Black Duck Polaris™ Platform

The Black Duck Polaris Platform is a comprehensive, cloud-native, SaaS application security testing solution designed to unify and automate application security throughout the software development life cycle. It integrates the industry’s most powerful security analysis engines—including SAST with Polaris fAST Static, SCA with Polaris fAST SCA, and DAST with Polaris fAST Dynamic—into a single, fully integrated platform.

Polaris empowers development, DevOps, and security teams by providing fast feedback, seamless CI/CD integration, and comprehensive vulnerability detection with governance controls. Built for scalability and flexibility, Polaris eliminates the traditional overhead of on-premises tools, allowing you to onboard and scan code within minutes from popular repositories like GitHub and GitLab. By shifting security left and consolidating multiple testing types, Polaris transforms application security into an automated, continuous process, ensuring that you maintain comprehensive visibility and control over your application security risks across diverse technology stacks.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform seamlessly integrates SAST, SCA, DAST, and IaC scanning into a single, unified, and orchestrated cloud-native solution. This integration eliminates the fragmentation common with disparate point solutions.

Polaris intelligently orchestrates various security testing types by triggering the appropriate scans based on development context: fast SAST and SCA scans run on code commits, comprehensive analysis executes on pull requests, full SAST, SCA, IaC, and secrets scanning occur during CI/CD builds, DAST scans test applications in staging, and scheduled scans continuously monitor for new vulnerabilities. Policy-based orchestration determines which testing types to run for specific applications or projects, using configurable rules based on technology stack, criticality, schedule, and compliance requirements to ensure tailored and effective security.

All findings are consolidated into a unified dashboard, where they are deduplicated, correlated, and enriched with contextual information for prioritized remediation. This comprehensive, policy-driven approach ensures complete application security coverage, simplifies management, accelerates feedback, and significantly improves overall security posture without the complexity and overhead of managing multiple tools.

Yes, the Black Duck Polaris Platform is a fully cloud-native application security testing platform, delivered as a SaaS solution. Polaris provides unparalleled on-demand scalability, automatically adjusting to any scanning workload without requiring upfront infrastructure investments or capacity planning. Customers get immediate access and simplified deployment, eliminating complex installations and maintenance.

Polaris ensures continuous security with automatic updates, high availability, and robust disaster recovery while offering significant cost optimization through a consumption-based model. Additionally, its cloud-native design provides global accessibility for distributed teams, as well as enterprise-grade security and privacy controls including encryption, single sign-on, and role-based access. This empowers you to shift focus from tool operations to strategic security initiatives, ensuring a future-proof investment with continuous platform enhancements and comprehensive protection.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform fundamentally transforms the relationship between developers and security teams by providing a unified platform with shared visibility, common workflows, and integrated communication mechanisms.

Polaris breaks down traditional silos by establishing a single source of truth for all application security findings, ensuring that everyone operates from consistent data. Developers receive security feedback directly within their existing tools—such as CI/CD pipelines, IDEs, and issue trackers—enabling them to address vulnerabilities without context-switching. Security teams maintain control through centralized policy management and portfolio-wide dashboards, preventing them from becoming bottlenecks while still ensuring consistent standards.

Polaris also provides developers with contextual remediation guidance and expert-assisted triage, further reducing friction and fostering a partnership between security and development teams, supported by integrated communication channels and shared accountability metrics.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform provides comprehensive compliance reporting and governance capabilities, transforming the often-burdensome task of meeting regulatory requirements into an automated, continuous process. Polaris generates automated compliance reports tailored for frameworks including PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, and automatically maps security findings to standards such as OWASP Top 10 and CWE.

Polaris also includes a robust governance engine that enforces consistent security policies across your entire application portfolio through centralized controls for vulnerability thresholds, remediation SLAs, and license compliance. Furthermore, it automates Software Bill of Materials generation, maintains detailed audit trails, implements role-based access control, and supports formal exception management workflows.

By integrating with GRC platforms and identifying historical trends, Polaris enables you to efficiently demonstrate security program effectiveness, satisfy diverse regulatory demands, and maintain strategic oversight of your security posture with minimal overhead.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform is our cloud-native, unified SaaS solution that integrates the core security analysis engines of both Black Duck SCA and Coverity SAST. Essentially, Polaris is a superset of these capabilities, delivering the same industry-leading SAST and SCA power, along with DAST, IaC scanning, and secrets detection, all within a single, integrated cloud platform.

While Polaris offers the operational simplicity, automatic updates, and elastic scalability of a cloud service, standalone Coverity and Black Duck SCA products continue to be available for organizations with specific on-premises requirements, such as air-gapped environments, or those with strict data residency regulations or existing legacy infrastructure.

Polaris is our cloud-first solution, providing a modern, integrated approach to application security while ensuring our proven analysis capabilities are accessible across diverse deployment needs.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform is engineered to scale application security programs across large enterprises by leveraging its cloud-native architecture, intelligent automation, and robust governance capabilities. Enterprise customers gain unlimited, on-demand scanning capacity that automatically handles workloads of any size, from individual developer scans to enterprise-wide assessments of hundreds of applications, without requiring infrastructure planning or proportional increases in security headcount.

Polaris facilitates rapid onboarding and provisioning of new projects and teams, and centralized policy management ensures consistent security standards are applied across your entire portfolio through policy inheritance and automated enforcement. Extensive automation—from scanning and triage to ticket creation and reporting—dramatically improves operational efficiency.

You benefit from portfolio-wide visibility, enabling strategic oversight and data-driven decision-making, as well as support for distributed teams and an API-first architecture for seamless integration.

By optimizing resource utilization through intelligent scanning and multiproject correlation, Polaris ensures that your AppSec program can grow economically and operationally to match your business expansion, securing diverse application portfolios throughout rapid development cycles.

The Black Duck Polaris Platform provides comprehensive risk visibility through unified dashboards, intelligent correlation, contextual enrichment, and portfolio-wide analytics, eliminating the fragmented views common with disparate security tools. Polaris consolidates findings from SAST, SCA, DAST, IaC scanning, and secrets detection into a single interface, offering a complete picture of your attack surface. Polaris intelligently deduplicates findings and enriches each vulnerability with critical context—such as exploitability indicators, exposure assessment, and business criticality—to help you assess actual risk and prioritize effectively.

Role-based views give developers actionable guidance on issues relevant to their code, and provide security leadership with strategic insights into portfolio-wide trends, remediation velocity, and security debt. Polaris also extends visibility to your supply chain, proactively alerts stakeholders to critical issues, and integrates with other security and GRC tools to provide a consolidated and complete view of risk posture.

Polaris transforms security from an opaque activity into a transparent, data-driven process, enabling informed decision-making across all levels of your organization.