The custom software solution is now a buzzword in the world of technology. Organizations no matter small or large or whatever domain they belong, are adopting custom-built software applications. These bespoke software solutions are helping businesses reap benefits including business optimization, automation, swift reporting and analytics, and integration. Out of all these manifest benefits, security and scalability are the most important ones. Organizations irrespective of their domain like healthcare, or their size whether small, startups, or enterprise-level business houses need the security and scalability of custom software solutions. These features are important and are on top of their priority list.
However how one can ensure the security and scalability of custom software products is the foremost concern for every software house. IT companies often struggle to meet these lofty goals.
You should not worry about this. We have consulted and discussed many software architects and have come up with industry best practices and measures that can help you design and implement secure and scalable custom software solutions.
Let’s discuss these measures and practices one by one.
What is a Secure and Scalable Custom Software Solution?
Secure and scalable custom software solutions are those tailor-made and customized software applications and products that are designed and implemented in a way to ensure reliable security against various cyber threats and meet the growing and anticipated future needs of businesses.
These customized software solutions can grow and offer enhanced capabilities in line with the growing needs and requirements of businesses. They are capable of meeting the specific needs of businesses and organizations such as cybersecurity, automation, cloud platforms, and the like.
How Can You Develop Secure Custom Software Solutions?
The development of customized software applications entails the processing of huge databases. The security of this database should be of topmost priority of any custom software development company. I
Here are some industry best practices to ensure the development of secure custom solutions, thus preventing breaches and maintaining user trust.
Patching Systems and Software
Hackers often attack the systems and software infrastructure that is outdated and old. If you regularly patch your system and software, there will be less vulnerability against cyberattacks and other issues.
Whether you are building custom software applications in-house, make sure that your team of software developers and designers review the codes, scan them against any vulnerability, and modify codes whenever there is any need for change.
Similarly, you should conduct security audits and vulnerability assessments to find any weaknesses and rectify them as well. In this regard, the conduction of penetration testing can be of great help. This testing helps you simulate a real-world attack and help you uncover weak spots in your custom software solution.
Database Encryption:
Database encryption is the key to delivering a secure custom software solution for customers. This ensures that only those who can access critical information who are relevant and need it. It prevents unauthorized access to data.
You can undertake many measures to ensure data encryption. For instance, software developers can deploy protocols like Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer, HTTP, Data-at-Rest encryption, encryption algorithm, salting, and hashing, among other measures, to ensure reliable data encryption.
Access Control:
Denying access to custom software applications is another way to ensure security. Though it may appear frustrating to use a strong password having a combination of lower and capital letters as well as special letters, it is the first line of defense. You must motivate users to have a strong password because no matter how best security measures you have implemented at the backend, any negligence by users can wreak havoc on your software applications.
Multiple types of access control layers can protect software at the user level. For instance, multi-factor authentication, secure password recovery procedure, a requirement to change password after some interval, and more.
You must also remove temporary, guest, and default accounts from a web browser. There should be a robust incident response plan to react promptly to any mishaps and deny attackers any room to achieve their nefarious objectives.
Training and Capacity Building:
Security threats are constantly evolving and need continuing, pre-planned, and comprehensive training of all members of custom software development companies. Every employee whether in a direct role in custom software development or indirect should be imparted training. They should be aware of the evolving nature of threats and the best security measures to preempt and tackle them.
Other Security Measures:
Here are some additional security measures recommended for protecting sensitive information.
- Testing your custom software product before publishing it.
- Staying consistent with the latest coding standards and practices.
- Building and sharing libraries for oft-repeated tasks.
These are some of the best security measures being practiced to protect critical and sensitive information for building secure custom software solutions. Now we move to our next question which is how to design and implement scalable custom software solutions.
But first, we look what is the scalability of custom software.
Understanding Custom Software Scalability:
In this world of fast-paced technological development, customers’ preferences, attitudes, and behaviors change rapidly. They are fed up with a product, a feature in software, or a service, you need to constantly evolve, update, and bring improvements to remain in the business. Here comes the scalability of custom software.
Scalability is the ability of software products to enhance their capacity and functionalities to meet the growing demands of users. So, whenever you update your software, overhaul it, or change it, it remains stable. You can enhance its features to handle increased workloads and support increasing data volume if you are using a custom software solution. Software scalability permits you to handle an increased amount of work without compromising performance, functionality, and reliability
Build Custom Software with Future/Anticipated Growth in Mind:
Designing and developing software should be a well-thought-out process. Though you don’t necessarily build software with abundant features, building one with essential features to keep pace with future needs is a good idea. All types of expansions such as database and speed should be kept in mind.
You can design a custom software solution with modular architecture. This allows the scaling of the different components of your software products independently and smoothly. Furthermore, you can allocate a specific number of resources for that particular component as well in line with the needs.
Choose an Expansion-Enabling Technology:
Choosing software development technology that supports scalability. You can use well-known libraries, suitable search algorithms, and the like to build scalable software solutions.
For instance, you can use the following technologies to achieve the intended scalability.
- Cloud Computing such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc.
- Microservices such as Docker, Kubernetes, Spring Boot, etc.
- Serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Function, IBM Cloud Functions, etc.
These are some technologies that don’t support scalability:
- Monolithic Architecture
- Traditional Virtualization
- Single-Tier Applications
- Legacy Technologies
So, choose your software development technology carefully, it will determine the future capacity of your software products to scale up without any adverse impact on its performance and functionalities.
Select Suitable Database Storage Type:
Similar to the type of software development technology, the choice of using the ultimate database storage can also hinder or enable future scalability. You can have two choices in this regard: object store database and relational database.
In the perspective of scalability, an objective store database is more favorable, particularly, if you want to make quick changes. Contrary to this, a relational database can give you access to information, but it does have some low-level issues.
Therefore, choose a database carefully because it could have complications for your future efforts to scale up your software products.
Write a Clean Code:
A code that is well written is another means to develop a scalable custom software application. You must use a programming technique such as KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) to write code that is easy to read and understand. It is key to ensuring future scalability as simply written code makes it easier for other developers to quickly understand it and expand it to add new features and capabilities.
In this way, well-written code makes it easier for scalability because programmers would find it easy to analyze the script and create a newer one. Therefore, we can say with confidence that scalability depends to a larger extent on the quality of the code written.
Practice Caching Techniques:
Caching mechanisms are also a good way to design a scalable software application. Caching is a process in which pre-computed results are stored which can be accessed by applications without requiring database queries. Caching techniques ensure optimum performance of software applications and improved response time because requests for handling data can be avoided.
The caching mechanism helps secure scalability in many ways. For instance, reduced database load, minimized network traffic, load balancing, and handling traffic spikes, among others, are some ways help to build scalable custom software solutions.
Some Other Ways of Building Scalable Custom Software Solutions:
You can consider adhering following practices to ensure software scalability.
- Considering horizontal scaling along with vertical ones.
- Making the addition of future capabilities simple and convenient
- Maintaining and updating your custom software
Wrapping Up:
In this blog, you have learned that building and implementing secure and scalable custom software solutions are key to keeping you in the business and delivering products and services effectively and efficiently. We have discussed that you can ensure security by adhering to some specific measures. Similarly, we have also provided a plan of action to build a scalable custom software application.
In a world of quick transformation in demands and business landscape, businesses need digital interventions that are secure and scalable. They can ill-afford negligence in this regard, and your organization must dedicate human and material resources to incorporate these features in your custom software products and applications.
Thanks for your reading. Hopefully, this blog will help you build a secure and scalable custom software solution.