A survey of 250 developers working at leading technology companies paints a bleak picture of the current state of application security with 85% admitting applications on average have 10 or more vulnerabilities, with nearly half saying they have on average more than 20 per application.
Conducted by Contrast Security, a provider of an observability platform for security, the survey also finds nearly 50% of application security tools are not integrated into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
Contrast Security CTO Jeff Williams said it’s clear most organizations have a long way to go before best DevSecOps practices become commonplace. In the meantime, the level of disruption being caused by the need to remediate vulnerabilities remains high. The survey finds 88% of respondents need to stop development work to remediate vulnerabilities at least once a week, with nearly 80% spending too much time triaging and diagnosing application security alerts.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents also noted their organizations cannot find highly specialized application security experts.
On the plus side, more than one-third of respondents (36%) said at least one application security metric is among their top four performance measurements. Most (63%) have also deployed an interactive application security testing (IAST) solution.
Most importantly, 77% of respondents said they want more application security training.
Williams said ultimately DevSecOps will require an observability platform capable of capturing metrics that are meaningful to developers. Contrast has launched an observability platform for IT security teams that borrows DevOps principles to streamline the management of cybersecurity.
Achieving and maintaining security is complex because application data flows in and out of disparate systems running in the cloud and on-premises IT environments. IT security teams are forced to navigate a multitude of application programming interfaces (APIs) that have varying degrees of dependencies to ascertain what’s actually occurring in their extended IT environments.
Contrast enables DevOps teams to instrument their applications with security sensors, which Williams said enables the Contrast Application Security Platform to aggregate data flows spanning multiple applications. That approach also eliminates silos spanning application security testing (AST), software composition analysis (SCA) and runtime application self-protection (RASP) tools installed across an enterprise, said Williams.
It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams will add agents specifically to instrument applications to gather security data. However, as more responsibility for application security is shifted left toward developers, it’s apparent legacy approaches to securing applications are being found wanting.
In the meantime, it’s still early days as far as DevSecOps is concerned even for technology companies, much less the average enterprise. Most IT organizations are just getting started down this path. The issue most of them are coming to terms with is the degree to which they need their DevOps and cybersecurity teams to collaborate. While there may be a need for a lot of interaction between these two teams early on, there may come a day soon when DevOps teams eventually reach a level of proficiency that makes security a natural extension of any quality assurance process.
