Optimizing Application Security Effectiveness to Scale with Rapid Development
As businesses modernize their development processes to increase productivity, security teams need an effective way to scale. TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group looked at best practices that drive the efficiency needed to rapidly remediate application security vulnerabilities in order to mitigate risk and prevent incidents.
The Need for Effective Remediation of Critical Vulnerabilities
Only 52% of companies say they can effectively remediate a critical vulnerability, and even fewer application security practitioners (44%) agree.
Similarly, just 41% are very confident in their ability to manage the security and compliance risks associated with open source software components used within internally developed applications.
The result: Organizations face serious consequences from security incidents.
Top 5 Impacts from Security Incidents
Best Practices Enabling Efficient Remediation of Critical Vulnerabilities
We identified key patterns among the organizations that could efficiently remediate critical vulnerabilities compared to those that could not. By following these best practices, organizations can measurably improve their security program effectiveness.
Aligning goals, along with collaboration
To build a culture of security, we encourage collaboration between application development, security, and operations.
Strongly disagree that our app dev team views security as a hinderance and avoids working with our security team
Strongly disagree that our cybersecurity team views the practices employed by our app dev team as inadvertently or knowingly subverting security policies to increase development speed
Reasons for incorporating security processes into DevOps processes and developer workflows
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So cybersecurity can keep pace with our continuous integration and continuous delivery of new code from development and test into production
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To establish a more proactive cybersecurity posture
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To secure sensitive cloud-resident data
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Allows us to meet and maintain compliance with application industry regulation
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To establish repeatability across application development projects
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To foster collaboration between our cybersecurity, application development, and IT operations teams
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To gain greater operational efficiencies via automation
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As the result of cybersecurity incident
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As the result of a failed audit
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Shifting security responsibilities left to developers while security plays a centralized role
Our application development team is taking on more security responsibilities with support and help from the security team.
What organizational structure best describes how security team members responsible for securing internally developed applications are distributed in your organization?
Fully understanding code composition, including third-party and OSS code
How important is it that you are able to answer each of the following questions about your code?
Generating an SBOM is a mandatory part of the application development process at my organization.
Measuring Program Effectiveness: Preventing Incidents
Organizations that report the ability to efficiently remediate vulnerabilities were nearly twice as likely to say they have not experienced any serious security incidents tied to a software vulnerability/web application exploit in internally developed applications over the last 12 months.
Conclusion
Organizations should leverage solutions that address these areas to streamline vulnerability remediation without slowing development down. When security teams can partner with development teams to help them efficiently secure the components of their software, both teams can work more efficiently to meet their goals of delivering secure products to fuel company growth.
Mend.io helps organizations build world-class AppSec programs that reduce risk and accelerate development, using tools built into the technologies that software and security teams already use. Its automated technology protects organizations from supply chain and malicious package attacks, vulnerabilities in open source and custom code, and open source license risks.