The evolution of application security

As application vulnerabilities have become the leading vector for cyberattacks, a wide range of security tools have emerged to detect software flaws early in the application lifecycle, before they are exploited. There are hundreds of tools available to test code (SAST, DAST, IAST), examine software composition (SCA), manage container security, detect cloud misconfigurations, and monitor applications during runtime.

Despite this, many security leaders report that they lack clear visibility into their end-to-end application security posture and are not comfortable with their understanding of their overall risk. This disconnect reflects a common challenge in security: a wide range of point solutions solve specific problems, but together, they produce too much isolated data, don’t integrate easily with other tools, and don’t understand your business context to help make intelligent prioritization decisions.

Without solving these problems, organizations face increased risk, compliance failures, lost productivity, high costs, and friction between developers and security teams. Gartner* sums this problem up well:

‍“As applications become more complex, and with security tools and responsibilities spanning multiple groups, visibility into the overall security posture of applications becomes vastly more difficult to obtain. This complicates efforts to assess, measure, prioritize and respond to application risks.”

‍The status quo: spreadsheet hell

Faced with far too much vulnerability data from too many sources, security analysts do their best to manually aggregate, deduplicate, and correlate data, with the goal of focusing their limited resources on the most critical issues.

In lieu of having good platforms designed to make this process manageable, we’ve all fallen back into downloading .csv files, dumping them into a spreadsheet, and then painfully trying to look for the needles in haystacks. But typically, when you get to row 200 out of 10,000 you realize that the brute force method simply doesn’t scale.

The other approach is to outsource the problem. For example, a financial services company hired consultants every six months to plow through logs and determine if their security posture was adequate. Each round of this cost them about $250K and produced reports that were static, and out of date the minute they were completed.

‍The need for Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)

ASPM has emerged over the last year to address the growing needs of security teams, to manage and prioritize vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security issues across the DevSecOps lifecycle. While the term is a mouthful, it was defined by Gartner* as follows:

"Application security posture management analyzes security signals across software development, deployment and operations to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities and enforce controls.”

AppSOC, a leader in ASPM, enables customers to integrate code-to-cloud vulnerability management capabilities directly into Security in Jira. Designed for CISOs, DevSecOps, AppSec, and cyber risk governance teams, the AppSOC platform seamlessly integrates with CI/CD processes and bridges the gaps between security and development teams.

The AppSOC solution expands the reach of Security in Jira by offering hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations with application security, cloud security, vulnerability management, and workflow automation tools. The solution consolidates findings from any of these  tools, then applies machine learning and business risk assessment to correlate, deduplicate and prioritize the findings. The platform can reduce vulnerability noise by over 90% while delivering consolidated, prioritized, and actionable data directly into Jira. It also includes automated workflows, and exception management, directly through Jira and other ITSM systems.

For an overview of the solution please watch this short demo video.  The solution can be automatically deployed through Security in Jira. AppSOC has flexible pricing and activation options, and qualified customers can get started with no cost or obligation. For more details, please see our Atlassian Marketplace listing or contact AppSOC at support-jira-apps@appsoc.com.

*Gartner, Innovation Insight for Application Security Posture Management, 2023.