Does this scenario sound familiar to you?
You’re juggling budget constraints, regulatory demands, and an ever-growing attack surface. Your application security stack is a patchwork of tools that don’t integrate, while developers push code faster than security can keep up, and that’s without talking about the network and data security tools that you are responsible for.
Traditional approaches to application security—where CISOs have complete control over the budget and get into the nitty-gritty details of which security tools are being used—is making way to a new approach, where developers have a decisive say in AppSec tool selection. And it does have a sound logic behind it. After all, developers are the ones who must integrate these tools in their workflow, balancing between agile development and continuous delivery, and fixing vulnerabilities.
However, since the security buck stops with CISOs, it’s up to them to establish a new security model where CISOs actively enable AppSec teams and development teams to work together, to fix vulnerabilities effectively without slowing business velocity.
The solution lies in a unified, proactive security strategy that stays ahead of threats without impeding development velocity. But achieving this balance requires a fundamental shift in how CISOs approach application security
The AppSec Landscape is Changing and CISOs Must Evolve
In today’s security landscape traditional command-and-control approaches are becoming less effective. The democratization of technology in organizations is shifting security budgets and tooling decisions from security leaders to the teams who engage with the tools the most. Given the rapid pace of modern application development, development teams increasingly influence tool selection. As with any major shift, it does not happen without challenges. To navigate this new reality, CISOs must evolve from tool purchasers to strategic leaders who enable secure development at scale. This evolution centers on three critical pillars:
- Eliminating Guesswork in Risk Prioritization – Helping dev teams know what needs to be fixed first by identifying and focusing on the most critical vulnerabilities, to mitigate risks effectively
- Let Your Devs Work – Enabling developers to integrate security into the development process to improve both productivity and security outcomes.
- Make It Work Together – Reducing complexity, improving visibility, and lowering operational costs by streamlining and consolidating all security tools into one platform.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these pillars.
Pillar #1: End the Guesswork – Know What to Fix First
Security and development teams often face an overwhelming volume of vulnerabilities. Without proper prioritization, time and resources are wasted on low-risk issues while critical threats remain unaddressed.
Without proper context and prioritization, security teams waste precious time investigating low-risk issues while critical vulnerabilities potentially go unaddressed. Development teams, in turn, waste time addressing non-issues, which slow down their workflow. In many cases, the sheer volume of alerts and security fatigue can backfire, creating a higher risk—developers may ignore vulnerabilities to stay on track and meet deadlines, inadvertently increasing exposure.
How CISOs Can Stay Ahead
To cut through this noise, CISOs need to provide their organizations with:
- Faster, more actionable insights into their application security landscape: This means moving beyond simple vulnerability scanning to understand the real-world impact of security findings.
- Contextual prioritization: True risk prioritization that considers factors like exploitability, exposure to the internet, and business impact. Not all vulnerabilities are created equal, and security teams need tools that help them focus on what matters most.
- Scan-depth flexibility: The ability to go deep or wide, depending on the circumstances – a fast, high-level scan that highlights a few pressing issues, or a deep-dive that goes in depth and provides a more thorough and detailed picture of the security status.
- Reporting automation: Automated compliance reporting and clear audit trails that make it easy to demonstrate security posture to stakeholders and auditors.
An integrated security platform enables security teams to consolidate risk visibility, maintain audit readiness, and ensure compliance without overwhelming developers with excessive security alerts.
How Checkmarx Helps
Rather than presenting AppSec practitioners with a flood of disconnected alerts, Checkmarx provides the context and clarity needed to make informed security decisions:
- Risk Correlation – Integrates security data from multiple tools to identify and prioritize exploitable vulnerabilities.
- Comprehensive Visibility – Provides a holistic view of an organization’s application security posture, ensuring informed decision-making.
- Correlation – Integrates security findings across multiple testing tools and correlates them to identify true areas of risk.
- Exploitable Path – Shows exactly how attackers could exploit weaknesses in the code. This capability traces the complete attack path from source to sink, helping developers understand not just what’s vulnerable, but why it matters and how to fix it.
- Compliance Readiness – Automated reporting and compliance dashboards, streamlining audits and security assessments.
- Flexible Scanning – Organizations can choose between rapid scans for quick feedback during development and comprehensive scans for deeper security analysis.
- Presets – Pre-configured security rules. Organizations can choose what to look for and tailor their security scanning to match their specific needs and risk tolerance
Pillar #2: Let Your Developers Work – Make Security Seamless
When security tools operate in isolation from development workflows, they create friction that slows down delivery and decreases security adoption. Vulnerabilities go unfixed, and security alerts are seen as a nuisance, rather than as an integral part of the workflow.
How CISOs Can Stay Ahead
The key to changing this perception among developers lies in making security as seamless and intuitive as possible for them.
