases in cyber-attacks, well-reputed Software Development Organizations (SDO) and government institutions are facing challenges related to vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks and potential threats. Furthermore, cyber-attacks are evolving; therefore, it is challenging to enable cyber security approaches to assure security on continuous observation. Thus, SDO are facing serious problems such as cyber theft, malware attacks, insider's threats, etc. Therefore, there is a need to investigate challenges related to cyber security affecting SDO; how these cyber-attacks harm and negatively effects the organizations in context of software development and how to mitigate with these evolving cyber-attacks enabling organizations for secure software development. Hence, in our proposed research study, a deliberate and articulate attempt is made by developing a strategic model known as Cyber Security Challenges in Software Development (CSC-SD) to identify challenges negatively effecting the SDOs during the development process of software's. Furthermore, our proposed research uses a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify the challenging factors of the cyber-attacks impacting organizations in the context of the SDO by developing a search string based on the defined research questions. The SLR is performed on 77 research articles selected based on the inclusion/exclusion and quality criteria from different databases, for instance, Google Scholar, IEEE, Springer, ACM, ResearchGate, and ScienceDirect. Based on the conducted SLR, 11 potential challenges are identified and investigated in order to facilitate the SDO to avoid or mitigate the potential threats posed by cyber-attacks. The identified potential challenges include cyber-attack exposure, knowledge deficiency, framework gaps, technical support limitations, disaster preparedness gaps, resource constraints, confidentiality and trust deficiency, management and measurement gaps, unauthorized access risk, development execution gaps, and quality/reliability concerns. The findings of our research study are intended to substantially aid SDO in fending off the threats posed by cyberattacks. In this way, it will also enable and encourage SDO towards secure software development. Furthermore, the findings of our research study analysis highlight both the similarities and differences in identified 11 potential challenges across various organizations, databases, and research methodologies. Moreover, our proposed research study provides a roadmap to conduct future research with the basic premise to formulate a CSC-SD model.

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