Software development has evolved dramatically. What began as simple, monolithic codebases has become a complex mix of custom code, open source, APIs, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Today’s development teams manage ecosystems, not just lines of code.
Delivery methods have undergone an equally significant shift. Traditional waterfall processes with predictable, infrequent releases have given way to continuous delivery pipelines where code changes deploy multiple times daily. With this acceleration, security can no longer function as an end-of-cycle gate without becoming a major bottleneck.
This evolution has driven the shift to DevSecOps, where security integrates throughout the development lifecycle rather than being a separate phase.
Security responsibilities have shifted from specialized teams to a shared model where developers actively participate in securing applications. Since Checkmarx pioneered SAST in 2006, the company has evolved its solutions to address these changing dynamics.
This article explores the practical implications of modernizing Application Security: why legacy SAST is no longer enough, what a modern cloud-based platform can offer, and how teams can make the move with minimal disruption and maximum impact.
Today’s Development Demands Flexible Security
On-premises SAST solutions have built a strong security foundation for many organizations. However, as development practices evolve, several challenges have emerged.
Key limitations of on-premises SAST
- Infrastructure Overhead: Running security infrastructure requires dedicated hardware and software licenses that consume IT resources
- Scalability Bottlenecks: Fixed scanning capacity creates bottlenecks during busy development periods, potentially slowing delivery
- Integration Complexity: Connecting to modern CI/CD pipelines often needs custom integration work that requires specialized expertise
- Developer Friction: Complex security tools drive developers to find workarounds, creating potential blind spots
- Limited Coverage: Modern applications contain many components beyond custom code – APIs, containers, cloud services – that need specialized security testing that SAST doesn’t provide
The evolution of software development means security teams must scan more code, more frequently, across more technologies than ever before. This scaling challenge is particularly evident during peak development periods when multiple teams need concurrent scanning.
How Cloud-Native AppSec Builds on Proven Foundations
Modern platforms like Checkmarx One address these challenges with cloud-native capabilities designed for speed, scale, and simplicity, without sacrificing security. They extend the benefits of traditional SAST while removing the bottlenecks.
Key advantages of moving to a modern AppSec platform
- Infrastructure Freedom: Eliminates hardware procurement cycles and infrastructure management, reducing IT overhead
- Elastic Capacity: Scales automatically to match development workloads, preventing bottlenecks even during peak periods
- Built-in Connectivity: Offers out-of-the-box integrations rather than custom connections, simplifying toolchain integration
- Continuous Updates: Updates security engines automatically without disruption, ensuring up-to-date protection against emerging threats
- Global Access: Supports distributed teams with consistent access from anywhere, matching modern work patterns
Cloud-native platforms reduce IT burden, eliminate scanning delays, and keep security in step with development velocity.
Better Developer Experience, Better Security
Developers determine the success of security tools. If the experience is smooth, security gets used. If not, it gets bypassed.
Checkmarx One improves the developer experience by embedding security directly into daily workflows and providing developers with key capabilities:
Watch this quick overview to see how Checkmarx One brings security into the IDE:
- IDE Integration: Embeds security directly in Visual Studio, VS Code, Eclipse, and JetBrains IDEs where developers spend their day. Even ASPM capabilities are available within the IDE, helping development teams prioritize critical risks and manage AppSec posture. This type of integration makes secure coding part of everyday work.
- Automatic Scanning and Decorated Pull Request – Automatically summarize security changes in the SDLC.
- Shift-Left Feedback: Identifies problems live while writing code, rather than later, when context is lost and fixes become more complex
- Easy IDE setup: Lightweight plugins that install in seconds
- Scan Local Branches: Scan local branches in the IDE, before deployment
- Native DevOps Connection: Connects seamlessly with GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket and other source repositories and pipelines. No complex set up required
- Flow Preservation: Keeps developers in their workflow instead of switching contexts, maintaining productivity
- Auto-remediation: Provides specific, practical fix guidance through AI assistance, taking it a step further from just “you have a problem” to “here’s how to fix it”
Instead of the traditional model where developers wait for security feedback after committing code, Checkmarx One provides immediate guidance during development.
For example, when a developer writes code containing a potential SQL injection vulnerability, Checkmarx One can highlight the issue in real-time within their IDE, explain the security implications, and suggest a specific fix – all before the code is even committed.
This real-time feedback loop helps developers resolve issues before code is even committed—dramatically reducing the time and cost of fixing vulnerabilities.
Checkmarx One also supports enterprise-scale security management, including policy enforcement and build-breaking for violations.
Security Coverage Beyond SAST
Securing modern applications requires more than scanning custom code. Checkmarx One goes beyond SAST to cover the full SDLC—from open-source dependencies and API endpoints to containers and cloud infrastructure.
