Software program growth has advanced dramatically. What started as easy, monolithic codebases has develop into a fancy mixture of customized code, open supply, APIs, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Right this moment’s growth groups handle ecosystems, not simply strains of code.
Supply strategies have undergone an equally important shift. Conventional waterfall processes with predictable, rare releases have given method to steady supply pipelines the place code adjustments deploy a number of occasions each day. With this acceleration, safety can not operate as an end-of-cycle gate with out changing into a serious bottleneck.
This evolution has pushed the shift to DevSecOps, the place safety integrates all through the event lifecycle moderately than being a separate section.
Safety duties have shifted from specialised groups to a shared mannequin the place builders actively take part in securing purposes. Since Checkmarx pioneered SAST in 2006, the corporate has advanced its options to handle these altering dynamics.
This text explores the sensible implications of modernizing Software Safety: why legacy SAST is not sufficient, what a contemporary cloud-based platform can supply, and the way groups could make the transfer with minimal disruption and most influence.
Right this moment’s Growth Calls for Versatile Safety
On-premises SAST options have constructed a powerful safety basis for a lot of organizations. Nevertheless, as growth practices evolve, a number of challenges have emerged.
Key limitations of on-premises SAST
- Infrastructure Overhead: Working safety infrastructure requires devoted {hardware} and software program licenses that devour IT assets
- Scalability Bottlenecks: Fastened scanning capability creates bottlenecks throughout busy growth durations, probably slowing supply
- Integration Complexity: Connecting to trendy CI/CD pipelines usually wants customized integration work that requires specialised experience
- Developer Friction: Advanced safety instruments drive builders to seek out workarounds, creating potential blind spots
- Restricted Protection: Fashionable purposes comprise many elements past customized code – APIs, containers, cloud providers – that want specialised safety testing that SAST doesn’t present
The evolution of software program growth means safety groups should scan extra code, extra steadily, throughout extra applied sciences than ever earlier than. This scaling problem is especially evident throughout peak growth durations when a number of groups want concurrent scanning.
How Cloud-Native AppSec Builds on Confirmed Foundations
Fashionable platforms like Checkmarx One handle these challenges with cloud-native capabilities designed for pace, scale, and ease, with out sacrificing safety. They lengthen the advantages of conventional SAST whereas eradicating the bottlenecks.
Key benefits of transferring to a contemporary AppSec platform
- Infrastructure Freedom: Eliminates {hardware} procurement cycles and infrastructure administration, decreasing IT overhead
- Elastic Capability: Scales mechanically to match growth workloads, stopping bottlenecks even throughout peak durations
- Constructed-in Connectivity: Affords out-of-the-box integrations moderately than customized connections, simplifying toolchain integration
- Steady Updates: Updates safety engines mechanically with out disruption, guaranteeing up-to-date safety towards rising threats
- World Entry: Helps distributed groups with constant entry from wherever, matching trendy work patterns
Cloud-native platforms scale back IT burden, remove scanning delays, and maintain safety in line with growth velocity.
Higher Developer Expertise, Higher Safety
Builders decide the success of safety instruments. If the expertise is clean, safety will get used. If not, it will get bypassed.
Checkmarx One improves the developer expertise by embedding safety instantly into each day workflows and offering builders with key capabilities:
Watch this fast overview to see how Checkmarx One brings safety into the IDE:
- IDE Integration: Embeds safety instantly in Visible Studio, VS Code, Eclipse, and JetBrains IDEs the place builders spend their day. Even ASPM capabilities can be found inside the IDE, serving to growth groups prioritize vital dangers and handle AppSec posture. Any such integration makes safe coding a part of on a regular basis work.
- Automated Scanning and Embellished Pull Request – Routinely summarize safety adjustments within the SDLC.
