In the fast-paced world of modern development that is driven by the constant need for innovation and rapid delivery, security teams are facing an increasing challenge in ensuring secure application delivery.
The adoption of agile and CI/CD practices results in hundreds of code changes that are being pushed into production every day. To keep up with the pace of innovation and ensure that these changes aren’t introducing new risks and critical vulnerabilities into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), security teams employ multiple application security and scanning tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) analysis, and containers scanning.
However, introducing additional siloed tools leads to new operating complexities without delivering the comprehensive visibility, relevant deep context and operational streamlining that application security teams really need, prompting the need for a new solutions category known as Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). According to Gartner’s Innovation Insight for ASPM, “Application security posture management analyzes security signals across software development, deployment and operation to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities and enforce controls.” They view ASPM as critical to the future of application security, stating that “By 2026, over 40% of organizations developing proprietary applications will adopt ASPM to more rapidly identify and resolve application security issues.”
In this blog, we will explore the challenges faced by security teams in managing siloed application security tools, discuss how Legit Security's code-to-cloud Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) capabilities provide an effective solution to address these challenges and highlight a few of our recent innovations and feature releases.
A Deep Dive into the Challenges
While automatic scanning tools like SAST, SCA, IaC analysis, and containers scanning are essential for detecting vulnerabilities at individual stages of the SDLC, using them in their typical operating siloes leaves significant challenges for security teams to overcome:
Limited visibility: Individual point solutions are designed to provide findings and alerts specific to individual tools or system types, without providing the context or correlation from other systems security solutions needed to holistically assess and monitor the organization's overall security posture.
Inability to prioritize risk: Without the ability to analyze and understand application vulnerabilities across the context of the entire SDLC, it’s difficult to accurately prioritize which to remediate first. With the high velocity and volume of vulnerabilities being introduced into the modern SDLC, no application security team can function efficiently without effective and intelligent risk-based prioritization.
Missing critical context: Siloed security tools provide findings independently, without considering or correlating risks detected by other tools. This makes it challenging for security teams to assess the true impact and severity of each identified issue and limiting their ability to make informed decisions for fast and effective remediation.
Operational inefficiencies: Working with multiple application security tools adds operational overhead to security teams, with maintenance, configuration, and workflows each consuming time and impacting efficiency. Redundant functionalities and duplicate efforts, like repetitive tasks and duplicate alerts and trouble tickets, can also decrease the productivity of security teams.
Legit Security Solution - Unified Platform for Efficient Application Security Management
In response to the challenges faced by security teams, Legit Security offers its Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform. The platform serves as a single pane of glass, simplifying the management of your application security program and securing the entire software development life cycle. Let's explore the key capabilities:
Code to Cloud Visibility: Legit Security seamlessly connects to your SDLC assets through simple integration, mapping the entire pipeline from source code to runtime environments. The platform automatically detects AppSec scanning tools in your pipeline and displays all the scanners and their covered assets, giving you full visibility into your application security coverage. It can even discover assets not directly connected to the SDLC and can dynamically identify new assets and shadow IT.
Contextual Insights: Legit Security's platform provides security teams with in-depth insights into their application security posture by collecting and analyzing security data in a meaningful context. It uses code-to-cloud capabilities to quickly identify critical issues in the run-time environment, enabling rapid responses to potential threats.
Unified View of Application Security Posture: Legit Security's ASPM platform offers the Legit Score, a consolidated risk score that combines data from all integrated tools. This unified view allows users to compare security levels across different parts of the organization and easily identify any gaps. With comprehensive dashboards and detailed reports, security teams can efficiently monitor and manage potential risks.
Efficient Remediation: Legit Security's platform simplifies the process of resolving security issues. It seamlessly integrates with ticketing and alerting systems, allowing for automated workflows based on predefined attributes. This accelerates the triage process and reduces response times. The platform provides all the necessary details for remediation and automatically identifies risk owners, streamlining the entire process. The platform also enables users to prioritize risks effectively by offering various methods, such as risk scoring using the Legit score, and business context by automatically categorizing SDLC assets into relevant business units.
Root Cause Analysis: Legit Security's ASPM platform offers powerful Legit Query capabilities for deep root cause analysis. By leveraging its extensive knowledge of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the platform offers valuable insights to security experts. Security experts can access the complete SDLC information through queries, save them as policies, and receive alerts based on the results.
Risk Detection: Legit Security provides out-of-the-box scanners like secret scanning, IaC scanner, pipeline scanner and detects misconfigurations to ensure the security of your pipeline. With dozens of secret detections, misconfigurations, and risk policies, the platform enhances resilience against software supply chain attacks.
Continuous Innovation Drives Legit Value
Legit Security is proud to have Fortune 500 customers like Google, Kraft-Heinz, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and many others. In addition to our enterprise customers, we’re no strangers to the need for a secure SDLC ourselves. We leverage our customer's feedback and use of our own solution to enable a fast and secure pipeline of product innovations designed to secure SDLC pipelines, improve AppSec operating efficiency, reduce costs, and streamline compliance. A few of our most recent innovations include:
Enhanced customization capabilities
- Custom security controls deliver powerful new capabilities to create, manage and enforce automated application security guardrails for code scanning, CI/CD pipeline security, and more.
- Custom security policies can be created and enforced simply by saving a custom search/query against the Legit Security platform’s graph model of your pre-production development environment. Custom security policies can be further defined by severity, remediation steps and more.
Expanded coverage, deeper context and broader visibility
- Legit Security has expanded our ASPM platform integrations to include BlackDuck, Snyk Code and SonarQube to ingest, consolidate and manage vulnerabilities within the Legit Security platform, enabling teams to prioritize and remediate issues faster and more efficiently.
- Legit’s code-to-cloud correlation engine has been enhanced to correlate code repositories to containers running in any Kubernetes cluster, regardless of the cloud vendor, to identify all code security issues relevant to running workloads and shift left remediation.
- Legit’s platform continues to extend marketing leading software supply chain security capabilities with the ability to detect and alert to anomalous activity in GitHub Source Code Management systems using machine learning to detect anomalous geolocation access attempts.
Strengthening Application Security with Unified Visibility and Contextual Insights
Legit Security's ASPM platform provides a unified solution for organizations to strengthen their application security without slowing the innovation critical to their bottom line. By delivering code-to-cloud visibility, providing crucial context, and streamlining security operations, Legit Security empowers organizations to secure their software supply chains and applications faster, while reducing overhead and meeting compliance objectives.
Legit Security's ASPM platform simplifies application security by seamlessly integrating security tools and providing a unified visibility layer. With contextual insights and efficient remediation workflows, security teams can make informed decisions and prioritize risks effectively. The platform's powerful search capabilities enable in-depth root cause analysis for proactive vulnerability management. Moreover, the Legit Score consolidates data from integrated tools, offering a simplified view of the application security posture, showing progress against security program objective over time and enhancing risk management capabilities.
In the rapidly-changing world of continuous innovation, organizations encounter a wealth of challenges keeping their application security postures up to date. Legit Security's ASPM platform offers an enterprise-grade ASPM solution, proven by customers. Equipped with powerful capabilities, it enables security experts to efficiently manage application security programs and ensure secure application delivery.
Ready to learn more? Schedule a product demo or check out the Legit Security Platform.
