The Cost of Bad Software: How Poor Program Quality Can Cost Businesses A Lot and What to Do!

Poor software quality is an issue with cybersecurity that not many people consider with thinking about cybersecurity, but it is an important issue! In fact, according to SC Magazine, poor software quality may have cost the United States and businesses based in the US at least two trillion four hundred ten billion dollars in 2022! How does poor software quality lead to this?

Well, if your programs are kept in poor shape and are not regularly updated, your programs can contain a bunch of vulnerabilities that make it easier for hackers and malware to get away with cyberattacks. You can also have issues from overly complex software that takes a long time to finish basic tasks that a less complicated software program can do quicker and more securely, as well as a debt that comes with paying for faulty software for a large price without knowing about the issues ahead of time. That is according to a report released by Synopsys.

“Cybercrime is predicted to cost the world $7 trillion in 2022. Now is the time to turn our attention to recent developments and emerging solutions to help improve the poor software quality situation as it now exists and stabilize and reduce the growth rate of CPSQ in the near future,” stated Herb Krasner, a retired Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin.

The cost of accumulated technical has risen to one and a half trillion US dollars, and according to Anita D’ Amico - vice president of cross-portfolio solution and strategy at Synopsys and a CISQ board member - technical debt can happen over time with pretty much any software program that is not regularly updated or replaced with newer models since technical debt “accumulates over the life of a software application.

Early in its lifecycle, an application does not have the full feature set that can be found in later versions. Those features are the result of a set of technical decisions about how best to implement them, given the constraints of how the application is structured. Over time those constraints limit the options available to development teams for not only how best to implement new features, but also how best to mitigate security issues.”

Note that not only is this cost expensive, but it is simply a decent estimation of how much this has cost organizations. In fact, as far as we know, issues like poor software quality may have cost organizations even more money than we know! There are many ways to combat this issue, but one of the main ways to fight this particular program is to regularly keep all programs up-to-date. That alone is not going to guarantee that your program can be defended from cyberattacks, but it is a decent start.

You also might want to get new programs, but you need to test them out and wait some time before you get new applications. Why? Because new applications can be easy targets for zero-day attacks: attacks, where some exploit some kind of vulnerability or issue with a new software program that most people do not know about - sometimes even the vendors or community working on the program do not know about it - simply because the program is so new. Finally, you can work to try to have systems and plans in place to get systems back up in case a problem happens due to a faulty program.

There is no perfect solution to poor software quality, but there are ways to deal with the issue and prevent your organization from losing a lot in money, reputation, and other ways!