Does it feel like consolidation suddenly went from a low-priority item on your to-do list to something your enterprise needs now?
If you feel that way, you’re not alone. A recent global Checkmarx survey asked CISOs, AppSec managers and developers which risks they wanted to prioritize most. In roughly equal amounts of about 36%, leaders named APIs, open source and supply chain, containers, and infrastructure as code all as high priority.
Digital transformation means that enterprises have more business running on more applications, and these new architectures and infrastructure are creating a multifaceted attack surface. It’s also is partially responsible for the increasing complexity that has become synonymous with running an effective application security program at an enterprise level. It’s also a key reason many are now prioritizing consolidation of their AppSec solutions.
Here’s why you should too, along with some points to consider before you do.
Enterprise AppSec should provide visibility into the entire application landscape
The high-velocity production of modern DevOps pushed application security teams to rapidly implement various AppSec scanning tools. Now they’re facing the consequences of a quickly built, patchwork AppSec program that was never designed to work seamlessly. The pieces aren’t integrated, the testing results aren’t always correlated, and the total cost of ownership isn’t quite what they’d hoped.
Security teams must also maintain trust with large, and often dispersed, development teams that they depend on to fix vulnerabilities. But developers, faced with divergent point solutions cranking out AppSec alerts by the thousands, are often unsure which alerts are credible. When your developers can’t easily differentiate between alerts that are false positives and low priority, from those that are high risk and need to be prioritized, the ensuing lack of trust can cripple your AppSec program.
For enterprise AppSec programs, the challenge is exponentially more complex due to sheer volume and scale. Their large development teams, billions of lines of code, hundreds of applications to release and support, and competing priorities make team alignment and trust that much more essential.
With so much at stake for enterprises, a consensus is forming around a solution: to consolidate into a fully integrated enterprise AppSec platform.
Defining a true enterprise AppSec platform
Your enterprise deserves a purpose-built platform that works toward securing all your applications, starting from when your developers write their first line of code, through production and runtime. An enterprise AppSec platform should check a lot of boxes, including these:
- AppSec scalability: Can it scale to handle your growing application footprint, with the speed to scan hundreds of apps, including their open source code, APIs, containers etc.?
- Results you can trust: Can it be tuned to fit the needs of your enterprise, prioritizing alerts so developers can focus on the riskiest vulnerabilities?
- Holistic view of risk: Can it help your team understand risk across your entire application footprint? A platform must continually build its AppSec tools to work together and communicate seamlessly.
- Developer experience: Can it easily integrate into your developer experience to allow devs to perform their AppSec duties right in their IDE? Can it motivate them to upskill with relevant, engaging training tailored to your organization’s needs?
- Embracing the power of AI: Does your platform allow developers to use AI to write secure code? Can you use AI for query tuning to minimize alert fatigue
An enterprise AppSec platform that shows you the whole picture of your risk
At Checkmarx, we have taken these criteria to heart. We built a full suite of AppSec tools that let you “shift everywhere” to secure application development throughout the SDLC. Our cloud-native Checkmarx One platform brings those tools together to give you the speed and ease of use that are crucial to a rapidly scaling enterprise.
We know that a full array of scanning tools isn’t enough, because few teams have the staffing and resources to deploy and manage them effectively. It’s why we built the technologies that make up Checkmarx One to talk to each other in smarter, and more insightful, ways.
Checkmarx Fusion correlates Checkmarx One results across all its individual AppSec tools so you can easily prioritize remediation of your riskiest vulnerabilities. Fusion is key functionality in Checkmarx One, helping you manage your resources effectively and gain better control over your enterprise’s application security posture.
Here are a few Fusion use cases to consider:
Identify your riskiest apps – Fusion allows you to view the security posture of your entire application portfolio and footprint. It aggregates data from multiple AppSec tools and provides a comprehensive risk score for each scanned application, so you can quickly see what to prioritize.
Discover shadow APIs – Undocumented APIs, or shadow APIs, are easy access points for attackers. With Checkmarx, SAST and DAST work together to discover your applications’ shadow APIs.
Focus on what’s exploitable – Exploitable Path evaluates vulnerabilities in open source libraries and analyzes whether they are actually called by your application’s code. If not, they aren’t exploitable. By weeding these out, Fusion can reduce AST noise by 40%.
Visualize your vulnerabilities – The average cloud-native application can have hundreds, or even thousands, of different components. The Fusion Insights Dashboard provides a visual and textual representation of threats in an intuitive chart containing all software elements, consumed cloud resources, and the relationships among them.
Correlate runtime protection – Runtime Insights gives you the full picture of your container once an application is in use, identifying what is and isn’t being called by your application. This connects the dots between pre-production and deployment, giving your team clear visibility into workloads that are running in production. This can help reduce vulnerability noise up to 95%.This just touches on the power of consolidating your AppSec tools into Checkmarx One. To learn more about how our platform delivers a holistic view of your AppSec risk, builds #DevSecTrust between your AppSec and development teams, and lowers your total cost of ownership, join our deep dive webinar on the topic.
