Navigating In-House and Third-Party Software: A Strategic Approach for Enterprise IT Leaders

Executive Summary

Enterprise IT leaders share a common mission to ensure that their systems help their organizations achieve their larger objectives safely, efficiently, and ethically. Navigating the complexities of diverse technologies developed both in-house and by third parties is an integral part of this mission. Each presents distinct management challenges and this is particularly evident when mitigating risks stemming from operational bugs and from security vulnerabilities.

This article provides a strategic approach to managing these challenges, highlighting key differences between in-house and third-party software management focusing in on the unique risks posed by both operational bugs and security vulnerabilities – two distinct, but overlapping, categories of exposure.

Key Definitions and Discussion Points

Managing In-House Software: With full control over development and deployment, your team can detect, prioritize, and remediate bugs directly. Tools like SonarQube, Checkmarx, and CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins and GitLab CI are crucial for maintaining security and operational stability.

Third-Party Software Challenges: Managing third-party software requires close coordination with external vendors who communicate differently and manage a vast user base. The burden is on the in-house IT team to ensure they receive accurate and timely information. Here is where BugZero proves essential for centralizing, validating, and curating vendor publications and alerts, filtering relevant data, and feeding the enriched bug data into your ITSM.

Operational Bugs vs. Security Vulnerabilities: While closely related, even overlapping – operational bugs and security vulnerabilities are distinct and pose unique challenges. Examples illustrate the often-under-appreciated fact that operational bugs with no specific security issues can cause system disruptions that are just as costly and damaging.

The Cost of System Outages: Regardless of whether outages stem from operational bugs or security vulnerabilities, the financial and reputational impacts are severe. This reality is increasingly amplified by regulatory bodies that often do not distinguish between the two when laying down reporting and other obligations.

IT leaders share a common mission: ensure that your systems operate safely, efficiently, and ethically to drive your organization’s success. Achieving this mission requires navigating a complex landscape of both internally developed software and an ever-growing portfolio of third-party software and services. While both types of software are critical to achieving your organizational goals, they come with distinct management challenges, particularly when it comes to addressing operational bugs and security vulnerabilities. 

In this installment, we explore the differences in managing in-house and third-party software and distinguish between requirements to manage the risks stemming from operational bugs and security vulnerabilities. A solid understanding these differences is a foundational element to aligning strategies and tools to safeguard your organization’s IT infrastructure. 

When managing in-house software, you have full control over the codebase, development processes, and deployment pipelines. This direct control allows you to: 

• Detect Bugs Early: Using tools like SonarQube and Checkmarx for Static Application Security Testing (SAST), you can identify vulnerabilities during the development phase before they reach production. 

• Prioritize Fixes: Bugs can be logged and tracked in systems like Jira or GitHub Issues, where internal teams can prioritize and address them based on impact and urgency. 

• Automate Remediation: Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools like Jenkins and GitLab CI enable automated testing and deployment, ensuring that bug fixes are swiftly rolled out with minimal disruption. 

Managing third-party software presents a unique set of challenges. Unlike in-house software, where you control every aspect, third-party software involves coordination with external vendors who are managing their software across potentially thousands or even millions of users. Here are some key considerations: 

• Diverse Communication Styles: Vendors communicate differently from one another—some may offer detailed patch notes and proactive updates, while others might provide only minimal information or communicate updates sporadically. This inconsistency can create gaps in your understanding of the risks and required actions. 

• Scalability of Communication: Vendors must manage communications to a broad user base, which can lead to generalized messaging that may not address your specific operational needs or timelines. As a result, critical details about bugs or vulnerabilities might get lost or delayed in the process. 

• IT’s Burden: Despite these challenges, the responsibility falls on your IT team to ensure they receive the right information in a consistent, accurate, and timely fashion. This involves monitoring multiple communication channels, verifying the relevance of updates to your environment, and ensuring that all necessary actions are taken promptly. 

BugZero’s mission: BugZero helps bridge the gap by centralizing bug information from inside each enterprise’s tenant curating only relevant vendor data, filtering and correlating it to each organization’s environment automatically registering changes as they occur.  This ensures that your team has access to consistent, accurate, and timely information inside their trusted ITSM. 

