Why is security certification important for applications?
Security certification ensures that an application is free from exploitable vulnerabilities, thereby protecting the application and its users from potential security threats.
As applications go through a code change, the security certification is the process of testing the application for any open exploitable security issues. This process may involve code review, secrets scanning, dependency checks or even pen testing. The certification ensures that there are no exploitable vulnerabilities in the released software / application. A lot of forward thinking enterprises may ask any software vendor for one such report; almost all government agencies have a standard requirement from the software vendors to furnish the OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities Certification of the latest release.
These certifications are conducted by authorized agencies that are selected by standards body or government departments (for example Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in India for software companies in India).
What are the main components of an application security certification?
As mentioned above security certifications require a set of security testing performed on the application. The components of application security certification include and are not limited to:
- SAST
- Secret scanning
- Image / Binary Scanning
- Artefact Scanning
- IAC scanning
- DAST or Penetration Testing
If the certification is for OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities then the purpose of certification / testing is to ensure that there is no violation for any policy related to OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities.
Why & how does security certification delay software releases?
The process involves multiple rounds of extensive security testing and iterations to fix identified issues, making it time-consuming. Developers may not be able to fix all issues in one go; sometimes needing 2-3 cycles to fix it, thus delaying the certification cycle/ process.
These iterations also contribute to the increase in operational costs. The delay in releases also impacts developer efficiency.
Why are security certifications costly and how much does an OWASP Top 10 Vulnerability certification cost?
An OWASP Top 10 Vulnerability Certification costs around USD 2500 to USD 4000 per application. This is a standard price for around 2–3 iterations. If the number of iterations goes up, the cost and the turnaround time also go up.
Imagine the cost of Application Security certifications if your enterprise is running 30-40 applications and if you are asked to provide audit reports for each and every release.
Ideally, the certifications are required for every code change however the practice is to do the certifications for major code change and generally once a year to reduce the costs. This is a major threat and the basic underlying problem.
The certifying agency may offer you volume discounts, but these discounts are insignificant in case you have a significant number of applications, which makes this a direct Recurring Operational Cost.
How does OpsMx reduce the cost and time of application security certifications?
OpsMx helps enterprises:
- To enable continuous security as part of software development and release process,
- To be test and audit ready,
- Accelerate the vulnerability management and remediation process with fool-proof correlation and prioritization for developers,
- With minimal number of iterations for the security certification, and
- With minimal or no open issues (Critical or High risk security issues) at the time of deployment
In short, OpsMx enables enterprises to accelerate their certification process thereby reducing the cost.
How OpsMx Reduces the Cost and Accelerates Application Security Certifications
The recurring operational cost of certifying multiple applications can be very high. OpsMx aggregates data from various tools into a unified dashboard, streamlining vulnerability management and remediation efforts.
OpsMx integrates security into the software delivery process, aggregates and prioritizes vulnerabilities, provides remediation insights, and reduces the number of iterations needed for certification.
Delivery Shield connects to your DevOps and Security tool chain including,
- Code repo,
- Build and Continuous Integration,
- Governance,
- Artefact,
- SAST,
- Secret scanning,
- Build, Image, Binary scanning,
- IAC scanning,
- Artefact Scanning,
- DAST,
- Continuous Delivery and Deployment,
- Cloud or target destination.
The purpose for these integrations is to listen and capture the events including security scans / testing, aggregate that information into the SDLC database, ingest this data and orchestrate specific policies (for example OWASP Top 10) in order to detect the vulnerabilities.
This may sound simple, as any tool may do that.
The differentiation is the OpsMx Delivery Shield not only aggregates and detects vulnerabilities from any source but it correlates, prioritises and remediates vulnerabilities and keeps you informed with help of a unified dashboard.
By prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities through an integrated dashboard, OpsMx accelerates the security readiness without slowing down the release cycle.
Your developers and engineers will have access to the details of vulnerabilities but also insights on how to fix these prioritized vulnerabilities.
So if you are using multiple security tools then you need not login into those tools individually, rather OpsMx prioritizes all the vulnerabilities together on a single dashboard to keep your development team focussed.
This is configurable. Hence if you are able to release or deploy an application with OpsMx Delivery Shield as your AppSec tool, the chances are high that Security Is Working Without Slowing Down The Speed Of Release!
You also get to see the progress with help of insights and trend reports over the release cycle during a specific duration of time.
Such standards of security practices integrated in your SDLC ensure minimum iterations during the certification and testing process, reducing the turnaround time and overall cost of Application Security.
May, I encourage you to ask for a live demo of OpsMx Delivery Shield and learn from our security experts on how OpsMx can help you to accelerate the AppSec process and reduce overall cost of SecOps.
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