The power of dependency updates

Give your devs what they need to get proactive with dependency updates.

Challenges

Obvious doesn’t mean easy

Keeping dependencies current is one of the most effective AppSec methods available, since it prevents vulnerabilities from entering the code base at the outset.  It should be a no-brainer, but updating dependencies is a complex task that takes time and often introduces technical debt.

Security risk vs. dev deadlines

There’s a reason devs prioritize developing applications over running maintenance checks—applying updates takes time, especially if an update requires reworking your code.

The complexity of context

Especially in a complex dependency tree, it’s difficult to even know what libraries or packages are out of date. Manually looking for updates is time-consuming and unrewarding work.

Merge anxiety

Updates may not always be compatible with existing code, and without total confidence in merging an update, devs worry that an update will break their app.

Opportunities

Remove the risk. Reap the rewards.

As a critical tool to shrinking technical debt and the application attack surface, dependency management isn’t an individual developer matter. It’s an organizational problem that needs to be solved in a more efficient and secure way.

Full-scale automation

Automated dependency updates streamline and optimize your devs’ entire dependency management process.

Centralized responsibility

Deploying automated tools organization wide not only shifts responsibility from individual developers, but also ensures consistency across all applications and simplifies the development process.

Merge confidence

Providing devs with a calculated merge confidence rating for each pull request allows them to  immediately submit high-confidence updates and significantly cut their workload.

The solution

Mend Renovate

Reduces risk, improves code quality, and cuts technical debt by automatically ensuring all dependencies are kept up to date.

Automatically checks for updates

Automatically delivers pull requests to the repo

Automatically preps pull requests with context

Automatically calculates merge confidence

Discover Mend Renovate

MTTR

“One of our most indicative KPIs is the amount of time for us to remediate vulnerabilities and also the amount of time developers spend fixing vulnerabilities in our code base, which has reduced significantly. We’re talking about at least 80% reduction in time.”

Andrei Ungureanu, Security Architect
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Fast, secure, compliant

“When the product you sell is an application you develop, your teams need to be fast, secure and compliant. These three factors often work in opposite directions. Mend provides the opportunity to align these often competing factors, providing Vonage with an advantage in a very competitive marketplace.”

Chris Wallace, Senior Security Architect
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Rapid results

“The biggest value we get out of Mend is the fast feedback loop, which enables our developers to respond rapidly to any vulnerability or license issues. When a vulnerability or a license is disregarded or blocked, and there is a policy violation, they get the feedback directly.”

Markus Leutner, DevOps Engineer for Cloud Solutions
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Start building a proactive AppSec program

Recent resources

Dependency Management: Protecting Your Code

Learn how to protect your application’s code with dependency management, and why automation is critical for effective dependency updates.

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Shrinking Security Debt with Dependency Management

Learn how to shrink security debt by managing dependencies.

Read more

Dependency Management vs Dependency Updates: What’s the Difference?

Keeping dependencies up to date is a big part of dependency management, but it’s not everything. Learn more about the differences between the two.

Read more