An essential step in safeguarding your applications running in the cloud is to identify and fix potential risks before they are exploited. It is especially important to tie effective success metrics to your overall application security (AppSec) and development processes. Shifting left isn’t a new concept; we have been talking about it for years. But what is new are ways to better understand these metrics and more thoughtfully examine how we neutralize potential application-based risks as part of our overall IT security strategy.
In recent years, AppSec has been more of a challenge. As we’ve shifted to the cloud, threats have become more abundant and more sophisticated. This is partly thanks to the use of AI to both produce code as well as adversaries creating malware with it.
To protect organizations in today’s interconnected world, AppSec and development teams need to align on goals so they are working together. By having the same success metrics, both teams can work to eliminate risk and improve their organization’s security posture. Here is how to start taking back control and provide better metrics to track your applications portfolios.
Holistic Tools
The number of security alerts produced by various protection products has exponentially increased in recent years, which quickly produces alert fatigue. Modern AppSec teams run multiple tools that scan an application’s code pre-deployment and have separate tools for runtime protection. Many of these tools don’t offer an interconnected view of the entire application estate. This makes it extremely challenging to secure applications from code to cloud when there isn’t a consistent approach to security for everyone — security and developers alike.
For a successful AppSec program, organizations must understand and track two key areas: First, the gaps between enforcing security and what gets put into your code, and second, ensuring both teams have the right context to understand what is actionable and how these actions can improve your security posture.
Prevention-First Approach
Many AppSec and developer teams define success based on how many alerts are resolved. While there is alignment across both teams here, this metric doesn’t provide any visibility into how secure the organization is. And it also can be counterproductive, encouraging both teams to quickly move through a large alert corpus and make mistakes. A far better choice is to measure the success of your prevention-first approach by striving to see a reduction in the number of critical vulnerabilities that reach production. Advances in AppSec driven by automation and AI can help teams be more proactive and avoid these manual and tedious threat discovery and mitigation methods.
Mean Time To Remediate (MTTR)
MTTR is a commonly used success metric in AppSec, but it can be misleading. On average, it takes 145 hours to remediate an alert. Organizations must clearly define and classify what a remediated or fixed issue is. Security teams might define success by how quickly they can ship an alert off to a developer, but that doesn’t mean the developer will actually fix the issue in a timely manner. For MTTR to be effective, it must involve both security and development to ensure that success is based on the total time from the alert to when the fix in code is pushed to the production environment.
Compliance
AppSec teams should be measuring how compliant their applications are, ensuring they’re meeting industry recognized frameworks like HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC2, PCI, etc. However, compliance alone can give a false sense of security if not paired with rigorous, proactive security measures. Organizations often make the mistake of treating compliance as the end goal rather than the minimum standard. The goal of security isn’t merely to avoid regulatory penalties but to protect data and systems from breaches. Organizations need to build security strategies that go beyond compliance, integrating advanced security practices that adapt to the dynamic nature of cyberthreats.
Combining the right metrics with better tooling and automation can enable more of a 10,000-foot view of the entire application infrastructure, provide a better understanding of how applications interact with each other, and make both AppSec and DevOps teams more productive. And of course, improve overall application security, too.
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Combining the right metrics with better tooling and automation can enable more of a 10,000-foot view of the entire application infrastructure.