Snyk's AppSec dream team

With springtime just around the corner, there’s a lot to be excited about — warmer weather, longer days, and, most importantly, basketball! In honor of the upcoming March Madness tournament, we’ve put together our own dream team for AppSec.

Read on to discover the all-star features in application security this year and how they can help your team get a slam dunk in protecting applications from code to cloud. 

Meet your head coach

Every dream team needs its head coach. Ours is led by none other than application security posture management (ASPM): the fearless leader who fosters collaboration and brings out the best in everyone. While the individual players we’ll mention are great on their own, they all rely on their head coach to work together and sweep the competition.

ASPM unites AppSec and developers into one unstoppable team. ASPM reinforces the fundamentals of the game, like following safe development practices and preventing security issues early in development, and also brings advanced winning strategies like a consolidated view of applications throughout their lifecycle, context-driven risk prioritization, and powerful automation for orchestrating security activities across the SDLC. 

Starting five 

Now it’s time to meet the MVPs who drive the team’s success. Here’s the lineup: 

1. Risk-based prioritization

Nothing tears a team apart like disagreements and lack of clarity — and that’s what makes this player a must-have for any application security program. If development and security teams don’t have the same view on why an issue is important to fix, it slows down everyone. Risk-based prioritization has the ability to look at every detail on the court, like exploit predictions, reachability, business criticality, and deployment status, and bubble it all up to the big picture so everyone is on the same page about which issues need to be addressed and why.

2. Human-in-the-loop hybrid AI

Speaking of seeing the entire floor, you need a teammate who combines the ability to rapidly understand every line of code in your application, with the ability to detect unsafe coding patterns and data flows that are prevalent today. Using AI to review your code is a good idea, but it has to be done right to ensure that you don’t put up brick shots. This player provides accurate results and minimizes false positives/negatives by balancing AI technologies and machine learning with human reviewers. 

3. Real-time scanning

Scanning application code towards the end of the SDLC and expecting developers to fix code they wrote weeks ago is sure to lead to the next Malice at the Palace. Real-time scanning shifts the code-fixing process as far left as possible, giving developers the tools to find and fix vulnerabilities in their IDEs and pull requests — minutes after writing the code. 

4. Actionable remediation

Every team needs a reliable player who can score from anywhere, and that’s the role of actionable remediation on the team. This player gives real-time scanning an assist by providing fix recommendations developers know how to use as they write code. With actionable remediation, developers don’t have to become security experts overnight. Instead, they can tap into valuable information from the fix recommendations and quickly secure their code.

5. Industry-leading security intel

Defense wins games and there’s no better defender on the court than deep security intel that keeps applications safe in an ever-changing world of emerging threats and savvy attackers. Luckily, this player keeps you in the know of the latest security intelligence, giving you the info you need to put up a strong defense against anything headed your way.

Bench: 

You also need strong players on the bench, ready to jump into the game and move the ball with precision. Meet the bench players in our AppSec dream team:

• Unified policy engine to create universal security policies across developer workflows, pipelines, and running cloud environments.

• Broad language coverage to ensure that your application security works seamlessly across all your applications.

• One-click pull requests to fix security issues automatically.

• CI/CD pipeline scanning to seamlessly integrate security into the CI/CD tools that your developers are already using.

• Software composition analysis (SCA) and container security to help you see all the 3rd party software added to your apps, and keep your applications safe from malicious packages and vulnerabilities.

• Software supply chain security such as workflows for tracking the security status of over 1M commonly-used open sources libraries and applying remediation actions within your supply chain. 

• Automated SBOM generation for gaining a complete understanding of the components that exist within your application and any open source risk they entail. 

• Security controls that map directly to compliance requirements and historical/real-time reporting to prove compliance to auditors. 

• Contextual developer education for training developers on common vulnerabilities and best practices as these issues come up in their own code. 

See how Snyk can make your AppSec initiatives nothing but net by signing up for free today (no credit card required).