PLEASANTON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Accurics, the cloud cyber resilience specialist, today announced a technology partnership with GitLab, a single application for the DevOps lifecycle, as well as the general availability of its integration with GitLab’s Static Application Security Testing (SAST) solution. Accurics leverages the integration with GitLab to provide DevSecOps teams with a holistic, contextualized view of application and infrastructure risks. Organizations can now establish and programmatically enforce consistent risk management policies throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) while minimizing the effort and expense of manual triage and investigation.

Cloud infrastructure and applications are traditionally deployed from two separate pipelines, which dissociates application security vulnerabilities from Infrastructure as Code (IaC) misconfigurations. As a result, developers are often left with a long list of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to fix without the context required to prioritize remediation of those vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could actually be exploited.

“The most effective innovation is often incremental – for example, new capabilities and additional functionality accompanied by relevant security advances,” said Om Moolchandani, Co-founder, CTO & CISO at Accurics. “In this environment, we see diverse and largely unconnected vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, collectively producing a level of noise that makes identifying the most serious risks vital but difficult. The partnership with GitLab serves to add greater context to every layer of code and strengthens the security risk posture throughout the extended development lifecycle.”

The integration with GitLab helps Accurics users overcome these challenges by correlating IaC, cloud, and SAST vulnerabilities to help mitigate risk throughout the SDLC and generate a threat score. This threat score can be used by policy guardrails established with Policy as Code, blocking the riskiest builds from being deployed into production while providing insight into less risky problems that don’t warrant breaking the build. As a result, developers are able to focus resources on remediating the most immediate threats first.

“The growing adoption of GitOps practices and Infrastructure as Code necessitates scalable risk management tools,” said Nima Badiey, Vice President, Global Alliances at GitLab. “The integration between GitLab and Accurics will help customers to programmatically define infrastructure and risk management policies more effectively throughout the software development lifecycle.”

At Accurics™, we envision a world where organizations can innovate in the cloud with confidence. Our mission is to enable organizations to achieve cloud cyber resilience with developer-first security that self-heals the cloud. The Accurics platform programmatically detects infrastructure misconfigurations and contextualizes the findings with application risks to identify breach paths throughout the development lifecycle. It automatically generates code to remediate issues and applies the fix in the development pipeline. Accurics enables organizations of all sizes to achieve developer-driven cloud cyber resilience through cloud-based and open source tools such as Terrascan

Accurics today announced it has integrated its tool for discovering violations of security policies that occur when developers provision infrastructure as code with both the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform and the static application security assessment testing (SAST) tools from GitLab.

Om Moolchandani, chief information and security officer (CISO) and CTO for Accurics, said both integrations make it easier for developers to discover security issues earlier as part of a DevSecOps workflow using the company’s Terrascan tools.

Many of the issues organizations are having with cloud security these days can be traced back to misconfigurations created by developers when configuring infrastructure using tools such as Terraform. Accurics created Terrascan to identify those misconfigurations.

The integration with GitLab makes it easier to incorporate Terrascan into a DevOps workflow in a way that also aggregates data collected from both SAST and dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools, said Moolchandani. That approach effectively unifies what today are two separate cloud infrastructure and application development pipelines by enabling DevOps teams to employ threat scores to enforce security policies as code that are deemed too risky to deploy with block builds, he added.

At the same time, the integration with SAST and DAST tools provides the context developers need to prioritize remediation efforts before applications are deployed in a production environment, noted Moolchandani.

Organizations of all sizes are now trying to strike a balance between two conflicting agendas. On the one hand, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform have played a critical role in enabling developers to build and deploy applications faster. The issue is that developers lack the security expertise required to ensure infrastructure is secured properly at a time when cybercriminals are more aggressively seeking to compromise software supply chains. Organizations most likely won’t slow down the rate at which applications are being deployed to make sure software supply chains are not compromised. However, in the absence of best DevSecOps practices—which still are not widely implemented—there may be a backlash against shifting application responsibility left toward developers.

The challenge that creates is most organizations don’t have enough security expertise available to review applications in a timely manner before they are deployed, which results in them hoping security issues will be discovered and remediated during the application update cycle before cybercriminals find a way to exploit a vulnerability.

Of course, hope does not make for an application security strategy. Organizations will need to find ways to enable developers to better secure applications while simultaneously making it easier for cybersecurity teams to maintain a zero-trust IT environment that reduces the chances organizations will be breached via, for example, a phishing attack to steal developer credentials.

Regardless of how DevSecOps workflows and zero-trust IT architectures are implemented, it’s clear organizations have run out of time to resolve longstanding security issues that are now making the kinds of headlines no one wants to see.