Even if your organisation doesn’t develop its own custom software from scratch, you are most certainly still using open-source tools and libraries to deliver everything from simple websites to customising and hosting complex internal applications critical to your business.
This means ensuring that secure coding and deployment practices are defined and followed by the development teams and not subverted because the security team has made it unnecessarily challenging to ship code quickly. With automation, the right processes, and tools, it’s possible to make application security an integral part of the SDLC, adequately protecting data while enabling teams to deliver quickly on their business purpose and intent.
Embracing security automation leads to:
Increased code quality. Prevent developers from introducing vulnerabilities into the code in the first place. This saves significant downstream effort in scanning, identifying and fixing security vulnerabilities if they are flagged upfront at the time of writing.
Increased deployment frequency. Clearly defining the security controls, guardrails and expected processes upfront and ensuring they are not circumvented allows development teams to deploy at their desired release cadence.
Decreased friction. Without the security team throwing up the largest hurdles at the end of the release and only getting involved if there’s a material security risk, the project managers, scrum masters, release managers, architects and developers can get on with creating software that enables business outcomes.
Decreased cost per release. Security automation not only allows for increased speed and agility but decreases the cost per release. Code cannot be deployed that is not secure and the checks that verify the code quality and security are known long before the deployment date – which allows plenty of time for remediation.
Security tool selection – If you don’t have scanning tools such as SAST, SCA, Secrets Scanning, DAST and IAST deployed into your environment, we can help you select the right tool to suit your requirements and budget.
Security tool deployment and operationalisation – Once the appropriate tools have been selected, despite what the vendors say, they must be tuned and optimised so they don’t become noisy. They also need to be integrated into other systems such as ticketing, SSO and provisioning and the right processes put in place to operationalise the tool. Application teams will refuse to use tools that don’t make their lives easier.
Security tool consolidation – Do you have a proliferation of tools to support many technologies? It might be a good time to consolidate you toolset, optimise the workflow and decrease the running cost. We can analyse your current environment and build a strategy that will preserve your current functionality while reducing operating cost.
Security Assurance Automation – From defining cloud blueprints/baselines to building Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Policy as Code (PaC) or securing your Kubernetes containers, we can advise your team on how to accelerate your security process to match the speed of the business.
CI/CD Pipeline Hardening – If you’re happy with your current toolset and pipeline, we can asses the current configuration and recommend ways that the pipeline security can be improved to protect against internal threats. This ensures the integrity of the build, and protects against unauthorised changes as well as the introduction of malicious code.
Securing the software supply chain – Leveraging publicly available libraries to accelerate the development effort is a great idea, but the bad guys are increasing their focus on the cyber software supply chain. A successful hack in an open source 3rd party library can compromise thousands of companies at once. Your Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) needs to be continuously checked for security vulnerabilities – not just at build time but continuously whilst code is in production.
Secure coding practices – It’s well known Quality Assurance that it’s much cheaper to fix a defect the closer it is to the source – the developer. If your developers are writing secure code from the start, the chance of introducing security vulnerabilities into the final product goes down significantly. Doing this takes secure code training, in addition to technical solutions that integrate into your development environment providing instant advice and feedback, which are relevant in the context of your specific environment, when writing code.
Offensive Security – Sometimes, theory is not enough, and you need to know if the vulnerabilities that exist in your environment or code are exploitable, or perhaps you want to search for the unknown. We can perform a security penetration test of your web or mobile application, or hosting infrastructure on your external or internal network.
