- A concentrate on depth relatively than breadth: It makes use of high-confidence, focused guidelines to determine vulnerabilities.
- It’s managed by growth groups: The event workforce addresses points as a part of their common workflow.
- Prevents new vulnerabilities: It stops particular lessons of vulnerabilities from coming into the code base throughout growth.
- Requires second-generation SAST instruments: To be efficient, the software must be quick and focused in order that it could possibly function on each commit and each pull request shortly and in a approach that limits the eye a developer must pay to it.
No matter whether or not you select a contemporary or conventional SAST, there’s one other consideration… to bundle or to not bundle. SAST distributors generally bundle different utility safety testing (AST) instruments together with software program composition evaluation (SCA), container scanning, and secret detection. For distributors, this is sensible — why promote you one factor if they’ll promote two, three, or extra. However does it make sense for you?
Usually, bundling can also be good for shoppers. However let’s transcend the plain (it may be cheaper). Bundling SAST with different ASTs might be vastly helpful for productiveness — assuming you’ve got comparable goals for all of your instruments (e.g., developer productiveness) — as a result of it could possibly create a extra built-in and streamlined AppSec program. To determine if the bundle will prevent time, begin along with your technical necessities for every software. When you’ve narrowed down your record, search for instruments that present a united interface for the AppSec workforce that consolidates or de-duplicates findings. Not solely will that make your workforce extra environment friendly, it could possibly additionally enable you keep away from investing in instruments like utility safety posture administration (ASPM) which might be designed to consolidate alerts when your instruments don’t play nicely collectively. Lastly, learn the way a lot effort it takes so as to add every AST. AppSec groups usually lack strong entry to CI, so most organizations will need a straightforward set up expertise the place they don’t have to put in every software individually. Ideally, this ought to be as non-disruptive as attainable to each the AppSec and growth groups.
Bundling won’t be for you in case your technical necessities can’t be adequately met by a single vendor. For instance, you would possibly want a standard SAST software however can’t deal with a loud SCA. It’s tempting to go together with a less expensive bundle however that may result in shelfware, so beware.
