The Changing Landscape in Modern Software Products

The digital product development landscape has completely transformed in the last few years. Modern development approaches like Agile and DevOps have taken over. So have cloud and SaaS products that make implementing changes and introducing new features quick and seamless.

Today’s era is also very different in terms of the aspects of the product that define success: in contrast to the early days when quality, cost, and timeliness of product delivery were the main factors to be taken into consideration. In today’s digitally transformed era, security has taken center stage. 

Today, security is a key foundation on which successful products are built. This shift towards a security-first culture is a consequence of the growing concerns over data security and privacy, especially as the pace and scale of cybersecurity attacks constantly mount. It is estimated that cybercrime will cost the world a total of $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.

With organizations big and small concerned about the far-reaching impact of non-secure products, DevSecOps has come in to completely change the approach to security. By making security endemic and integrating it across every aspect of the development lifecycle, it ensures the products of tomorrow are built on a strong security foundation. 

In this series blog, let us look at the changing landscape in modern products. 

5 New-Age Changes in the Era of Modern Products

As change becomes the only constant in product development, developers have a lot to contend with. In addition to keeping pace with changing consumer habits, evolving trends, and an intensifying competitive landscape, today’s enterprise products also have to keep up with several new-age changes in their ways of working too:

Remote Working Users

Today’s complex products require extensive face-to-face communication and scrum meetings between different team members, so they can engage in intense discussions to track progress, work on issues, and ensure all milestones are met within time and budget. But the sudden shift to a remote work model has completely altered the dynamics of team conversations. With all members of product development teams working from home, the product development approach is no longer what it used to be. 

Unsecured Devices and Networks

Long before the pandemic, organizations had begun strengthening their bring your own devices (BYOD) policies. They were looking to ensure security even while empowering application development users to use their own devices to carry out daily tasks, collaborate with peers, and meet deadlines. Post pandemic, the percentage of personal devices being used to access enterprise resources has further increased, with as many as 56% using their own computers in today’s remote work model – most of which are unsecured and fail to meet the required enterprise security requirements. 

User Management

In many product development organizations, it is also a struggle to manage the growing number of users trying to communicate with each other, access enterprise data, and work together to meet shared goals. Handling various aspects of user management such as identity and access control and user provisioning (and de-provisioning) across an explosion of new devices and browsers further adds to the woes. 

Growing Public Cloud Usage

Although the adoption of cloud has enabled enterprise product development teams to flexibly adapt traditional, on-premise development strategies, the growing usage of public cloud services brings with it a new set of challenges. The security and privacy of data that resides in the public cloud is still a big concern for most product development organizations. So is the fear of loss of control over their own data and infrastructure. 

Third Party Integrations

With modern customers using a bevy of new tools and technologies today, streamlining the overall product experience with integration in mind has become a top priority for application developers. Creating room for third party integrations that allow for a seamless, consistent, and wholesome experience is now essential for products that wish to make a mark in the complex enterprise tech landscape. The changes software products are forced to go through due to third party integrations, interoperability efforts, compatibility with next-gen tech stack for digital transformation have also changed the landscape for modern products. 

In the next part of this series blog, we will look at the security challenges modern products have had to face and how can DevSecOps help.

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