With the recent Sony Pictures hack and other notable cyber attacks of 2014, building software can be a scary thing. One vulnerability can lead to your customers private data compromised and potentially, your business ruined. This begs the question – if these mega-corporations can be hacked, how do I stand a chance?

In our line of work, we typically deal with web application security concerns (Cross-site scripting, SQL injection, etc.). The severity can range anywhere from some unwanted content displaying on your webpage, to your entire database breached. The threat of an attack is a serious concern for our clients and something we take very seriously.

Our motto – standardization. For most cases, when developing software, it’s a bad idea to reinvent the wheel. Chances are, there’s a standard process to do X and failure to follow it, can leave you vulnerable. Sticking to widely used, standard tools and processes, ensures best practices are being met.

We achieve standardization, mostly by sticking to open source software. Many popular open source tools are used in production by billions of people, everyday. This means they’re battle-tested. They’ve been through more edge cases than you can even comprehend. Even if a new vulnerability comes out, it’s likely to be reported and a fix put in place, before you even knew about it.

Our specific tool of choice is Django, a widely used web framework. Django was downloaded over 600,000 times just last month and is in-use by some of the most widely-used software in the world, such as Instagram and Pinterest. This means hundreds of millions of testers for our code, without us having to do a thing. Django gives us solutions for common threats and constant updates to stay ahead of the curve. Simply put, Django let’s us focus on solving business problems, without the worry for common web security concerns.

If you’re in the planning phases of architecting an application, make the decision to standardize – by stick to widely used and well supported frameworks and libraries – you’ll sleep better at night.