Here are some of the core new application requirements:
- Highly scalable: The social platform has grown exponentially over the last decade and people are more tech-savvy than ever.
- Resilient, fault-tolerant, and highly available: downtime in your application is something which enterprises are not ready to take in modern times; downtime of even seconds is now creating huge losses for many big businesses.
- High performance: If your site is slow, people have a tendency to leave and search for alternatives. People have a short attention span and will not stay or come back if your website performs poorly.
- Hyper-personalization: Users need personalized websites rather than generic websites, and this puts huge pressure on servers to do many intensive analyses in real time.
With technology in everyone's hands (in some form or another, most people use technology), users are quite well-versed in privacy policies and application security. They are aware of most of the security requirements, and companies take time to educate users about the importance of security and the ways they should look for security flaws in applications. You might already know that if a site runs on HTTP as opposed to HTTPS (SSL) and Chrome tags, these sites quite clearly show the users as Not Secure in the address bar. With more people becoming knowledgeable about technology, these aspects are well-known among the majority of users and security has become one of the most talked about subjects in the IT landscape.
Another important aspect is data privacy. Some users are not concerned about sharing their data but some are quite reticent. Many governments recognize this fear and have started making many rules and regulations in this space. One such data privacy rule is the well-known General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has been enforced since May 25th, 2018.
The European Union (EU) GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizen's data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy. For more information, you can check this link: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-99-gdpr/.
Modern browsers have also given us enough tools to look at many aspects of a web application in a more detailed manner with regards to security. In addition, browsers have been enhanced with more and more features (for example, a cookie was once one of the options for storing data, but now we have other options, such as localStorage and indexedDB), making it more vulnerable to security breaches and attacks from an ever-open hacker sitting on the sidelines.
To achieve these various application requirements, organizations go to public cloud providers instead of their own on-premise datacenters. This puts applications in a more vulnerable state and security aspects come to the forefront. The various components that constitute the application need to be highly secured and nonhackable.
The technological landscape is constantly growing, with new technologies popping up and getting adopted by the developer community. Because of this and the various technology improvements it brings in, many organizations have to adopt these technologies to be compete within the market. This again puts huge pressure on security, as these shiny new technologies may not have concentrated enough effort on making security a major requirement.
All in, having rigid security in an application is a no-brainer requirement and organizations, and end users, are well aware of this fact.