Introducing SSA

Your Most Valuable Software Is Also Your Most Vulnerable

It’s the ultimate irony: The versatile software you depend on to run your business also puts it at risk. Your business applications hold the business processes and the data that form the lifeblood of your company. Yet, even as they open your business up to more customers and partners, the security holes your software contains leave you vulnerable to attack. Relentless and destructive data predators are ready to pounce. Today’s hackers, organized crime cartels and enemy nations are highly adept at quickly turning security flaws into stolen data and cash.

Enterprise Software Is Inherently Susceptible

Today’s enterprise software is built using open standards and service-oriented architectures - technologies that make applications accessible, modular and faster to develop. For development teams, however, securing these applications still takes a back seat to functionality, quality and performance. As a result, undetected security flaws in software pose the greatest risk to your operations.

Existing Security Measures Create a False Sense of Security

Research firm The Gartner Group estimates that 75 percent of all security reaches occur at the application layer¹.Yet enterprises are focused almost solely on perimeter solutions that harden the network, while leaving business applications and data assets behind the firewall unprotected.

Although spending on perimeter-only strategies continues to grow, reported breaches more than doubled in 2007².The cost of recovering from even a single data breach now averages $6.3 million — up 31 percent since 2006 and nearly 90 percent since 2005³.

Fortify Software - Enabling Software Security Assurance

Software Security Assurance (SSA) is a growing industry trend that refers to technologies and techniques that enable you to maximize the flexibility, enhanced capabilities and easy availability of enterprise software without exposing your operations to attacks that can threaten your business. In short SSA answers the question “How do you know your business is secure?”

Our vision and implementation of Software Security Assurance results in applications that are inherently secure and impervious to attack, even if intruders get past network perimeter defenses.  With solutions from Fortify Software, you can enhance software assurance by identifying and resolving your most critical application vulnerabilities in less time and for less cost. In addition, our solutions integrate seamlessly with the tools and processes your already have in place, enabling you to make Software Security Assurance a core business process.

1 Theresa Lanowitz, Now Is the Time for Security at the Application Level, December 1, 2005, The Gartner Group.

2 Ponemon Institute Study, 2007.

3 Ibid.