Organizations today use a wide range of AST tools, and some can take days to provide security scanning results. Ever-increasing development speeds require application security testing tools and practices that can keep up.
Additionally, ensuring that software is compliant and secure means understanding software risk at the development level, in earlier stages of the software development life cycle. But without a cohesive testing strategy in place, organizations end up with manual scanning and code reviews, and overall, inconsistent security hygiene.
Further, integrating numerous tools across existing pipelines can be a complex and time-consuming undertaking, and can increase the risk of breaking existing build and release pipelines. If organizations can’t easily integrate their AST tooling with an existing software delivery tracking system, or prioritize security activities based on risk, security and development resources can easily become stretched thin.
These tooling challenges often result extraneous testing that adds hurdles and time lags to developer productivity. Security analysts will struggle to keep up with siloed tooling and manual reviews, and costly and potentially exploitable software flaws can go undetected due to lack of testing and broader visibility into process, decisions, and key findings.
Policy-as-code helps overcome these impediments to DevSecOps by
- Providing continuous developer feedback loops. Policies can be enforced via API integration to directly communicate critical security activities to developers through Jira tickets or Slack notifications.
- Automating decision-making. Codifying the conditions that trigger security events based on predefined thresholds for application risk, code changes, and dependencies greatly helps reduce the friction in standardizing AppSec for agile environments. Policies-as-code eliminate the manual intervention that would normally be required to determine whether to test, and what test should be applied.