This means:
- Integration with existing tools and workflows: Security checks should run within the IDE and CI/CD pipeline, providing immediate feedback without requiring developers to change their workflow, context switch or learn new tools.
- Real-time guidance and feedback: Developers need clear, live, and actionable information about security issues as they code.
- Automated remediation support: When issues are found, developers should receive clear guidance on how to fix them, ideally with automated remediation options where possible.
How Checkmarx Helps
Checkmarx provides developers a seamless experience, allowing them to address vulnerabilities without distracting them from dev work:
- Seamless Integration: Security is embedded directly into the tools developers already use. Bug trackers, IDEs, CI/CD tools, SCM integrations are your developers’ natural environment.
- DevOps Policy Management: Break builds if security policies are violated. Integrate directly into the CI/CD process and have security policies automatically enforced.
- AI-Powered Coding Assistant: Provides instant security feedback during coding, helping developers remediate issues in real-time.
- Guided and Auto-remediation: Remediate vulnerabilities at a click of a button. No need for developers to be security experts. Easier to fix vulnerabilities means more vulnerabilities are fixed.
- Developer Enablement: Guided remediation and training ensure that security adoption is frictionless and efficient.
Pillar #3: Make It Work Together – Create a Unified AppSec Strategy
Tool sprawl is more than an inconvenience; it’s a security risk. When organizations rely on multiple disconnected security tools, they create blind spots, increase management overhead, and drive up costs. Tool sprawl doesn’t allow synergies. Additionally, tool sprawl is a management challenge, overwhelming CISOs with too many vendors and budget concerns to manage.
How CISOs Can Stay Ahead
A unified approach to application security is essential for modern organizations.
This unification should deliver:
- Improved security coverage: Correlation and prioritization across all application types, security testing methods, and dev stages allows for more cohesive security coverage.
- Centralized visibility: Allows for more control and a better overview of the total security posture through unified dashboards and reporting.
- Better collaboration: AppSec and dev teams can collaborate more efficiently and reduce frictions through shared processes.
- Reduced total cost of ownership: Tool consolidation and automated workflows reduce the overall cost of ownership across all teams and functions.
How Checkmarx Helps
Checkmarx provides a comprehensive security platform that enables multiple teams to collaborate efficiently throughout the SDLC, across multiple pipelines.
- Multiple tools in one Platform: Checkmarx One combines SAST, DAST, API Security, Container Security, IaC Security, and more all on one platform, providing a single pane of glass.
- Built-in ASPM Dashboards: Unify security findings to improve risk prioritization.
Leveraging APMA for Strategic Application Security
CISOs need to create an application security strategy.
To create the strategy, you need to know where you currently stand, what gaps remain, and how to fix them.
To assist organizations in measuring and enhancing their security posture, Checkmarx developed the Application Security Program Maturity Assessment (APMA) framework. APMA provides a structured methodology for evaluating AppSec strategies, identifying gaps, and implementing improvements. It focuses on five key dimensions:
- Strategy and Governance: Aligning high-level security goals, objectives, and policies, typically under CISO’s purview.
- Security Testing (Tactical): Examining AppSec program processes, often managed by the head of AppSec.
- Security Testing (Operational): Assessing required tools and their utilization, usually the responsibility of the head of application development in collaboration with AppSec management.
- Security Testing (Architecture and Scale): Evaluating the infrastructure needed for security testing, primarily handled by the IT/infrastructure manager.
- Planning: Breaking down security initiatives into work packages, timelines, and resources, typically managed by project, program, or delivery managers.
APMA has been leveraged in over 300 security assessments across 200+ organizations, with an additional 600 self-assessments conducted using APMA Digital.
A real-world example of APMA’s impact is Cdiscount, one of the largest e-commerce companies in Europe. Cdiscount faced growing vulnerabilities and fragmented security processes. By leveraging APMA, they gained a clearer view of their security maturity, streamlined risk management, and aligned their teams under a unified AppSec strategy. The result was a significant reduction in security friction and improved risk visibility.
Conclusion: When Everything Clicks into Place
A modern approach to application security enables CISOs to achieve true alignment between security and development teams. By prioritizing the most critical vulnerabilities, integrating security into developer workflows, and consolidating security tools, CISOs can finally get ahead of application risk without slowing down innovation.
Ready to Get Ahead of Application Risk?
With Checkmarx, CISOs gain complete visibility into security risks, enable developers to fix vulnerabilities in real-time, and maintain control over security across cloud and legacy applications. Unifying your AppSec on Checkmarx One provides a 177% ROI, according to analysis conducted as part of the Forrester Total Economic Impact report.
Checkmarx enables security leaders to achieve this transformation, ensuring organizations are always ready to run—without compromising on security or development speed. The result is a security program that enables innovation while maintaining robust protection against evolving threats.
Request a demo today and see what it’s like to be Always Ready to Run.