IT Ecology, a leading software testing consultancy firm, has announced that it has become a gold partner of CyberRes, a Micro Focus line of business. CyberRes is one of the world’s largest security portfolios assisting customers to navigate the changing threat landscape by building both cyber and business resiliency within their teams and organisations.

The focus area for IT Ecology’s IT Security business unit will be supporting local customers with leading-edge, enterprise-scale security testing and monitoring solutions as well as consultative, implementation and delivery services to support our client’s digital transformation initiatives.

One of the greatest concerns enterprise customers are facing in these initiatives is keeping up with the exponentially increasing attack surface typically created through faster-paced delivery cycles, ever-increasing environment complexity, significantly more modular architectures and the exponential increase in the use of third-party open-source components.

In many organisations, vulnerability testing has been identified as a contributor to delayed delivery, or it has been ignored with dire consequences. Some of the challenges are process related in that security testing is often still relegated to a once-a-quarter exercise. But the real challenge once an organisation recognises the need to incorporate AppSec at every step of the delivery lifecycle, is how to achieve such a Shift-Left AppSec approach that is scalable.

Just as other testing disciplines are moving to a risk-based testing approach, achieving scalable DevSecOps requires a similar mindset. This is accomplished by testing what matters, when it matters within the development process, rather than attempting to testing everything that can be tested all at once.

And to support such a risk-based Shift-Left DevSecOps approach, you need the automation and integration at every leg of the delivery pipeline, from static application security test integration in development; to black-box test integration in test environments; to AppSec monitoring for known vulnerabilities in open-source, third-party components.

Single pane of glass

Not all vulnerabilities can be detected with either one of the above-mentioned disciplines and so a combination of these techniques is required. Fortify not only delivers all of these capabilities, it does so more intelligently and is more streamlined than separate tooling while delivering a single pane of glass visualising your security posture. Fortify also scales horizontally to deliver parallel executions with intelligent resource allocation to further speed up scans. Furthermore, Fortify supports the risk-based testing approach by enabling prioritisation of tests so that a subset of scans may be executed early in the development lifecycle against then available code, leaving more rigorous all-encompassing tests for later.

For more in-depth information on this topic, please feel free to download the relevant white paper here.

For IT Ecology, already a long-term partner for Micro Focus ADM (application delivery management) solutions, the market-leading CyberRes Fortify platform was an obvious choice to be selected as a key offering in our solution portfolio.

“We welcome IT Ecology, now also as a Gold Partner to our CyberRes offering and look forward to assisting IT Ecology’s clients with our market-leading CyberRes solutions,” said Nathalie Ing-Gussmann, channel head, CyberRes South Africa. “Our solutions will assist IT Ecology customers build secure software faster using our scalable, highly integrable Fortify platform.”

“We are looking forward to be working with IT Ecology to help organisations protect their software, detect risks in their applications and evolve their application security programmes,” said Seph Robbertse, application security specialist, CyberRes South Africa. “Our use cases of DevSecOps and securing the software supply chain fit very well with the work IT Ecology has done for several enterprises in South Africa.”

Our use cases of DevSecOps and securing the software supply chain fit very well with the work IT Ecology has done for several enterprises in South Africa

“We are equally excited to announce the extended partnership with Micro Focus and its CyberRes line of business to advance our security testing portfolio of solutions and services,” said IT Ecology founder and director Dirk Loosen. “The significant skills shortage, especially in the AppSec space, and increasing risks of cyberattacks make Micro Focus the ideal partner to deliver more automated and streamlined AppSec testing to our customers. Complemented with IT Ecology specialist services and CyberRes Team’s experience and support, we believe we are ready to assist our customers with the challenge to deliver DevSecOps at scale.”

About IT Ecology
Founded in 2004, IT Ecology made it its mission to provide technical testing and monitoring competencies to the sub-Saharan African market that excels at delivering against unique customer requirements. Customers call upon IT Ecology as the solution thinkers and advisers. Coupled with a can-do attitude, our team has delighted our customers again and again, exceeding expectations.

For more information, visit www.itecology.co.za or visit IT Ecology on LinkedIn.