The Guardian's Arsenal: 5 Essential Security Measures to Safeguard Your Digital Products

Safeguarding your company's assets, personnel, and operations from online threats is paramount In today's digital landscape. The term "cybersecurity" encompasses a wide range of measures necessary to mitigate the ever-increasing risk of cyberattacks.

In this era of information, digital product security has taken center stage. As attacks and malicious actors grow more sophisticated, customers now prioritize products with robust security measures. Consequently, product security has evolved from a mere afterthought for developers to a fundamental consideration in people's minds.

According to Accenture's cyber attack statistics for 2023, 43% of cyberattacks are targeted at SMBs. On the other hand, approx 14% of the targeted SMBs can deal with this attack. As a result, consumers are actively seeking products with high safety ratings.

Top security measures for building secure digital products entail the proactive approaches manufacturers take to ensure the creation of robust products. Unfortunately, breaches and malicious third parties have become increasingly formidable despite heightened cybersecurity.

Therefore, if you're looking for the top security measures for building secure digital products, find out in this blog all the strategies to bolster the security of digital products, critical security measures to follow, and more.

Importance of Building Secure Digital Products

Digital security entails safeguarding your online presence, including identity, data protection, and assets. But beyond AppSec and IoT security, digital product security aids embedded device teams in creating secure products.

As integrated devices often merge software and hardware components, product security heeds to AppSec to bolster software security.

Top Security Measures to Consider While Securing Digital Products

Only some strategies for ensuring security in digital product development will work uniformly well. These are the major strategies to follow while securing digital products and retaining security in digital product development:

You can't prevent intrusion by getting a copyright. But it will help make seeking redressal hassle-free when someone imitates your product. Hence, copyrighting is one of the best security measures to consider during digital product development. It showcases that you're the legit owner of a particular item. Therefore, you can sue someone for contravening the copyright upon stealing your product.

Secure your digital product with .htaccess

.htaccess is the name of a hidden file that most websites have. To see this, you must have complete access to the web hosting server of your website. You may edit this file to impede unregistered access to specific folders on the server. Hence, it's a robust way to safeguard your digital products or downloads.

Generate product licenses

Creating product licenses is one of the best practices for secure digital product development. This is the best measure to prevent theft and every time you want to access the product, enter the license key.

The enormous benefits of generating product licenses are:

  • Remote locking

You may disable the license if a customer engages in malicious activity or demands a refund. It will help block future downloads and unauthenticated available product copies.

  • Strong protection

You can't invade a license key. So its protection quality is solid.

  • Impede reprinting

You may use licensing software to immobilize print functionality in the case of eBooks. However, this may discourage readers from producing copies and physically disseminating them.

  • Wards off redistribution

Hackers cannot modify or replicate the file since every file copy is linked to a unique key.

What's the Importance of Cybersecurity in Digital Product Development?

Product security ensures your digital products are safeguarded from exploitation. Here comes the importance of cybersecurity; it's on the minds of the consumers. Optimum cybersecurity implies the market demand for protected digital goods is increasing gradually.

According to a Cisco-conducted survey, 32% of the participants have jumped into another product because of security issues or data sharing standards.

Cybersecurity is vital in digital product development because it protects different data types against loss and theft. The initial step is integrating information security into the elementary design of services and products.

More giant enterprises have created formal management processes to underpin the demands of conventional software development with daily release cycles. These processes mandate cybersecurity reviews at checkpoints via the development phase and vulnerability inspection after development.

Brand-new products are the lifeblood of every business as they let organizations evolve to meet customers' needs. It is believed that out of the thousands of items that hit the marketplace each year, between 70 and 80% fail. Therefore, a corporation can only use thoughtful preparation to reduce risks and succeed if it has a robust product development approach. The examples of companies that have prioritized security in their development are the following:

Netflix

It's one of the best streaming entertainment services, with more than 232.5 million subscribers, according to 2023's Statista report. The product security and development team at Netflix categorizes monthly retention due to the company's growth and monetization. In its product development process, Netflix follows consumer science, customization, and original content.

Zoom

This cloud-based conferencing tool helps communicate with anyone through audio, chat, and video. In addition, it has collaborated with Oracle Cloud to underpin infrastructure abilities and bolster security and privacy.

What are the best practices for securing digital product development?

You need to make sure the digital products must be as protected as they can be. Also, it should appeal to privacy-oriented customers. Therefore, the best practices for securing digital product development are the following:

Safety from the beginning

You may commence your journey by enacting a transparent security strategy. Although some security measures are more challenging than others, it's crucial to have professional advice at this stage. It may include embellishing a safe environment enclosing internal scanning and stringent code reviews. Also, remember to protect your website with SSL/TLS.

Better to prevent than to treat

Fending off digital infection is the right strategy than fixing it. Therefore, owning a subject matter professional focused entirely on security within the product development team is crucial. It's because prevention is a cost-efficient way to ensure security is a leading priority from the beginning.

Investigate and re-investigate security

Penetration investigation isn't beneficial in isolation. However, it remains a top-notch way to measure your security levels and discover vulnerabilities.

Everything counts

Every component of an item can be made secure. The framework, product layout, frontend, and backend are all included in this.

Consider the product lifecycle

You must consider the whole product lifecycle if you're worried about security. It consists of early development along with the ideas phase, marketing time, and eventual withdrawal.

Although enhancing digital product security is not difficult, it must be handled correctly and from the start. This entails increasing security consciousness via your goods, risk evaluation, threat modeling, ongoing security level evaluation, and further testing.

The extra work is worthwhile since product security advantages consistently surpass the risks of inadequate safety precautions. Moreover, you can accomplish your corporate objectives without worrying about challenging privacy issues by avoiding expensive mistakes.