An AppSecOps practice is “Application Security at Scale”. To ensure software development teams ship secure and fast, successful security practices must bring people, process, and technology together- and this necessitates a new category.

What is AppSecOps?

In AppSecOps, security testing and scanning findings are ingested and processed across the DevSecOps pipeline, yielding actionable insights in the form of prioritized findings and remediation recommendations. As part of the DevSecOps pipeline, automated security tasks and workflows are managed and measured, along with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between Security, Development, and Operations. Developers are empowered with the contextual information they need, to solve issues quickly and effectively without specialized training.

What challenges are driving the need for AppSecOps?

A large number of moving parts make up modern software development. Modernization efforts such as Agile, DevOps, cloud deployment, microservice architectures, and open-source adoption have dramatically accelerated application delivery and complexity. In most cases, AppSec teams are overworked and underfunded because developers outnumber them by as much as 100:1. In order to identify and protect the always-changing and growing application risk surface, they rely on a collection of point security products and siloed manual processes.

With AppSecOps, you can identify and protect an organization’s constantly changing and growing application risk surface from security breaches, losses, and compliance gaps without slowing down or affecting application delivery.

How is AppSecOps different?

You might think, “We’re already doing that” and, in some cases, this is partially true, since AppSecOps entails traditional application security practices and interconnects with many parts of DevSecOps. However, AppSecOps is more focused on, and is more responsible for, security than other parts of DevSecOps. Even if you do already manage vulnerabilities or AppSec postures, AppSecOps goes beyond these practices to incorporate:

• Managing vulnerabilities, automating workflow, and ensuring compliance with AppSec.
• Data integration from code security and scanning tools.
• Integration with the DevSecOps pipeline and workflows.
• Tracking issues and communicating with developers are integrated.
• Security Software Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC) insights that can be applied across the entire process.
• A pipeline of automated SLAs between processes and components.
• Boost developer productivity with a comprehensive and extensive Knowledge Base.
• Continual compliance checks to ensure compliance.
• Automating the SDLC workflow.

As a result, AppSecOps overlaps with and encompasses other established practices and is essential for ensuring AppSec operations run smoothly.

Why do you need an AppSecOps platform?

In order to scale AppSec throughout the organization, you need an AppSecOps platform.

The following benefits are provided by AppSecOps platforms:

• Provides continuous visibility and actionable insight across security, vulnerability, and compliance use cases to reduce loss exposure and risk.
• Automate tasks and processes for security analysts, developers, and operations engineers to improve operational efficiency.
• Provides developers with the ability to ship more secure applications faster at scale without significantly expanding their teams, training, or tools.

In order for AppSec teams to build, deliver, and scale an effective and efficient AppSec program across the entire organization and DevSecOps pipeline, ArmorCode offers the industry-leading AppSecOps platform, providing visibility, actionable insight, automation, and integration.

What does an AppSecOps platform look like?

Integrating (a lot of integrations) with security, continuous integration, and continuous delivery tools on the market to handle different security concerns is the foundation of any AppSecOps solution. AppSecOps platforms must integrate with the following ecosystem components, for example:

• SAST, DAST, RASP, Pen testing, Specific vulnerability scanners, and bug bounty programs are some examples of software testing and scanning tools.
• Pipeline managers for DevSecOps pipelines, such as GitHub, GitLab, Harness, Jenkins, etc.
• Slack and Jira ticketing and communication systems.
• NIST’s threat intelligence, commercial solutions, and internal knowledge bases provide threat intelligence, modelling, and security databases.

Conclusion

In order to deliver secure software, AppSec needs to be integrated with the DevSecOps pipeline. Even though AppSec staff is already outnumbered, you can leverage an AppSecOps platform so that they can focus on the most critical security issues and scale their skills and experience across the organization. With AppSecOps, software security chaos can be reined in.