Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (A-SOC)

Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (A-SOC)

Application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC) is a category of application security (AppSec) solution that helps streamline vulnerability testing and remediation through workflow automation. ASOC solutions collect data from various AppSec sources (like SAST, DAST, and IAST tools) and consolidate them into a single database. ASOC solutions then correlate these findings, prioritising critical remediation efforts. The end result enables security teams to streamline their AppSec activities in an informed and efficient way.

What are the benefits of ASOC?

At a high level, the most impactful benefit of ASOC is the role it plays in increasing DevSecOps efficiency. As agile development demands increased speeds and more tooling, adequate management of resources and remediation activities pose great challenges for security teams. ASOC plays a key role in helping tackle these challenges.?

More specifically, ASOC benefits security efforts in several ways:

1. Improved resource allocation: Introducing ASOC into a development environment provides critical remediation prioritization information without hindering existing practices. AppSec tools uncover a large number of vulnerabilities, some which may be false positives that don’t need code fixes. This leads to an overload of identified issues that requires assessment to determine whether they truly need attention. An ASOC solution provides critical prioritisation of findings, enabling resource and cost savings.?
2. Centralised vulnerability management: While each AppSec tool used in a development environment plays an important role in securing an organization’s applications, they all provide results in different formats. Additionally, more than one tool may find the same issue. Efforts to weed through results from all AppSec tools are time-consuming and slow down development. With an ASOC solution, analysis results from multiple AppSec tools and manual testing are aggregated, the same issues identified by different tools are deduplicated, and all remaining results are automatically correlated and prioritized in a single central hub.?
3. Better understanding of risk: ASOC solutions enable CISOs and development leads to quickly identify the highest-risk projects in their application portfolios. They also provide metrics showing how well teams are performing vulnerability management and AppSec activities over time. Using these metrics, teams can understand how well or how poorly they’re doing at securing their applications and make adjustments accordingly.?
4. Continuous and automated scanning: In place of manually scanning applications, ASOC solutions offer a way to schedule automated scans for all the security tools an organization uses. Frequency and specific actions of the tool can all be defined and set up within an ASOC solution. This removes the need for piecemeal or individual scanning activities.?
5. Automated AppSec processes: ASOC solutions allow predetermined cross-team workflows to be easily set up and automated. Rather than relying on communication between security engineers and developers, both teams are notified when something falls outside of their agreed-upon processes.

Credits: Multiple sources

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