Operational bugs, whether in in-house or third-party software, can lead to significant disruptions: 

• In-House Software: Operational bugs in your internal systems can cause downtime, reduce system performance, or lead to data corruption. Managing these bugs involves direct remediation efforts by your development teams, supported by tools like Nagios or Prometheus for monitoring and detection. 

• Third-Party Software: Here, operational bugs can be particularly challenging as you rely on vendors to provide fixes.  

BugZero uses your organization’s risk framework to automatically assign priorities to bugs, allowing your IT teams to focus on the most critical issues that could lead to system outages or performance degradation. 

Security vulnerabilities and operational bugs are closely related, yet distinct: 

• Overlapping Risks: Operational bugs can translate into security vulnerabilities when they expose the system to potential exploits. For example, a flaw in a third-party application could be both a source of downtime and a gateway for unauthorized access if not addressed promptly. 

• Distinct Causes: Not all security vulnerabilities arise from operational bugs. Vulnerabilities can also stem from issues like misconfigurations, inadequate access controls, or unpatched software. Conversely, not all operational bugs pose security risks—they might simply cause system instability without creating an avenue for attacks. 

While security vulnerabilities often receive the most attention due to their potential to cause breaches and data loss, operational bugs can be equally disruptive—even when they do not pose a direct security risk. These bugs can bring down or degrade systems, leading to significant operational and financial consequences: 

• System Downtime: An operational bug might cause a critical system to crash or behave unpredictably, leading to downtime that affects productivity and business operations. For instance, a bug in a third-party database system could halt your ability to process transactions, directly impacting your bottom line. 

• Performance Degradation: Even if a system remains operational, bugs can slow down performance, leading to inefficiencies. In high-transaction environments like financial services, such degradation can lead to missed opportunities and loss of customer trust. 

BugZero helps mitigate the impact of these bugs by identifying, tracking, and prioritizing them before they cause major disruptions. By focusing on operational defects in third-party software, BugZero ensures that your IT environment remains stable and resilient, even in the face of non-security-related bugs.  

System outages are universally damaging, whether they stem from security vulnerabilities or operational bugs. The financial impact of downtime can be staggering, including lost revenue, decreased productivity, and damaged reputations. For critical systems—such as those supporting financial infrastructure, healthcare, or national security—the stakes are even higher. 

In sectors where operational resilience is paramount, regulators and governmental agencies often do not distinguish between the causes of a system outage. Whether the outage is due to a security breach or an operational bug, the consequences are severe, and compliance with regulatory standards is mandatory: 

• DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act): In the European Union, DORA requires financial entities to ensure their IT systems are robust and resilient against all types of disruptions, whether they are caused by cyberattacks or operational failures. 

• OSFI (Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions) in Canada: OSFI’s guidelines mandate that financial institutions maintain operational resilience, focusing on preventing service disruptions from any cause, including operational bugs. 

• Other Global Standards: Many global standards emphasize the need for continuous service availability and resilience, with a strong focus on both operational integrity and security. 

In these contexts, the ability to quickly identify, prioritize, and resolve issues—regardless of whether they stem from security vulnerabilities or operational bugs—is critical.  

Managing in-house and third-party software requires a nuanced approach that recognizes the distinct challenges each presents. Operational bugs and security vulnerabilities, while overlapping in many respects, demand different strategies and tools to ensure your organization’s systems remain resilient and secure. 

For in-house software, leverage your full control over the development process to proactively manage both operational bugs and security vulnerabilities. For third-party software, adopt a collaborative approach, using tools like BugZero to manage operational defects. 

By tailoring your management strategies to the specific needs of in-house and third-party software, you can ensure that your IT infrastructure not only supports but actively drives your organization’s success. 

Appreciate the differences in managing in-house versus third-party software and understanding the distinct risks posed by operational bugs and security vulnerabilities and you position yourself and your organization to best align your tools and strategies to meet your overarching mission: the safe, efficient, and ethical operation of your organization’s systems to ensure its success.