- Shift-Left Suggestions: Identifies issues reside whereas writing code, moderately than later, when context is misplaced and fixes develop into extra advanced
- Simple IDE setup: Light-weight plugins that set up in seconds
- Scan Native Branches: Scan native branches within the IDE, earlier than deployment
- Native DevOps Connection: Connects seamlessly with GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket and different supply repositories and pipelines. No advanced arrange required
- Circulation Preservation: Retains builders of their workflow as an alternative of switching contexts, sustaining productiveness
- Auto-remediation: Gives particular, sensible repair steering by way of AI help, taking it a step farther from simply “you have got an issue” to “right here’s the best way to repair it”
As a substitute of the standard mannequin the place builders look ahead to safety suggestions after committing code, Checkmarx One supplies speedy steering throughout growth.
For instance, when a developer writes code containing a possible SQL injection vulnerability, Checkmarx One can spotlight the problem in real-time inside their IDE, clarify the safety implications, and recommend a particular repair – all earlier than the code is even dedicated.
This real-time suggestions loop helps builders resolve points earlier than code is even dedicated—dramatically decreasing the time and value of fixing vulnerabilities.
Checkmarx One additionally helps enterprise-scale safety administration, together with coverage enforcement and build-breaking for violations.
Safety Protection Past SAST
Securing trendy purposes requires greater than scanning customized code. Checkmarx One goes past SAST to cowl the complete SDLC—from open-source dependencies and API endpoints to containers and cloud infrastructure.
Moreover, in contrast to many platforms which are pieced collectively by way of acquisitions, offering a disjointed consumer expertise, Checkmarx One is constructed as a holistic end-to-end resolution from the bottom up, totally incorporating the next capabilities and elements:
- Malicious Package deal Safety: Helps you determine — and remove the hazards of — malicious open-source packages all through the SDLC, leveraging the trade’s largest database of malicious packages
- Secrets and techniques Detection: Prevents the publicity of secrets and techniques by detecting and validating hardcoded passwords, entry tokens, keys, and different delicate credentials — whereas proactively blocking any Git commit containing secrets and techniques, guaranteeing that they by no means attain shared repositories
- Repository Well being: Helps enhance your safety posture with full visibility into the safety, dependency administration, and upkeep well being of the code repositories utilized in your purposes
- API Safety: Detects weaknesses in API implementations, identifies misconfigured endpoints, and validates enter validation
- Container Safety: Checks Docker photographs and Kubernetes configurations for vulnerabilities and safety points
Every engine addresses safety issues particular to its area, offering complete protection {that a} single testing method can’t obtain alone.
A number of scan varieties can run concurrently, with correlated outcomes throughout engines, giving safety groups full visibility into the problem. This will increase accuracy because the vulnerability context helps prioritize software danger.
This method has a number of key benefits:
- Full visibility throughout customized code, third-party elements, runtime conduct, and infrastructure
- Decreased software sprawl by consolidating a number of safety capabilities in a single platform
- Constant coverage enforcement throughout all software elements
- Simplified compliance by way of complete protection and reporting
For safety groups, this implies extra environment friendly operations and higher danger protection. For builders, it means a single set of safety pointers moderately than conflicting necessities from a number of instruments.
Software Safety Posture Administration: Safety at Scale
As AppSec matures, scanning alone isn’t sufficient. Safety groups want to know posture, danger, and tendencies throughout all their apps. That’s the place ASPM is available in.
Checkmarx One’s Software Safety Posture Administration (ASPM) capabilities assist groups scale their safety operations by:
- Threat-based prioritization: Evaluating vulnerabilities based mostly on precise danger components like publicity, information sensitivity, and exploitability
- Portfolio-wide visibility: Offering unified visibility throughout all purposes, permitting groups to determine systemic points
- Coverage standardization: Implementing constant safety requirements organization-wide by way of automated coverage enforcement
- Safety pattern evaluation: Monitoring safety enhancements over time with clear metrics and visualizations
- Vulnerability correlation: Connecting associated findings throughout testing varieties to disclose broader safety patterns
This method shifts safety from reactive vulnerability administration to proactive danger discount. As a substitute of chasing particular person findings throughout totally different techniques, safety groups can give attention to the highest-impact points and systemic enhancements.
For instance, ASPM capabilities would possibly reveal that sure groups persistently wrestle with the identical safety patterns, highlighting alternatives for focused coaching. Or they may present {that a} particular framework is liable for a disproportionate variety of vulnerabilities, prompting architectural assessment. With Checkmarx One, ASPM is even introduced into the IDE. Uncover why this shift is vital in our latest weblog, ASPM is for Everybody.
