Fundamentals of Cloud-based Application Security Testing

The technology interfaces are shifting to mobile-based or device-based applications. People are eager to acquire innovative technologies and use them. They don't want any application which cannot fulfill their needs or complex or not functioning well. As such, applications today are coming to the market with countless innovative features to attract customers. On the other hand, the application security threats are also on the rise.

It is crucial to have security testing, as most of the applications have highly sensitive data. If the applications are moving to the cloud, why can’t app security testing? Most companies are focusing on a new approach called Cloud-based security testing to validate the apps and ensure quality with high-level security.

What is Cloud Security?

Cloud security is to secure your application or data hosted on cloud/infrastructure associated with the cloud. It involves the latest techniques and programs to ensure the safety of data stored online against stealing, leakage, and omission. Cloud security includes advantages like:

• Centralized protection: Cloud-based computing centralizes applications and data security
  
  
• Minimized expense: The best advantage of consuming cloud storage for security is that there is no need to invest in dedicated hardware or other equipment.
  
  
• Minimize Administration: When the user chooses the best cloud services provider or cloud security platform, they no need to concentrate on manual security configurations as the cloud offers constant security updates.
  
  
• Credibility: Cloud-based computing services allow the extreme in dependability
  
  

Why Cloud-Based Security Testing Is Important?

Nowadays, all or most of the applications are hosted in the Cloud. Security is one of the major problems for applications.

The main objective of Cloud-based security is to stop any threat or malware from accessing, stealing or manipulating any of our private data. It identifies the threats in the system and measures its potential vulnerabilities. Also, it helps in detecting all possible security risk in the system and help developers in fixing those problems through coding. The cloud-based application security testing is applicable for large application base, applications with low to medium risk and organizations with a strict budget & time restrictions

Cloud-based Application Security Testing gives the feasibility to host the security testing tools on the Cloud for testing. With this process, tools on the Cloud can test the applications. Previously, in traditional testing, you need to have on-premise tools and infrastructure. Now, enterprises are adopting Cloud-based testing techniques, which make the process faster, and cost-effective.

Key elements for Cloud-based Application Security Testing

Here are the three critical elements to be considered while implementing your cloud-based security testing strategy:

Need Scalability

If there is a lack of scalability, it can obstruct the testing activity and make issues related to speed, efficiency, and accuracy. Your testing action should ensure scalability to the testing procedure. This implies the setup of versatility as such the testing process can extend as the organization grows or need updates & better configuration.

Guarantee Accessibility

In the Agile world, the global teams are remotely hosted, and they are working nonstop to deliver the project. Thus, the testing solution must be accessible online over the browser at any time. They must be provided with a centralized dashboard, which offers features for working together continually in the security testing process.

Bring Cost-effectiveness

All the worldwide organizations require cost-efficiency to drive new propositions for the clients. The solution implemented for cloud security testing must bring higher ROI and reduce the testing cost.

Rapid inspection of the testing tools and parallel execution of tests can cut down the testing efforts and expenses. With this kind of tool, any number of repetitions won’t bring greater expenses.

Types of Testing Performed in Cloud

Testing in a cloud ensures that functional needs are met and emphasis the needs to be placed on nonfunctional testing. Here are different types of testing performed in the Cloud:

• Functional Testing- It ensures requirements are satisfied by the application.
  
  
• System Testing — This technique evaluates requirements & functionalities from end to end perspective.
  
  
• Acceptance Testing — It ensures that the software is ready to be used by an End-User.
• Non-functional Testing- This testing is to ensure that the expected requirements are met, including Quality of service, Usability, Reliability, and Response time.
  
  
• Security Testing- It examines the app and ensures six basic principles - Authorization, Availability, Confidentiality, Authentication, Integrity, and Non-repudiation.
  
  
• Scalability and Performance Testing - These testing help to understand the system behavior under a certain expected load.
  
  
• Compatibility Testing- It ensures compatibility with various cloud environments and instances of different operating systems.
  
  
• Disaster Recovery Testing-Recovery Testing allows to evaluate disaster recovery time & ensure that the application is available to the user again with minimum data Loss
  
  
• Multi-Tenancy testing -This testing refers to software architecture in which its single instance runs on server & serves multiple tenants. In this testing, cloud environment aims at providing a dedicated share of the instance to every tenant including, tenant individual functionality, data, user management, configuration, and non-functional properties

Cloud Testing Environments & Cloud Testing Tools

A Cloud testing environment helps to test the performance, security and 3rd party dependencies of the applications. Since the primary assets of the cloud-like servers, networks, and databases are predominantly accessed through the environment; testers get more flexibility when approaching each case. Cloud testing environments are of three types:

• Private or publish environment
• Cloud-based Test environment
• Hybrid environment

A wide range of testing tools is used in the testing of the cloud-based application. Some of them are as follows:

• SOASTA CloudTest: CloudTest is one of the largest, highly scalable, and global load testing platforms that help you to quickly validate if your project is ready for success.
  
  
• LoadStorm: LoadStorm has a simple user interface. It can generate scripts representing different user types and allocate the right volume to each.
  
  
• BlazeMeter: BlazeMeter is delivered as a self-service web application for developers and Quality Assurance (QA) professionals providing a comprehensive easy-to-use load and performance testing solution. Even it can generate a report on the most complex load testing requirements and environments.
  
  
• Nessus: This cloud-testing tool can be used to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and missing patches. This cloud-testing tool is a boon for banking and healthcare industries as it can generate an audit report as well. This tool is one of the most widely used testing tools and its benefits are not just limited only with healthcare and banking but for other industries as well.
  
  
• App Thwack: This tool can test iOS, Android and web apps with utmost accuracy and precision
  
  
• Jenkins Dev@Cloud: It allows for continuous deployment; development and integration so that you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty of cloud testing tools. This tool provides a large number of mobile tools as well, so that you can test your product with the utmost ease.
  
  
• Xamarin test cloud: It is a UI acceptance-testing tool used on mobile devices. It also uses the NUnit testing library so that the test results are accurate and precise. This tool can test a thousand physical devices at a time and shows accurate results.
  
  
• AppPerfect: This tool concentrates on Cloud testing for web applications, wherein we can do functional tests and load tests for web applications using real traffic over the Internet. We can test web applications on different browsers, hardware, and operating system combinations by using the Cloud Testing framework. We can design, develop and execute your tests using your servers over the cloud infrastructure.
  
  
• TestLink: – This cloud-based testing tool offers a broad range of testing services including test plans, test cases, and user management.
  
  
• Watir: As it is an open-source and effective tool, you don’t have to spend anything to use it. It consists of Ruby libraries, which makes the tool more user-friendly and powerful.

As you can see, the testing in the cloud doesn’t even hard to achieve. If you are attempting to perform testing on your cloud environment, combine these testing solutions, you will get the opportunity to maintain a highly secured cloud application.

This blog is co-authored by Chandrashekhar Pawar, Ruchira More, Vaibhav Langore , Yogesh Gadhavi , Rashmi Binzade , Sulekha Sardar