When accelerated software development lifecycles prioritize speed and functionality, how can you ensure optimal security without creating friction?
Theory Meets Practice
“The only secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete, and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards – but even then I have my doubts.”
The legendary Gene Spafford was joking when he said this, but for security practitioners, the point stands: Risk can never be zero, but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it.
From an AppSec perspective, finding the balance between security and flexibility brings its unique challenges: When accelerated software development lifecycles (SDLCs) prioritize speed and functionality, how do you ensure optimal security without creating friction?
More to the point: in a world where application vulnerabilities have become the critical path to action to initiate a breach, how do you hone in on the real problems without adding time, effort, and staff? Time for a little pragmatism.
How AppSec Teams Use Pragmatic Security
At its core, pragmatic security is all about finding the right balance between security, productivity, and resources. Instead of trying to solve *All of The Problems*, it emphasizes efficiency, automation, and prioritization — get it right, and AppSec teams can focus on the 5% of issues that matter, saving time, money, and resources.
Easier said than done, right? Today’s defenders are up against a constantly expanding attack surface and sophisticated threat actors: more threats, more attack surfaces, more tools, more alerts, more siloes, more devices.
In this environment, anything you can do to maximize the performance of the tools you have while minimizing the pressure on human resources should carry a lot of weight. A pragmatic approach can help AppSec teams find the balance they need, as some of the key principles underpinning it show. Let’s take a look.
Risk-based Prioritization
Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. And not all vulnerabilities are relevant to your organization. Chasing every CVE with a high severity rating is a recipe for disaster — and burnout.
AppSec teams are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of alerts and an ever-expanding catalog of vulnerabilities. The most effective way to prevent security debt (and its sidekick alert fatigue), is to help teams focus on the 5% of vulnerabilities most relevant to the organization’s specific environment.
How can you do that?
A risk-based approach to application security underlines the importance of context in vulnerability management, enabling AppSec teams to prioritize and address software vulnerabilities that are exploitable, reachable, and have significant impact on their unique business environment. Risk-based prioritization is one of the most effective ways to allocate and manage security resources – instead of treating all vulnerabilities the same, organizations focus on the ones that matter most. What that can look like in practice includes:
- Comprehensive vulnerability insights: Integrating data from code repositories, APIs and cloud environments gives security teams detailed insights and visualizations of potential attack vectors, enabling targeted risk mitigation.
- Attack path reachability analysis: By mapping out potential attack paths, AppSec teams can assess vulnerabilities based on their reachability, exploitability, and business impact – helping them focus efforts where they matter most.
- Unified Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): Tool sprawl is real. Security teams are monitoring an average 129 applications. A platform approach allows teams to consolidate multiple tools and processes into a single, integrated platform. This makes it easier for AppSec and DevOps teams to collaborate and streamline identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.
Focusing only on exploitable code significantly reduces the number of alerts generated, freeing up staff time to focus on the alerts that actually pose a threat to the business.
Bottom line: A risk-based strategy supports a perfect balance between tools, budget, and talent. But you can take that a step further.
Automation For the Win
When AppSec teams automate detection, analysis, triage, and response to issues, they can manage more without over-burdening staff. Tools such as SAST and DAST can be automated and integrated into AppSec processes, leaving the more complex analysis to human expertise.
In addition to reducing alert fatigue, automation helps reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), preventing critical issues from making their way into production code – mitigating vulnerability risks, streamlining release times, and managing technical debt. Some of the ways this can work include:
- Automate your playbooks: From straightforward alerting to patching and/or blocking a risk merge, automating the organization-specific playbooks many teams have developed in-house takes the grind of manual triage out of the equation.
- Take the friction out of workflows: Automation helps streamline communication around fixes, speeding up remediation and response processes. When processes are streamlined, vulnerabilities can be detected earlier in the development cycle, minimizing impact on release timing.
Bottom line: Reduce manual AppSec processes and you reduce security debt. Teams focus on the most critical vulnerabilities, helping to accelerate the SDLC and cutting MTTR; a win for budgets, tools and the humans that manage them.
Developer-friendly Processes
The earlier security is addressed in the SDLC, the less expensive it is to find and fix vulnerabilities. AppSec teams that integrate tools and testing into the workflow help drive a secure software development environment – without impacting the pace of development. All of the techniques we’ve just mentioned support this goal. Three ways to achieve this include:
- Integrate with workflows: Seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines enables security to be completely embedded in the process, detecting vulnerabilities without requiring software developers to take additional steps. As we saw above, automation helps make this process even smoother.
- Context is everything: Move beyond simply flagging issues – actionable, developer-focused alerts that provide enough details and context, along with fixes and code samples, make life easier for developers. And security less of a “burden.”
- Share the knowledge: Number 2 above feeds into our next point: Many developers aren’t security experts. Security training, clear explanations of risks, along with clear guidance for remediation go a long way toward building a secure code culture. Some ASPM solutions provide no-code workflows, reducing friction even further.
Bottom line: Fostering developer-friendly AppSec processes doesn’t just make code more secure, it improves quality across the board, ultimately saving time, costs, and resources.
Bend, Don’t Break
When everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. Taking a pragmatic approach to AppSec is less about locking everything down (you can’t), and more about making strategic, context-based choices that balance tools, budgets, and skills.
As we’ve seen, risk-based prioritization, automation, and developer-friendly processes go a long way toward creating an environment in which AppSec teams can keep pace with evolving business needs without becoming an operational bottleneck or introducing risk:
- Focus on real threats, rather than chasing every alert
- Reduce friction, working with developers to solve issues
- Scaling protection without pushing teams or budget to the limit
Traditional security measures often fail to address these evolving challenges, leading organizations to seek integrated solutions that balance effectiveness with resource constraints. ASPM platforms and a focus on critical threats have emerged as viable strategies to enhance security posture while managing costs and personnel effectively.
Get the Balance Right with OX ASPM
OX ASPM empowers AppSec teams to strike their ideal balance between risk-based prioritization, automation, and developer-centric security – without the complexity of disconnected tools. Unlike best-of-breed approaches, Active ASPM seamlessly unifies and integrates application security across the SDLC, cutting costs while driving automation and streamlining workflows.
No patchwork of connectors or cobbled-together solutions – OX is designed for full end-to-end application security, from code to cloud. Combining 10 native scanning solutions with source data from third-party integrations, OX was purpose-built to provide comprehensive AppSec posture management.
Focus on the 5% of AppSec risks that really matter >> start for free.
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