AI Transforms Safety Effectiveness
AI options improve each developer workflows and safety group capabilities.
Checkmarx One integrates synthetic intelligence to streamline software safety processes, providing instruments that help each builders and safety professionals:
- AI Safe Coding Assistant (ASCA): ASCA supplies real-time suggestions by scanning code as builders write it. It identifies safety greatest observe violations and, when built-in with instruments like GitHub Copilot, suggests remediation snippets to handle these points promptly
- AI Safety Champion: Generative AI-driven remediation strategies for vulnerabilities detected by SAST and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scans. It aids builders in understanding and resolving safety points effectively inside their growth atmosphere
- AI Question Builder: Assists safety groups in crafting customized queries for SAST and IaC scans. By leveraging generative AI, it simplifies the method of writing and refining queries, enabling tailor-made safety assessments for particular purposes
- Integration with Generative AI Instruments: Checkmarx One integrates with platforms like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, serving to groups determine vulnerabilities earlier – earlier than they’re deployed
These AI-powered options are designed to boost the effectiveness of software safety efforts, enabling groups to determine and remediate vulnerabilities extra swiftly and precisely.
Supporting Your DevSecOps Journey
Transitioning to DevSecOps requires greater than instruments – it wants a platform that connects safety with growth processes. Integrations have to be simple to do and out-of-the-box. As DevOps and steady supply have develop into the norm, your safety instruments have to seamlessly combine along with your pipeline with out advanced implementation. Checkmarx One helps this shift by way of:
- Unified Visibility: Dashboards displaying safety throughout all purposes in a single view
- Clever Threat Rating: Algorithms that determine vital points based mostly on a number of danger components
- Automated Governance: Coverage enforcement with out guide intervention or safety bottlenecks
- Related Insights: Analytics that hyperlink findings throughout totally different testing varieties and purposes
Organizations utilizing Checkmarx One report sooner deployment cycles with out compromising safety. By embedding safety checks all through the event course of moderately than concentrating them on the finish, groups catch points earlier once they’re simpler and cheaper to repair.
This method additionally improves collaboration between safety and growth groups. With shared visibility and clear metrics, each teams can work collectively on bettering safety moderately than participating within the conventional back-and-forth about whether or not points are actual or essential.
Making Migration Sensible
Safety issues are sometimes a barrier to cloud adoption. Checkmarx One addresses these head-on with enterprise-grade protections:
Safety of the platform itself
Checkmarx One addresses this with complete measures:
- Finish-to-end encryption for code and findings each in transit and at relaxation
- Granular role-based entry controls that may match or exceed on-premises permissions
- SOC 2 Kind II and ISO 27001 certifications verifying safety practices
- Common penetration testing and safety assessments
Sustaining safety throughout transition
The migration course of consists of:
- Parallel working of each platforms through the transition interval
- Step-by-step software migration with verification at every stage
- Coverage verification to make sure constant safety requirements
- Outcomes comparability to validate detection capabilities
- Clear milestones and success standards for every section
This structured method ensures steady safety all through the migration course of, permitting organizations to maneuver at their very own tempo with out creating safety gaps.
When customers migrate from CxSAST to Checkmarx One, they will migrate:
- Current customers and develop determine administration
- Beforehand custom-made presets
- Beforehand custom-made queries
What does this imply in observe?
Let’s take the instance of a giant US monetary establishment that not too long ago upgraded from their on-premises SAST to Checkmarx One: By transferring they streamlined their workflow and enhanced effectivity.
The consequence? A 2000% improve in scan quantity and 100% vulnerability backlog discount.
By evolving your software safety technique, you possibly can transfer sooner, scale back danger, and construct software program with confidence. Discover our migration assets for greatest practices, insights, and assets.
Able to take the subsequent step to modernize your AppSec program?
Whether or not you’re presently utilizing an on-prem Checkmarx resolution or a competitor’s legacy software, now’s the time to see what a contemporary, cloud-native platform can do on your group.
Request a demo of Checkmarx One to discover what migration appears like in observe for you.
