7 Key Benefits of a Reliable Cloud Application Security Partner

When you’re looking to secure your applications, you need to keep a few things in mind. You want to make sure that your software security vendor is a fully-Saas vendor you access in the cloud. That way you benefit from scalability, peer benchmarking, and more. Here’s what to look for in an application security testing solution that you can access in the cloud while supporting cloud-native development. Plus, you’ll learn why cloud-based trumps on-premises solutions. 

The key components of a reliable cloud application security partner 

When you’re evaluating the ever-changing landscape of different solutions for securing applications, it’s important to consider the following factors. 

Scalability  

When distinguishing between cloud and on-premises software security vendors, consider the growth of your program, both long-term and as required in the short term. Cloud vendors offer economy of scale as you grow, saving you the costs inherent in hardware for your data center over time. Can your vendor’s solution scale as your business grows? 

Elasticity 

If you host your own solution, you’ll need to consider having extra hardware to handle the load in the event of a crucial zero-day vulnerability such as Log4j. Cloud-based vendors bear that cost for you and can satisfy your scanning needs during such time-critical events. Is your solution sufficiently elastic to meet unexpected demand? 

Aggregate Data 

A cloud-based software security solution lets you benefit from years of data starting on day one. The vendor uses this data to improve the accuracy of their scanning, so you spend less time fixing things that aren’t broken. If you’ve had an on-premises solution for one year, you only have one year of data. If you’ve been with Veracode for one year, you’re getting the advantages of the 78 trillion lines of code we’ve scanned over nearly two decades (longer than anyone else). 

Peer Benchmarking 

A cloud-based vendor can leverage all that data and help you see how you compare to your industry peers. Measuring yourself against those you compete with allows you to benchmark your team’s performance against that of your peers.  

Protecting the entire SDLC 

It’s critical to ask if the solution provides visibility into your entire codebase throughout the SDLC (at run-time as well as when you scan binaries). The increased use of third-party software, including open source, introduces risk into your software development. This risk can be hard to find, especially when vulnerabilities are not in the libraries you call, but in the libraries those libraries call. Not only do you need to be able to scan third-party software, but your vendor should also provide a means to export a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to give you visibility throughout your codebase. DevSecOps collaboration between your developer and security team is extremely difficult if the vendor can’t provide a “single pane of glass” for seeing your security posture. 

As our CTO & Founder, Chris Wysopal, said in a recent interview:  “In the past, when everyone was operating their own on-prem data centers, we couldn’t have this kind of visibility. But now that infrastructure is being built in the cloud, we can look at it all in a meaningful way. If everything is code running through cloud-native CI/CD pipelines and into cloud-native architectures, you can look at that code together – and, more importantly, make risk-driven tradeoffs at different levels of the application stack.”  

Agile Updates 

A SaaS vendor means your software security solution is updated at the speed of threats. Your development methodology is agile, and your vendor needs to be, too, throughout the entire SDLC. Being in the cloud means the ability to make constant updates and release new features whenever they're ready, for more rapid remediation or mitigation of security risks. In fact, Veracode updates our vulnerability database daily. You’ll appreciate this when the next major zero-day vulnerability is discovered. 

Qualifications 

On a final note, a qualified vendor is a vendor you can trust. There are some different qualifications a cloud-native vendor can meet that will help you determine their caliber. AWS Security Competency Partners and AWS DevOps Competency Partners must meet strict qualifications for technical expertise and customer success. Also, especially if you work for the public sector or sell software to the public sector, you may need to check your vendor’s qualifications for regulatory requirements like FedRAMP. 

Book a Demo with Veracode

There are clear benefits associated with choosing a software security partner you can access on the cloud. When it comes to finding a reliable SaaS solution, make sure you consider how long they’ve been operating so you can fully benefit from capabilities like learning from aggregate data and peer benchmarking. Book a demo today and hear how you can benefit from our world-class service and platform.