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Let’s face it. Most of our applications are driven by data. Either they’re consuming it, creating it, reporting on it, or all of the above.
Unfortunately, your app is really only as good as the data that supports it and most of the time, that can be out of your control.
How should you be handling the multitudes of situations where you are dependent on external sources to provide data? What can you do to ensure that your system is protected?
Determining Dependencies
If you’re not uploading or generating the data yourself, you’re making your application reliant on other people or applications. This is a dependency.
A dependency can be explained as simply as “any situation where you rely on someone other than your application to provide data.” This can be a manual upload, an automated API call, a database transfer from an external source, or even relying on an external data source altogether.