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Application baseline - What should it be?
As a part of my job responsibilities and growth plan in my organization I was supposed to undergo an examination to test my technical competence and knowledge. While studying a section on application administration something caught my eye. One part of the subject was on analysis of prominent services of web servers and application servers. While outlining the reasons why performance issues might occur in a web application, one of the reasons given was security. Risking copyright infringement, I am pasting the line verbatim:
The line in itself is fairly innocuous, but it clearly demonstrates the way of thinking or mind set of the software industry as a whole. Security is something added as an afterthought, something not core to the system, but bolted on later to comply with regulations or to patch a breach that happened. The performance testers and engineers also test the application and base line the performance without security and hence it is perceived that security makes the application performance go down.
But in today's scenario, isn't it core to protect the integrity and confidentiality of our data which contains core information about our business, customers, trade secrets etc? So why is security still an overhead? Something that brings down the performance and should be avoided if we can?
In my opinion, security should be the core component of ANY application. It doesn't matter if the application is facing the internet or if it is exclusively meant for internal use. Any performance benchmarking should be done with application security in place and not without security. Once we achieve that baseline, then we will get the true picture of application performance. In today's world security is indispensible and is not optional. Period.
- Category(s)
- Technology
- Information Security
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- http://www.dharwadkar.com/weblog/appbaseline/tbping
