The increasing pressure of an ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape has pushed business leaders to look for ways to optimize and streamline their application security strategies.
Consolidation has come to the forefront of these initiatives as a practical means to achieve greater resource efficiency and improve the overall risk posture for an organization's application portfolio.
TO recent survey commissioned by Synopsys showed that 70% of organizations have more than 10 application security testing (AST) solutions. The pain associated with the proliferation of this tool is threefold.
- Low AppSec ROI: Organizations maintain multiple, potentially overlapping solutions, increasing costs and straining resources.
- Increased complexity: Too many tools have created friction in the development cycle, slowing down teams and causing security steps to be skipped.
- Fragmented picture of risk: More tools generate mountains of disconnected findings, making it easier to miss critical issues.
This can put stress on development and security teams, making consolidation initiatives more attractive. Gartner research supports this view, stating in its Top trends in cybersecurity: survey analysis: consolidation of cybersecurity platforms reports that 75% of organizations surveyed were actively pursuing supplier consolidation in 2022, a notable increase from the 29% reported in its 2020 survey.
What is leading AppSec consolidation?
If an organization has a complex or disjointed AppSec program, several problems can arise, including unwarranted complexity, unquantifiable or obscured levels of risk to the business, and inefficient allocation of resources.
This presents several challenges and presents an unclear picture of the overall risk landscape, making it almost impossible to make decisions or report on risks at any time.
Digging deeper, there are three elements that force many organizations to go down the consolidation route.
Poor return on investment in application security
The large number of security tools that organizations now purchase has led to an increase in operational costs involving maintenance, support and licensing. Naturally, with more tools in use, more time and resources are required to ensure effective implementation and maintenance.
Then there is the requirement for development teams to be familiar with multiple user interfaces; however, this will often lead to reduced productivity and the possibility of safety steps being skipped.
When evaluating these tools, in most cases, they have similar or even overlapping capabilities, which increases the likelihood that critical findings will be missed, making the testing and remediation process difficult.
Greater complexity
When teams deploy too many tools in the development cycle, it can create friction that slows teams down at a time when everything needs to move faster.
Additionally, when individual teams purchase and deploy tools in silos, the overall application security program runs the risk of running inconsistently. If policies are implemented and managed differently across tools and teams, there is no standard way to assess and report on risk.
Additionally, there is the duplicated effort of implementing and enforcing policies multiple times across multiple tools and multiple development teams.
Fragmented image of risk
Additionally, due to the number of security tools, there will be a higher volume of testing producing an avalanche of results to analyze. Much of the time, test results remain confined within their respective point tools.
Developers who try to take action on these issues end up with duplicate or inefficient solution guides and little understanding of what needs to be fixed first, wasting already limited time and resources.
And when the results are within their respective point tools, there is no single source of truth for reporting overall business risk.
Since organizations already use 10 or more AST tools, teams must find a way to optimize the tools they already own. Start by identifying the critical security tests your business requires and make sure you have them covered.
Then you'll be in a position to narrow down the number of vendors by finding a solid application security partner that can offer solid solutions for multiple of your critical testing needs. This will reduce operational stress on your procurement, implementation, support, security and development teams.
Getting multiple tools from a single vendor can solve part of the problem, but isolated implementations may not achieve the benefits that consolidation offers. Look for solutions that offer strong integration points between tools to streamline your entire implementation.
Consolidate effort to reduce complexity
Multiple point tool deployments within individual teams lead to duplicate efforts and inconsistent AppSec programs. By centralizing policy management, your organization can set security policies once and apply them consistently across all applications and computers, regardless of the tools used.
This streamlines policy enforcement, reduces duplicate effort, and ensures a standardized approach to security.
By centralizing policy management, it also allows teams to automate testing and enforcement of SLAs to resolve issues. This ensures that security testing is performed when necessary, reducing unnecessary analysis and avoiding bottlenecks in the development process.
Consolidate knowledge to improve risk management
With a consolidated approach to vendor selection, tool implementation, and centralized policy management, you configure your organization to have a consolidated and consistent risk picture.
This improves visibility into your security posture by providing a single source of truth about what was tested, what was found, and what was fixed.
Having this unified view allows decision makers to mitigate potential threats, shorten audit time, and resolve new threats quickly.
How to evaluate suppliers for consolidation
Once an organization decides to undertake a consolidation initiative, the next logical step is to begin vetting and evaluating potential partners. The logical starting point is to look for a vendor whose portfolio can cover most or all of your AppSec needs.
Additionally, the ideal supplier should also display some specific attributes.
- Your vision should be continuous innovation to keep up with the latest development techniques and threats in the cyber landscape.
- The provider must have a wide scope of coverage with its offering and be easily adopted by development teams.
- The AST tool portfolio should be strong across the board and should not require any sacrifice in functionality. Can the supplier show its staying power (stability and longevity) so that the organization realizes a return on investment?
- You must be flexible with your pricing and licensing options to meet the organization's growth and schedule.
- The vendor should show some degree of openness, as they have the ability to aggregate test results from multiple products to provide a clear view of software risk and protect their existing investment in AppSec.
In conclusion, organizations should drive the consolidation of AppSec as a means to reduce complexity and inefficiencies within their current application security program.
This will optimize resources and improve risk posture. Ultimately, decision makers should look for a vendor that maintains a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class solutions to fully realize the benefits and ROI of their consolidation strategy.
