How Emerging AppSec Solutions Can Actually Boost Your ROI

Historically, investments in application security (AppSec) have been seen as financial black holes, with never-ending cost and complexity. And yet, they are a necessity in today’s software-driven world, where getting high-quality products to market quickly is what counts.

Companies looking to retain and build a thriving customer base must produce excellent and secure software, no matter what. But this doesn’t mean they have to settle for skyrocketing security costs and a dismal Return on Investment (ROI). What businesses today need is a better strategy for examining the costs they have—and how they might be minimized through strategies and solutions.

Worst Offenders

Take security scan tools, for example. They are core to any AppSec program, and yet they are some of the worst offenders in spiraling costs and complexity. To make matters worse, all of these AppSec tools focus on different challenges, which means they generate disparate information—and a lot of it. Because the results (and their overall quality) vary so much, a clear picture of risk can be hard to see. Which results are actionable? What is the criticality of each issue? Visibility into these questions is key to quick and effective remediation of software vulnerabilities. It’s not difficult to see why resources and skilled professionals are an essential piece to successful tool management… and yet, it’s also clear how throwing money at AppSec without a clear strategy is a path to nowhere.

The ROI for security should measure performance and be used to evaluate the efficiency of the program. Are you getting your money’s worth? Is AppSec improving? Is your current security program worth the budget you spend on it? These are the questions that come to mind, for CISOs and business leaders alike, who are looking for a better, more cost-effective path forward. The ROI for security should include a need for fewer resources, time, and money spent on analyzing and prioritizing scan data, and a way to scale AppSec programs to new DevOps teams and CI/CD pipelines. The ROI for DevOps and the business will likely include many of the same issues—plus others that are unique to their workflows.

Best Solutions

So, how can organizations begin to see significant financial benefits while improving security? How can they improve the ROI of their AppSec programs? The answer lies in AppSec automation and orchestration and bridging the divide that often exists across Security and DevOps teams. By automating and orchestrating security scanning tools and programs in conjunction with development pipelines, organizations can find considerable benefits to the business—while also addressing security.

This is why AppSec automation and orchestration was developed in the first place, to meet the challenge of security tool sprawl, along with a solution for skyrocketing investments in security that don’t seem to be working. There’s no doubt, AppSec automation and orchestration offers quantifiable benefits to security, DevOps, and the business.

The ROI in automating and orchestrating AppSec for DevOps sits at the heart of DevSecOps, a fusion of these two cultures. The goal of this union has always been the same: to tighten the integration between development and security, to get them on the same page and speaking the same language—and moving at the speed of DevOps. But again, existing security tools are often what stands in the way of this collaboration, as they can disrupt the velocity of a build and send costs through the roof.

Organizations looking to finally get a handle on their security costs and improve their AppSec program at the same time can now rest easier. The right solution, with the right capabilities, can identify the vulnerabilities standing in the way of software excellence. The ZeroNorth AppSec automation and orchestration platform, for example, ingests and normalizes different findings from scan tools and compresses them into a common risk framework. This capability delivers streamlined remediation tickets to developers, prioritized by risk.

As an overlay to the SDLC, the ZeroNorth platform seamlessly connects with DevOps toolchains and integrates with developers’ tools, making AppSec transparent and friction-free. This empowers developers to quickly remediate problems, early and often throughout the SDLC, without changing their workflows. For more information on how your organization can deliver better ROI to the business, download our white paper on the ROI of AppSec, or contact us at ZeroNorth.