In the last few years it’s become nearly impossible for organizations to appropriately staff cybersecurity positions. According to Forbes, the market is looking at a global shortage of 2 million cybersecurity professionals by 2019, and that gap only looks to be increasing.

One area where this is heavily felt is the 68% of companies that are increasing spending on mobile development, but have difficulty in filling the positions necessary to release safe and secure applications.

In the wake of the skills shortage organizations are now being hit on two fronts. The first is the traditional problem of security vs time-to-market, where security often comes last (or not at all) in an effort to get mobile apps into the marketplace faster. The second is the inability to staff for the required security positions, even if an organization has prioritized security.

But smart companies are now cracking the mobile security productivity code. They know how to solve for the skills gap and time-to-market issues, getting the most output for the least effort. Doing more with less isn’t just a C-level fad, it’s now a way of life for organizations that want to keep up. It permeates everything they do, including the way they keep their organizations, employees and customers secure in a world that now revolves around mobility and mobile apps.

For instance, take the 60-hour week that plagues mobile security testing in many companies. They are struggling to find out if new vendor apps, or new releases of in-house developed apps, are secure and will keep customer data safe. You may already have seen how this goes down with manual approaches. No blood perhaps, but sweat and tears in abundance, toiling for results, and stressed due to high workloads as the fatigue sets in.

There is absolutely no reason to continue working this way. Using current and cutting edge technologies like machine learning you can get a full 360-degree view of the risk associated with any mobile app in the blink of an eye (relatively speaking). Imagine producing all of the required security testing with none of the stress. The good news is that it’s possible when you know how. Successful companies know how and they use that knowledge to consistently deliver mobile apps faster and more securely than their competitors.

It's a concept that some enterprises have difficulty in grasping. Yes, you can actually increase security and productivity at the same time. Automation is one key factor that accelerates testing to make it orders of magnitude faster. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is the second key factor that takes mobile app testing into a new dimension altogether. The result is a methodology that produces warp speed results, with less personnel, and deeper levels of insight than was previously possible, ultimately enabling automatic reinforcement and expansion of testing capabilities.

As we mentioned in a previous blog post, Machine Learning is like having your own virtual, private army of experts, alert and active around the clock. For us, Machine Learning lets us completely bust the traditional paradigm of signature-based security analysis, allowing our RECON platform to rapidly detect new trends and patterns across over 10,000 data points from each application we analyze. By effectively implementation Machine Learning against our entire database of application intelligence we can produce the same security testing results in minutes that it would normally take a team to do in weeks. In fact, in many cases we can come into a new customer and produce more actionable security intelligence in 15 minutes than they have produced in over two months using manual means.

The benefit to organizations that take this approach is that the understaffing problem in the technical department then goes away, as do those horribly stressful 60-hour work weeks. With Mi3’s AppInterrogator, mobile app risk assessments and recommendations come back in minutes, instead of days or even weeks, and enable organizations to operate at whatever speed they feel is necessary to keep up with market demand.

Internal development teams can get on with their development, without waiting on test engineers. Audits can be completed rapidly, efficiency guaranteed. IT departments get the answer they need right away, to guide end-users towards good apps and steer them away from bad ones. And, finally, testing and QA folks will be able to efficiently test more applications without compromising quality and efficacy.

It’s striking to think that mobility, with or without mobile devices, is deeply rooted in all of us. From an evolutionary point of view, we really weren’t made to sit at the same desk all the time, even though so many of us do. Mobile working brings us back to what we do best, naturally. And that goes for automated and machine learning based mobile app testing too.

Testers only started to slave over a hot test rig for days on end because there was no better solution available. By mistake, this came to be considered normal, but it isn’t. It never was and never will be. Mi3 Security puts mobility back into the lives of researchers, analysts, engineers, auditors and security staff, aligning with people’s inherent strengths and therefore with their capability to be productive.

We like to put our money where our mouth is, so head on over to the Mi3 Security Threat Center to check out how we can fill the cybersecurity skills gap and make your mobile app security testing way more productive.