Secure the SDLC with Veracode


The Strategic Imperative of a SDLC 


The modern enterprise runs on software. The methodologies driving this software creation—Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)—prioritize rapid iteration and frequent releases. While this velocity is crucial for market competitiveness, it has fundamentally reshaped the cybersecurity landscape, making security an intrinsic, rather than an incidental component of software creation.


This shift necessitates a proactive and comprehensive approach: the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC). A SSDLC integrates security measures and considerations into every phase of the software development process, from initial design and ideation, to coding, to testing, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. This framework moves beyond reactive vulnerability patching to a preventive security-by-design philosophy, ensuring that security is built in, not bolted on. 


Learn more about Veracode's product integration into the SDLC & request a demo.

Why a Secure SDLC Matters:


  • Expanded Attack Surface: The proliferation of microservices, third-party libraries, open-source components, and containerized environments significantly broadens the potential entry points for attackers. Each new dependency or service represents a potential vulnerability. Three in ten organizations have more than 96% of critical debt from third party code.


  • Escalating Cyber Threats: Cyberattacks are growing in sophistication and frequency. Organizations face constant threats from data breaches, intellectual property theft, and operational disruptions, which can incur millions of dollars in costs annually. In fact, 80% of applications tested have at least one security flaw.


  • Regulatory Demands: An increasing number of industry regulations and compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, NIST) mandate robust application security practices, making a demonstrable Secure SDLC essential for avoiding severe penalties.


  • Developer Empowerment: The shift-left movement places more responsibility on developers to address security early. However, these developers often lack the specialized security knowledge and resources to effectively integrate security testing across the SDLC.


  • Balancing Velocity and Security: While developers are under immense pressure to deliver software rapidly, application security teams are tasked with ensuring that software is secure before it reaches production. This creates a significant challenge, as the constant demand for speed often comes at the expense of security. In fact, 80% of developers reported feeling some level of burnout due to high workload and tight deadlines.5 This intense pressure means that for many organizations security simply cannot keep pace with development velocity, resulting in 50% of organizations admitting that they carry critical security debt.6 Thus, the need for accuracy and comprehensive coverage without compromising quality. 


 

The Six Essential Steps to Secure the SDLC

Veracode’s industry experience, outlined in the Secure Your SDLC in 6 Steps framework, identifies the critical components of a successful Secure SDLC: 


Step 1: Discover and Assess Risks:

Identify all applications, their owners, open-source dependencies, AI usage, and associated risk levels to establish a baseline.




Step 2: Establish Prevention Methods:

Implement security controls early in the SDLC. Use appropriate testing tools, continuously monitor open-source libraries and third party components and use AI-assisted remediation tools. Unify and prioritize findings across all sources.




Step 3: Onboard and Scale Apps:

Integrate automated security scans into the development process and continuously scan applications to establish a security posture baseline.



Step 4: Set Policies:

Define clear security policies based on risk tolerance, regulatory requirements, and application criticality, enforcing them through technical controls in CI/CD

  • Goal: Automatically enforce your organization's risk tolerance.
  • Key Action: Define clear security policies based on regulatory requirements and application criticality. Enforce these policies in CI/CD to prevent policy-violating code from moving forward. This aligns with the OWASP SAMM Governance function.




Step 5: Prioritize and Address Findings:

Categorize and resolve policy-violating flaws efficiently through remediation or mitigation, focusing on critical security debt.

  • Goal: Reduce security debt and improve Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR).
  • Key Action: Use a tool-neutral platform like Veracode Risk Manager to unify findings from all sources (SAST, DAST, SCA). Automate investigation, prioritize issues by root cause and owner, and use Next Best Actions™ to eliminate the most risk with the least effort.



Step 6: Leverage Reporting and Analytics:

Use unified reporting systems to track progress, identify areas for improvement, set goals, and demonstrate compliance to stakeholders.

  • Goal: Prove your security posture to stakeholders and track strategic improvements.
  • Key Action: Use unified reporting systems to track progress, set goals, and demonstrate compliance to stakeholders. Analyze the results of your policy enforcement and remediation efforts.
  • Veracode Risk Manager (Application Security Posture Management)


 

Secure the SDLC with Veracode


Add Veracode into your organization's security & development processes:

  • Find & Fix flaws before they hit production. By adding Veracode to the early stages of the SDLC (IDE and Pipeline), you are catching flaws when they are cheapest to fix.


  • Security is no longer the gatekeeper, it's the guardrail. Builds no longer have to be delayed by security findings after the fact. When Veracode is in the SDLC (CI/CD), security checks happen automatically with every build.


  • Reduce context switching by leveraging Veracode's IDE plugins and Veracode Fix. Keep your developers in their flow state. Don't make them archaeology dig through old code to fix new bugs.


  • Reduce risk to outside vulnerabilities and attacks. Modern apps are heavy on open-source libraries. A single vulnerability in a library (like Log4j) can compromise an entire org. SCA (Software Composition Analysis) and Package Firewall running in the SDLC monitors these libraries constantly.


By integrating Veracode Fix, Static Application Security Testing, Dynamic Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, Package Firewall, Risk Manager, Container Security, and more, Veracode provides a comprehensive, unified solution that ensures your software is built and deployed safely, protecting sensitive data, and helping you stay ahead of potential cyber threats.



Unified Risk Management and Prioritization

To manage the overwhelming volume of findings, Veracode Risk Manager is a tool-neutral platform that unifies findings from all sources (SAST, DAST, SCA, Container, etc.), automates investigation and prioritization, links issues to their root cause and owner, and provides Next Best Actions™ to eliminate the most risk with the least effort. This provides smarter prioritization and unified insights for enterprise security teams and CISOs, allowing them to efficiently reduce security debt and gain comprehensive visibility as per the Governance function of OWASP SAMM.






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