Traditional Security Models Are Not Fit for Modern Application Development
Citizen development is the new wave of application development, and allows users from across the organization to create apps and integrations they require quickly, without putting pressure on overstretched IT teams to create those solutions for them. As Generative AI is folded into low-code/no-code platforms, this only adds to the pressure to get security right.
Here are some inherent risks that come with citizen development:
- No way of ensuring that citizen developer-built software solutions align with software security and governance standards
- Difficulty in maintaining inventory of how many low-code/no-code applications exist within the organization, who built them and which data they can manage, and if they present potential risks
- More citizen developers mean more makers, more apps, automations or integrations, and more tools in the mix, all of which can amplify security risks.
- Challenges identifying data leakage or suspicious activity derived from applications created by citizen developers
- No clear understanding of where risks lie, and no way of defining different levels of risk that would allow them to enforce actions that stop low-code/no-code applications from violating those policies
- Citizen developers can use SaaS applications to create apps, automations, and integrations without any oversight, or permission
Zenity Ensures Citizen Developers Are Responsible Developers
Zenity unleashes citizen developers to safely use no-code/low-code platforms for creating the things that they need, while also ensuring their creations meet centrally-defined security and compliance requirements. Zenity’s solution for securing citizen development hinges on 3 key pillars: Discovery, Risk Assessment, and Governance.
Zenity provides a continuously updated cross-platform inventory of which low-code/no-code applications, automations or integrations exist within the organization, who built them, creation and modification timeline, change tracking, and data flow relationships and tracking.
The Zenity platform also generates visualization capabilities to investigate resource relationships, and provides in-depth views of data movement that results from citizen-developed apps, automations or integrations – no matter how many platforms, environments or resources you have.
Zenity provides built-in security controls that allow citizen-developed apps, automations or integrations to be held to the same security and governance standards as apps created by professional developers, even without the presence of a traditional software development lifecycle.
Want to identify insecure transfer of business data, insecure user authentication, or lack of PoLP, for example? Zenity lets you do that, in a continuous, centralized way.
Zenity doesn’t just provide alerts for risk. The Zenity platform allows security teams to automatically mitigate risk in real-time through enforcement playbooks and customizable management policies. The Zenity platform gathers insights based on the business logic of your apps, enabling security teams to set rules per low-code/no-code platform or environment – such as production vs. personal productivity . That means security integrations are baked into the applications’ core, regardless of which tools citizen developers are using, or how those tools are used within your organization. Policies are also highly customizable, so admins can define triggers and actions based on unique organizational requirements.
Hello, Citizen Developers.
Goodbye, Security Risks.
Citizen development is a powerful strategy for businesses, and is the driving force behind modern application development. With Zenity, enterprises can capitalize fully on everything that citizen development has to offer, without worrying about the security and compliance risks that can undercut the value of this approach.
Want to learn more?
See us in action!