When bringing new applications to market, speed has become a top priority. Nearly 80% of organizations say their development team is under growing pressure to shorten release cycles. Companies are increasingly adopting DevOps tools, open-source components, and cloud-native/serverless approaches to achieve more aggressive delivery cycles.
But in many cases, faster time to market is coming at a cost of application security. And the reason for this is simple: Traditional application security tools bog down development workflows without offering sufficient and efficient risk reduction. In a recent survey, more than half of developers admit to sometimes skipping security scans to meet deadlines. Further, while investments in application security tools continue to increase, the number of vulnerabilities in applications remains steady.
As one might expect, cyber criminals haven’t missed the expanding application attack surface. Over the last year, the average application endured more than 13,000 attacks per month searching for unremediated vulnerabilities. And while the vast majority of those attacks are simply probes that don’t find an actual vulnerability to exploit, the success rate is significant enough—nearly half of all successful data breaches can be traced back to an unsecured application.
The market demand for new and updated applications isn’t going away. Neither is the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks seeking open vulnerabilities. So the only way to address this problem is to eliminate the application security bottlenecks that often put development and security teams at cross purposes.
Modern tools that build security into development processes can actually accelerate operations while improving the quality of innovations. Organizations need a different approach to application security—one that synchronizes the workflows and objectives of developers, operations managers, and security experts within the organization (better known as DevSecOps).
Application security that supports DevSecOps must automatically see how all parts of an application perform when it’s actually running—comprehensive observability of the application runtime that can instantly spot both vulnerabilities and potential exploits.
To gain this interior view of the code in action, organizations can add a security agent to the application code to provide continuous, complete, and accurate security without scanning. An agent is deployed once and operates throughout the entire life cycle of the application—from development through production. In addition, a single solution can replace the entire “tool soup” of legacy security solutions by providing a complete platform of integrated capabilities. These include:
To address the aforementioned challenges and requirements, the Contrast Application Security Platform uses instrumentation to embed security within the application runtime. It’s comprised of three main solutions:
As these three product solutions are wrapped into one integrated DevSecOps platform, Contrast delivers customers a unique set of capabilities not available in other application security models:
Because of these and other capabilities, the Contrast platform provides deep observability across the entire application stack—including custom code and open-source components. It delivers accurate vulnerability testing in development and powerful protection in production through the same embedded security agent. Most of all, it helps DevOps evolve into DevSecOps by removing security roadblocks, reducing alert noise caused by false positives, and scaling security without additional staff or training.
To learn more about the drivers behind modern, platform-based application security and the specific capabilities to look for, check out the following resources:
Inside AppSec Podcast: Right and Wrong DevSecOps Metrics: Measuring What Counts
Webinar: What True DevSecOps Controls and Metrics Look Like
DevSecOps Buyer’s Guide: Application Security
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