This St. Patrick’s Day is sure to bring all the usual trappings: shamrocks, the color green, leprechauns and pots of gold. But while we take a step back to celebrate Irish culture and the first signs of spring this year, the development cycle never stops. Think of a safe, secure product and a confident, satisfied customer base as the pot of gold at the end of your release rainbow. To get there, you’ll need to add application security to your delivery pipeline, but it’s got nothing to do with luck. Your success depends on your organizational culture.

It’s Time to Greenlight Application Security

Because security issues in applications have left so many feeling a little green, consumers now expect and demand security as a top priority. However, security efforts are often seen as red, as in a red stop light or stop sign. In others, they are seen as a cautious yellow at best. But what if security actually enabled you to go faster?

By adding application security early in the development cycle, developers can obtain critical feedback to resolve vulnerabilities in context when they first occur. This earlier resolution can actually reduce overall cycle times. In fact, a 2016 Puppet Labs survey found that “high performers spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues than low performers,” which the most recent edition attributed to the developers building “security into the software delivery cycle as opposed to retrofitting security at the end.” The 2018 study also noted that high-performing organizations were 24 times more likely to automate security configurations.

Go green this spring by making application security testing a part of your overall quality and risk management program, and soon you’ll be delivering faster, more stable and more secure applications to happier customers.

Build Your AppSec Shamrock

Many people I talk to today are working hard to find the perfect, balanced four-leaf clover of application modernization, digital transformation, cloud computing and big data to strike gold in the marketplace. New methodologies such as microservice architectures and new container-based delivery models create an ever-changing threat landscape, and it’s no wonder that security teams feel overwhelmed.

A recent Ponemon Institute study found that 88 percent of cybersecurity teams spend at least 25 hours per week investigating and detecting application vulnerabilities, and 83 percent spend at least that much time on remediation efforts. While it’s certainly necessary to have these teams in place to continuously investigate and remediate incidents, they should ideally focus on vulnerabilities that cannot be found by other means.

A strong presence in the software delivery life cycle will allow other teams to handle more of the common and easier-to-fix issues. For a start this St. Patrick’s Day, consider establishing an application security “shamrock” that includes:

• Static application security testing (SAST) for developer source code changes;
• Dynamic application security testing (DAST) for key integration stages and milestones; and
• Open-source software (OSS) to identify vulnerabilities in third-party software.

You can enhance each of these elements by leveraging automation, intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Over time, you can implement additional testing capabilities, such as interactive application security testing (IAST), penetration testing and runtime application self-protection (RASP), for more advanced insight, detection and remediation.

Get Off to a Clean Start This Spring

In the Northern Hemisphere, St. Patrick’s Day comes near the start of spring, and what better time to think about new beginnings for your security program. Start by incorporating application security in your delivery pipeline early and often to more quickly identify and remediate vulnerabilities. Before long, you’ll find that your security team has much more time to deal with more critical flaws and incidents. With developers and security personnel working in tandem, the organization will be in a much better position to release high-quality applications that lead to greater consumer trust, lower risk and fewer breaches.