Software security in 2025 - Four encouraging trends

The good news is that over the last few years software development organizations have embraced their role in ensuring the security of their applications in the face of ever-increasing threats to their organizations. The bad news is that they are struggling with how to protect code without overburdening developers, slowing down releases, and generally hindering innovation.

Software Security in 2025: Four Encouraging Trends

The team at OpsMx, a secure software delivery company, sees four very positive trends emerging in 2025 that offer hope that development teams and their businesses will be able to retool their strategies and implement best practices to deliver greater security and accelerate innovation without higher costs.

Security automation from the start will simplify and improve security processes

Because of the importance of security, it is often mandated by top management without a clear understanding of the time and complexity that implementing security frameworks places on the development team. Sadly, the additional security burden often has the opposite of the intended effect, as the additional workload overwhelms teams with tight deadlines and additional overhead. This can actually increase the number of vulnerabilities that make their way into applications.

In 2025, however, growing awareness of the benefits of security automation in the software development lifecycle is on track to reach the boardroom. Instead of simply pushing new manual security requirements onto developers, companies will invite developers into the application planning stage to enable integration of automated security tools early in the development workflow. Automated, developer-friendly security solutions will minimize the need to disrupt development workflows and allow developers to focus on coding while still improving security.

Development teams stop trying to drive vulnerabilities to zero

It seems to make sense that if you find a security vulnerability in your code, you should fix it. After all, isn’t the goal to have zero vulnerabilities in code? The reality is that zero vulnerabilities is neither practical nor necessary. Not all vulnerabilities are equally damaging and easy to exploit, and more pose very little risk. At the same time more vendors than ever before have the authority to identify Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), which has led to a growing tide of CVEs inundating organizations with a flood of security vulnerabilities. As a result, trying to achieve a goal of zero vulnerabilities is not feasible for overworked teams, squanders precious resources, and often overlooks the most critical threats.

In 2025, we believe a new best practice will take hold across development organizations as teams begin using risk-based vulnerability management to prioritize threats and ensure secure and functional applications. By utilizing new tools that assist in prioritizing the level of risk to the application and its users based on exploitability, usage, and potential impact, organizations will more effectively address the most critical threats and better protect their applications.

Reliance on open-source software components increases, but so do risk management strategies

A 2022 Linux Foundation report found that 70-90% of any given software code base was made up of open source software components. Other surveys have found that over 95% of software includes open source. However, while OSS offers unparalleled flexibility and efficiency, organizations are increasingly aware of the security risks it can introduce.

In 2025, software development teams will put more focus on addressing potential vulnerabilities in OSS by implementing proven risk management strategies. By conducting regular open source security assessments, monitoring the health of open source projects, maintaining updated inventories of OSS components, and prioritizing alternative components with more robust security profiles, organizations will begin successfully navigating the delicate balance between leveraging open-source technologies and safeguarding against potential threats.

Adoption of open-source security tools soars

Development teams often maintain a dozen or more DevOps and security tools as part of their application security program. Yet even as costs escalate security gaps remain. In 2025, CFOs will say “enough” and begin mandating that the organization reduce expenses associated with security programs while continuing to grow their security capabilities. This will drive a strategic focus on adopting powerful open-source security tools as an alternative to the proprietary and often costly vendor-supported solutions that have dominated the marketplace. Over the next couple of years, we expect the trend will accelerate as security teams recognize that open-source security tool capabilities have advanced in recent years and are now on par – and in many cases better – than proprietary tools.

Security is a journey that never ends, and new threats will continue to emerge. The widespread recognition that software security must begin at the very earliest stages of the software development and delivery lifecycle – and do so without burdening developers and stifling innovation – is very encouraging. All of us in the application development community can look forward to continuing advances in the coming year.

About Gopinath Rebala

Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility software engineering as well as the security and machine learning architectures of OpsMx’s secure software delivery solutions. Rebala is a frequent speaker on security compliance and strategies for security first continuous delivery of software. Rebala also has a strong connection with OpsMx customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations for some of the world’s largest companies.