Application Security Orchestration and Correlation

At a high level, the most impactful benefit of ASOC is the role it plays in increasing DevSecOps efficiency. As agile development demands increased speeds and more tooling, adequate management of both resources and remediation activities poses a great challenge for security teams. ASOC can assist in several ways.

• Improved resource allocation. Introducing ASOC into a development environment provides critical remediation prioritization information without hindering existing practices. AppSec tools uncover a large number of vulnerabilities, some of which may be false positives that don’t need code fixes, leading to an overload of identified issues that require assessment. ASOC provides critical prioritization of findings, enabling resource and cost savings.
• Centralized vulnerability management. While each AppSec tool used in a development environment plays an important role in securing an organization’s applications, they all provide results in a different format. Additionally, more than one tool may find the same issue, which makes the effort to weed through them all time-consuming. With an ASOC solution, analysis results from multiple tools and tests are aggregated, deduplicated, and automatically correlated and prioritized in a single central hub.
• Better understanding of risk. ASOC enables CISOs and development leads to quickly identify the highest-risk projects in their application portfolios. They also provide metrics showing how well teams are performing vulnerability management and AppSec activities over time. By using these metrics, teams can understand how well or how poorly they’re doing at securing their applications and make adjustments accordingly.
• Continuous and automated scanning. In place of doing it manually, ASOC offers a way to schedule automated scans for all the security tools that an organization uses. Each tool’s frequency and specific action can be defined and set up in an ASOC solution, removing the need for piecemeal or individual scanning activities.
• Automated AppSec processes. ASOC allows predetermined cross-team workflows to be easily set up and automated. Rather than relying on communication between security engineers and developers, both teams are notified when something falls outside of their agreed-upon processes. 

A common AppSec problem is the separation between vulnerability management and continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines. ASOC can help bridge this gap by combining integrated testing results from multiple sources into a single tool, correlating the findings, and prioritizing high-risk vulnerabilities. This allows developers to orchestrate security within a CI/CD pipeline without hindering development velocity.

As demands on security teams continue to grow, ASOC will undoubtedly play an increasingly critical role in helping to alleviate the vulnerability overload that taxes security and development teams alike. Offering continuous and automated scanning in existing pipelines, ASOC solutions provide a single source from which to schedule automated scans across all the tools used in an organization. The future state of AppSec will likely involve organizations moving toward adopting ASOC as their single source of truth and using it to manage their AppSec portfolio effectively and efficiently. 

Black Duck® Software Risk Manager™ is a comprehensive ASOC solution that enables teams to

• Implement policy-driven AppSec at scale by defining and enforcing the security policies that specify parameters for test execution and vulnerability management
• Unify user experience across disparate AppSec testing tools to simplify your resourcing and operations while improving tool consolidation across teams
• Consolidate vulnerability reporting and management across projects, teams, and tools to provide a complete picture of normalized, deduplicated, and prioritized security risks
• Simplify AppSec integration and orchestration in development workflows to integrate security workflows into existing developer toolchains and enable quick onboarding for existing projects and builds
• Optimize core AppSec testing with a single, unified solution to efficiently deploy, manage, and report on core testing functions

Learn more about how Software Risk Manager can streamline your security activities and prioritize test findings