Cloud Software Vendor Deploys Risk-Based Application Security Solution

This innovative software vendor has built an open-source framework for real-time data processing, enabling customers to manage large-scale applications in production environments. It is widely used in industries such as finance, telecommunications, and e-commerce for tasks like real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and data pipelines. Their solutions emphasize scalability, fault tolerance, and ease of integration with existing data infrastructures. An AppSec team of five manages 5-6 major applications each built with on top of dozens of microservices.

As a cloud-based software vendor, security and efficiency are paramount. While the company is relatively small, they service large-scale enterprises processing mission-critical data in real-time. They needed both assurances of security, and the visibility and metrics to demonstrate rigorous standards and compliance for their customers. All their customer deployments are considered critical.

Like many smaller organizations, keeping up with the flood of security noise, duplicates, and redundant alerts is a constant challenge. They needed a vulnerability management tool that could integrate into their development and cloud environments, and consolidate and prioritize findings, so they can respond immediately to the most critical issues.

They also wanted a solution that would clearly show where findings occur in the systems – in libraries, microservices, applications, containers, or cloud deployments. Correlating events across tools was proving very time consuming and unsatisfactory.

AppSOC’s ASPM and Vulnerability Management platform was ideally suited to meet their requirements. All their customer deployments use AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) with a range of security tools including SAST and DAST to test code in development, as well as various manual tests and audits. They were also looking for automated, streamlined integration with Jira to provide rich detail on security issues, without flooding them with redundant tickets.

During a brief POV period, the AppSOC platform used out-of-the-box integrations for all their major tools, and quickly demonstrated the ability to aggregate, deduplicate, correlate, and prioritize security findings from all sources, while filtering out more than 90% of raw alerts, and prioritizing critical alerts based on their specific application and business context.

Another critical factor was AppSOC’s built-in exception management workflows, which enabled them to filter out known, non-critical alerts from legacy platforms, to further reduce noise and increase efficiency.

AppSOC also provided bidirectional, automated workflows with Jira and Slack, to automate ticket creation, while limiting redundant tickets, and instantly alerting stakeholders to real critical issues.

All of this was presented through AppSOC’s intuitive UI, which provides custom dashboards for different types of users, as well as SLA and security posture tracking.

The AppSOC ASPM platform was selected due to its comprehensive, end-to-end capabilities for managing security challenges throughout the CI/CD pipeline. Among its key advantages were the seamless, out-of-the-box integrations with the customer’s existing security tools, along with its deep understanding of AWS environments. These integrations allowed the platform to quickly become an integral part of their security processes. Additionally, the platform's ability to reduce noise by eliminating over 90% of non-critical alerts provided significant efficiency improvements, allowing teams to focus on the most pressing threats.

A standout feature of the platform was its risk-based prioritization, aligning security management with the customer's specific needs by focusing on their most critical risks. Furthermore, the platform's robust exception management capabilities prevented repetitive alerts, streamlining the security process. Automation was another crucial factor, with workflows that integrated with tools like Jira and Slack to facilitate rapid remediation. Lastly, the responsiveness and adaptability of the AppSOC team ensured that the solution was deployed quickly, meeting all criteria without any delays or complications, cementing their reputation as a reliable partner.