Simplify AppSec program management with Software Risk Manager

What is driving the need to simplify AppSec?

Proliferation of security tools

Organizations have adopted a wide range of tools to secure their applications. In fact, in a recent survey ESG found that 70% of organizations use 11 or more application security testing (AST) tools. In addition, vulnerability management platforms, custom BI dashboards, manual testing, and more have added to the tool proliferation and increased complexity and cost for organizations. And as the software footprint grows, this patchwork of technologies and data sources greatly hinders development agility due to the time and resources required to train, support, and maintain these tools. Development teams struggle to adopt the technologies, issues are stuck in point tools, and remediation efforts become inefficient and offer no clear picture of risk.

Fragmented picture of risk

Securing software and its components is an enormous task—it can require tracking thousands of distributed sources that are subject to rapid cycles of change. Organizations struggle to know what to test, escalate, and report. Point solutions offer a limited view of software issues, and each has their own means for classifying risk. This results in an unclear and fragmented picture of compliance posture and no uniform way to implement AppSec across tools and teams. Another recent ESG report found that 42% of organizations cited gaining visibility into testing results as their top challenge. This, coupled with the inefficiencies in performing that testing regularly, causes many AppSec programs to fail.

How can companies simplify AppSec?

Consolidate tools

In a recent Gartner survey, analyst John Watts writes, “security and risk management leaders are increasingly dissatisfied with the operational inefficiencies and the lack of integration of a heterogenous security stack. As a result, they are consolidating the number of security vendors they use.”

By reducing the number of security vendors, organizations can create efficiencies across procurement cycles, training, implementation, and support. As part of this effort, companies can also remove duplicate functionality across tools to optimize what they already have deployed. Consolidating tools within a single management solution simplifies security workflows and ensures that AppSec programs are set up to succeed.

Consolidate insight

Critical to the consolidation effort is an efficient way for organizations to quickly and accurately understand their risk posture through a single source of truth. With a centralized way to connect security data, software resources, policies, and insights, organizations can make quick, informed decisions to immediately bolster their security posture.

The answer: Application security posture management

Application security posture management (ASPM) provides a way to unify identification, prioritization, and risk visibility across all stages of software development. Gartner describes ASPM solutions as being able to gather "security signals across software development, deployment, and operations to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities, and enforce controls. Security leaders can use ASPM to improve application security efficacy and better manage risk.” Gartner also indicates that “by 2026, over 40% of organizations developing proprietary applications will adopt ASPM to more rapidly identify and resolve application security issues.”

For an ASPM solution to add value, it must provide a high-fidelity, simplified means of achieving several core capabilities: orchestration, correlation, prioritization, and risk management. It should also be able to abstract all underlying tooling through extensive third-party integrations, provide actionable insight, and implement policies that standardize testing and remediation workflows across pipelines. This is essential to elevating AppSec program efficacy.

What is Software Risk Manager and how can it help?

Software Risk Manager is a unified, on-premises ASPM solution that enables security and development teams to prioritize risk and focus on what matters most. It brings together policy, orchestration, correlation, and built-in static application security testing (SAST) and software composition analysis (SCA) engines to integrate security activities intelligently and consistently across the software development life cycle. With Software Risk Manager, security, risk, and development teams can make informed decisions from a single source of truth and deliver resilient applications.

With Software Risk Manager, teams can

• Simplify management: With support for 125+ integrations with security testing tools, Software Risk Manager provides a single source of truth to manage existing and new security tools and derive relevant results across manual and automated AST.
• Reduce AppSec time to value: Software Risk Manager is the only ASPM solution to offer industry-leading, built-in engines for SAST and SCA to quickly achieve source code and open source testing, and onboard necessary scanning with little disruption to existing pipelines.
• Get a uniform assessment of software risk posture: Teams can trim their time to audit by leveraging Software Risk Manager’s compliance mapping and reporting, which traces individual findings to regulatory standards, down to the line of code.
• Prioritize issues: Software Risk Manager provides contextual risk scoring of vulnerabilities and escalates critical issues, pushing these defects to developers directly, within the tools they work in. And it provides support for bidirectional syncing with issue-tracking systems.
• Standardize AppSec workflows across all tools and development environments: With centralized policy management, Software Risk Manager can define, enforce, and track adherence to policies that set criteria for testing, triage, and remediation.
• Learn how Software Risk Manager can help you simplify your AppSec program management.