Orchestration for Secure Development Lifecycle Management

With the increasing adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, it is imperative for enterprises to move beyond a cookie-cutter approach to

cybersecurity and espouse a more proactive strategy that can help them shift toward a more secure software development life cycle (SDLC).

While multiple security frameworks and tools, such as code vulnerability scanning and code quality assurance, are used to detect vulnerabilities, mapping the data points generated from these tools into a single database is often challenging. Though these tools allow early detection of critical vulnerabilities in the software development life cycle (SDLC), they lack the capabilities to fix the vulnerabilities completely.

Organizations must focus on centralizing data points across their software security tools and aggregating them into a single database. In this blog, let’s take a look at how Cyware enables data visualization for easy detection of vulnerabilities, as well as provides a central security decision-making dashboard for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, creating a secure SDLC.

Focus on Data Correlation

For a successful SDLC, it’s important to ensure that the release dates, features, and SLAs related to the development of the software are timely met. When it comes to maintaining the highest standards of security throughout the development lifecycle, organizations often implement various security tools across their development environment.

However, security tools like third-party requirement scanning, code vulnerability scanning, vulnerability scanning, etc. have their individual databases and dashboards that result in massive volumes of data. Security teams must correlate the data generated from different sources to connect the dots between the information collected and draw valuable insights into the development lifecycle.

The Dominance of Dashboards

Cyware allows security teams to take an integrated risk management approach, enabling them to effectively perform data correlation by ingesting information from multiple sources into a singular database and feeding it into a visualization platform.

This single pane of glass not only saves security teams’ time but also provides central visibility across all the aspects of the SDLC on a single dashboard, empowering better decision-making.

How Cyware Helps Secure Your SDLC?

To orchestrate the SDLC, Cyware equips security teams with its orchestration platform, Cyware Orchestrate, which allows them to use a combination of different security tools to poll the information across the SDLC using diverse sources and add them into a database. Using Cyware Orchestrate, security teams can visualize this data to gain a bird’s-eye view of software security during the development cycle and take quick remediation actions on the same.

The combination of different tools that are used in this process include:

• Dependency scanning tool to understand an organization’s dependency and license security posture alongside identifying obsolete or vulnerable third-party packages (Eg: SNYK, Google OSV)

• Code analysis tool to detect inherent security vulnerabilities that may exploit the codebase (E.g.: Sonar Cloud, Bandit, etc.)

• Vulnerability scanning/vulnerability management service (Eg: AWS Inspector, Nessus, etc.)

• A time series database to store the code security information (Eg: Influx DB, TimescaleDB, etc.)

• A visualization platform to view the stored data (Eg: Grafana, Tableau, etc.)

A pair of API credentials gets generated for every security tool and integrated into Cyware Orchestrate which helps configure the playbook, aggregating data and feeding it into the database.

Why Choose Cyware Orchestrate?

While custom scripts can be written to poll data and sequentially process them, Cyware Orchestrate offers low-code security orchestration and automation capabilities, enabling security teams to orchestrate use cases with ease.

The overall flow of the code monitoring orchestration offered by Cyware is fairly straightforward, where the playbook runs over an interval of time and polls data points across the configured toolset. Further, it processes the response and sorts issues based on severity.

This sorted data is reformatted to the database format and added to the time series database. The playbook is illustrated below.

Once the data points are ingested into the time series database, a platform like Grafana can be used to visualize the data.

Single Pane view of the dashboard to visualize the data

Overview of the dashboard to visualize the data

The Bottom Line

Insecure software puts an organization at increasing risks and vulnerabilities, therefore it is imperative to shift toward a more secure development lifecycle. While individual tools and technologies assist in different areas of software security, orchestrating these data points into a single database, in turn, a single dashboard, provides a single pane of glass, allowing security teams to view the security standpoint of a SasS product. This synthesis opens up gateways into data correlation, enabling security teams to view key security information and metrics across various stages of a SaaS product development lifecycle.

To learn more about Cyware Orchestrate and how easily it orchestrates code security monitoring, schedule a free demo.

References

Cyware Orchestrate

Grafana

InfluxDB

SYNK

Google OSV

Sonar Cloud

Bandit

AWS Inspector

Nessus

TimeScale DB

Tableau