In the world of cybersecurity preparedness, there are a variety of strategies organizations large and small can take to help protect their networks and data from cyber-attacks. One such strategy involves an organization testing its own environment for security vulnerabilities. But because security weaknesses come in different forms, it’s necessary to have a focused security team that comprehensively searches for vulnerabilities that go beyond simple risk assessments.

The application layer continues to be the most attacked and hardest to defend in the enterprise software stack. With the proliferation of tools aimed at preventing an attack, it’s no wonder the application security testing market is valued at US 4.48 billion. Forrester’s market taxonomy breaks up the application security testing tools market into two main categories: security scanning tools and runtime protection tools.

Compliance testing, also known as conformance testing, is a periodic, independent, and objective assessment of compliance-related processes and/or controls. The goal of compliance testing is to determine whether the elements, processes, and controls of your compliance program are designed appropriately and operating as designed. Compliance testing follows an established process and plan as well as a risk-based approach.

In today’s fast-paced world, companies are racing to bring new, innovative software to market first. In order to keep up with the speed of innovation, many organizations are shifting toward DevSecOps. DevSecOps brings security to the front of the software development lifecycle, allowing for both fast deployments and secure applications.

By now, most are familiar with the concept of DevSecOps. With DevSecOps, application security (AppSec) is moved to the beginning of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). By scanning earlier in the SDLC, you are able to find and fix flaws earlier. This can result in significant time and cost savings. Most organizations understand the importance of static analysis, which scans for flaws during development, but dynamic application security testing (DAST) is just as important.

Application security testing (AST), which are tools that automate the testing, analyzing, and reporting of security vulnerabilities, is an indispensable part of software development. In a modern DevOps framework where security is shifted left, AST should be thought of as compulsory. And this has never been more important when you consider that Forrester reports the most common external attack method continues to be application weaknesses and software vulnerabilities.