How to Run AppSec at the Speed of DevSecOps

Do you find yourself running short of AppSec resources or find it hard to get approval to hire another AppSec engineer to help manage your increasingly complex application threat landscape? Imagine if you could see your highest risk vulnerabilities, get an AppSec posture heat map at the click of a button, reduce time-to-release, and build a robust AppSec program, without increasing costs. How would that change your work life and AppSec posture? 

70% of DevOps teams now release code continuously, once a day, or every few days according to a recent Gitlab survey. However, organizations are struggling to loop application security checks and guardrails into the development process - with 70% of developers and AppSec engineers reporting that they do not have security scan results built-in to their workflows. 42% of respondents in an AppSecOps survey conducted by ArmorCode said they have “unmanaged risk in their portfolio”, and in the same survey, 63% of respondents said that shipping fast takes priority over shipping securely.

AppSec Challenges within the organization

Release speed > security

With Agile development, software releases are fast and frequent, and security alerts may only be triggered post-go-live. This is often due to an overwhelming list of vulnerabilities with unclear prioritization and false positives that traditional AppSec tools surface; developers don’t know what’s important to fix now - and neither does the AppSec team.

Siloed security data

With many AppSec tools sitting across several different development processes, there is no single pane of glass where all issues come together for a clear view of risks. Instead, AppSec engineers are bogged down by manual work in putting all the pieces together and trying to make sense of them to lead developer intervention and inform other stakeholders.

Inability to set achievable & desirable application security targets

It’s up to the AppSec engineers to explain their risk findings, rather than have always-on, easy access to heat maps and risk scores for decision-makers. This makes it very hard to set a target risk score and hence get the necessary budget to try and achieve it.

Tool-based mindset rather than a strategic AppSec program

The team has been implementing a tool-based approach to solving the problem, stapling together solutions, rather than setting up a dedicated AppSec program.

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Leveraging the ArmorCode AppSecOps platform to drive AppSec maturity

Application Security Posture Management

ArmorCode gives teams and stakeholders a single pane of glass across the end-to-end dev cycle for all software assets so they can fulfill Application Security Posture Management use cases. The ArmorCode platform can pull in data from all security scanners across applications, infrastructure, cloud, and containers and combine it effectively to give an overall picture of AppSec health with app security assessment, as well as the ability to do data deep dives. The platform includes an overall issue heat map and risk score.

Unified Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management is also centralized, combining findings and suggested solutions from a wide variety of tools including SAST, DAST, SCA, Bug Bounty, Pen Testing, and more. Working just in time, Unified Vulnerability Management lets developers know where to make fixes and what’s a priority.

Runbooks for DevOps integration and security automation

To enhance collaboration and MTTR, you can create runbooks to orchestrate AppSecOps automation within DevOps frameworks and solution architectures. Integrate into the CI/CD pipeline to create guardrails and leverage DevSecOps orchestration to automatically triage vulnerabilities or incidents.

Save time & personnel resources with ArmorCode

Using the ArmorCode platform, teams see impressive results in resource savings from their application security assessment orchestration. For an organization with the common type of issues mentioned above, you might expect to see:

• 90% reduction in the time spent by the AppSec team in reviewing and processing alerts
• 33% reduction in the time spent by developers reviewing and processing alerts
• 35% faster releases

AppSec needs to mature in line with your DevOps-enriched development efforts to keep up with increased compliance goals and security risks across a wide threat landscape. The ArmorCode AppSecOps platform can help with doing exactly that—request a demo to see the results in action.