Cycode has added a module to its platform for mapping metadata and events using graph technology that makes it simpler for application development and cybersecurity to consolidate alerts generated by their DevSevOps tools.
Lotem Guy, vice president of product for Cycode, said the Cycode Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC) module will automatically discover all the tools that make up a DevSecOps workflow without requiring any integration effort.
That capability makes it simpler to aggregate results in a way that enables development teams and cybersecurity professionals to identify the most critical issues that need to be addressed before applications are deployed in production environments, he added.
In effect, Cycode is now providing a method for bridging the historic divide between cybersecurity professionals and application development teams. More cybersecurity professionals are embedded within DevOps teams, but in the absence of a platform for aggregating alerts, they often encounter communications issues. ASOC provides an agentless approach to aggregating the data that DevSecOps teams need to prioritize remediation efforts, said Guy.
While a lot of progress has been made in terms of adopting DevSecOps best practices, many organizations still struggle with securing their software supply chains. Most of the members of a DevOps team have limited cybersecurity expertise, so they need the help of a cybersecurity professional to determine what specific actions are required to remediate a vulnerability. Cybersecurity professionals, conversely, don’t have a lot of application development expertise and generally would prefer not to be overwhelmed by multiple DevOps tools generating alerts about the same potential application security issue.
As the number of regulations specifically focused on application security steadily increase, it’s now just a question of time before every organization that builds software will need to embrace DevSecOps. The challenge is that while everyone involved generally agrees software should be more secure before it’s deployed, the security tools made available to DevOps teams vary widely. In fact, it’s not uncommon for DevOps teams to find themselves spending significant amounts of time sorting through multiple conflicting alerts.
Nor is every alert that gets generated relevant—in some cases, a specific module that generated an alert might not find its way into the final application. In addition, many of the alerts generated also tend to lack context about severity. Application developers can’t devote all their time to fixing bugs, so choices will need to be made based on the actual risk to the application.
Cycode is betting that, as DevSecOps continues to evolve, organizations will look for tools and platforms that make it simpler to make sense of the current level of application security chaos that tends to pervade IT organizations. In the meantime, cybersecurity professionals and application developers will need to learn to trust one another. Developers have too often viewed cybersecurity as an obstacle to deployment while cybersecurity teams have historically considered developers to be one of the primary causes of the breaches they are expected to clean up. The first step toward achieving that goal is, of course, to realize that neither is really the enemy of the other.
