Singapore, Oct 16 (IANS): Web and mobile applications aimed at customers are the top security challenges for businesses and IT professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, a survey said on Tuesday.

Nearly 36 per cent respondents viewed web applications as the area presenting the highest security risk to businesses, followed by internal-facing web applications at 26 per cent and mobile applications at 25 per cent, revealed the survey by software company Synopsys.

Desktop applications and embedded and IoT systems were represented at 24 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.

Seventy-one percent of the respondents reported that they have an incident response plan in place in the event of a security incident, an increase over 2017.

"With an escalating number of cyber security incidents large and small, it is increasingly clear that software development life cycles (SDLC) have to be not about pushing software quickly to market, but building software quickly and securely," said Geok Cheng Tan, Managing Director of Asia Pacific at the Synopsys Software Integrity Group.

"Forty-three percent of the respondents have an established process for inventorying and managing open source software, while 30 per cent reported that they do not. Twenty-seven percent of the respondents say they do not use open source," the findings showed.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed highlighted the lack of skilled security personnel or training as one of the biggest challenges to implementing an application security programme.

The survey involved 251 IT professionals and was conducted at the "GovernmentWare" (GovWare) event in Singapore recently.