Additionally, unlike many platforms that are pieced together through acquisitions, providing a disjointed user experience, Checkmarx One is built as a holistic end-to-end solution from the ground up, fully incorporating the following capabilities and components:
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Finds vulnerabilities in open-source components, identifies licensing issues, and detects malicious packages
- Malicious Package Protection: Helps you identify — and eliminate the dangers of — malicious open-source packages throughout the SDLC, leveraging the industry’s largest database of malicious packages
- Secrets Detection: Prevents the exposure of secrets by detecting and validating hardcoded passwords, access tokens, keys, and other sensitive credentials — while proactively blocking any Git commit containing secrets, ensuring that they never reach shared repositories
- Repository Health: Helps improve your security posture with full visibility into the security, dependency management, and maintenance health of the code repositories used in your applications
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Discovers runtime vulnerabilities by testing running applications, finding issues that only emerge during execution
- API Security: Detects weaknesses in API implementations, identifies misconfigured endpoints, and validates input validation
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Catches misconfigurations before cloud deployment, preventing insecure cloud resources
- Container Security: Checks Docker images and Kubernetes configurations for vulnerabilities and security issues
Each engine addresses security concerns specific to its domain, providing comprehensive coverage that a single testing approach can’t achieve alone.
Multiple scan types can run simultaneously, with correlated results across engines, giving security teams complete visibility into the issue. This increases accuracy as the vulnerability context helps prioritize application risk.
This approach has several key advantages:
- Complete visibility across custom code, third-party components, runtime behavior, and infrastructure
- Reduced tool sprawl by consolidating multiple security functions in one platform
- Consistent policy enforcement across all application components
- Simplified compliance through comprehensive coverage and reporting
For security teams, this means more efficient operations and better risk coverage. For developers, it means a single set of security guidelines rather than conflicting requirements from multiple tools.
Application Security Posture Management: Security at Scale
As AppSec matures, scanning alone isn’t enough. Security teams need to understand posture, risk, and trends across all their apps. That’s where ASPM comes in.
Checkmarx One’s Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) capabilities help teams scale their security operations by:
- Risk-based prioritization: Evaluating vulnerabilities based on actual risk factors like exposure, data sensitivity, and exploitability
- Portfolio-wide visibility: Providing unified visibility across all applications, allowing teams to identify systemic issues
- Policy standardization: Implementing consistent security standards organization-wide through automated policy enforcement
- Security trend analysis: Tracking security improvements over time with clear metrics and visualizations
- Vulnerability correlation: Connecting related findings across testing types to reveal broader security patterns
This approach shifts security from reactive vulnerability management to proactive risk reduction. Instead of chasing individual findings across different systems, security teams can focus on the highest-impact issues and systemic improvements.
For example, ASPM capabilities might reveal that certain teams consistently struggle with the same security patterns, highlighting opportunities for targeted training. Or they might show that a specific framework is responsible for a disproportionate number of vulnerabilities, prompting architectural review. With Checkmarx One, ASPM is even brought into the IDE. Discover why this shift is critical in our recent blog, ASPM is for Everyone.
AI Transforms Security Effectiveness
AI features enhance both developer workflows and security team capabilities.
Checkmarx One integrates artificial intelligence to streamline application security processes, offering tools that assist both developers and security professionals:
- AI Secure Coding Assistant (ASCA): ASCA provides real-time feedback by scanning code as developers write it. It identifies security best practice violations and, when integrated with tools like GitHub Copilot, suggests remediation snippets to address these issues promptly
- AI Security Champion: Generative AI-driven remediation suggestions for vulnerabilities detected by SAST and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scans. It aids developers in understanding and resolving security issues efficiently within their development environment
- AI Query Builder: Assists security teams in crafting custom queries for SAST and IaC scans. By leveraging generative AI, it simplifies the process of writing and refining queries, enabling tailored security assessments for specific applications
- Integration with Generative AI Tools: Checkmarx One integrates with platforms like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, helping teams identify vulnerabilities earlier – before they’re deployed
These AI-powered features are designed to enhance the effectiveness of application security efforts, enabling teams to identify and remediate vulnerabilities more swiftly and accurately.
Supporting Your DevSecOps Journey
Transitioning to DevSecOps requires more than tools – it needs a platform that connects security with development processes. Integrations need to be easy to do and out-of-the-box. As DevOps and continuous delivery have become the norm, your security tools need to seamlessly integrate with your pipeline without complex implementation. Checkmarx One supports this shift through:
- Unified Visibility: Dashboards showing security across all applications in a single view
- Intelligent Risk Ranking: Algorithms that identify critical issues based on multiple risk factors
- Automated Governance: Policy enforcement without manual intervention or security bottlenecks
- Connected Insights: Analytics that link findings across different testing types and applications
Organizations using Checkmarx One report faster deployment cycles without compromising security. By embedding security checks throughout the development process rather than concentrating them at the end, teams catch issues earlier when they’re easier and cheaper to fix.
This approach also improves collaboration between security and development teams. With shared visibility and clear metrics, both groups can work together on improving security rather than engaging in the traditional back-and-forth about whether issues are real or important.
Making Migration Practical
Security concerns are often a barrier to cloud adoption. Checkmarx One addresses these head-on with enterprise-grade protections:
Security of the platform itself
Checkmarx One addresses this with comprehensive measures:
- End-to-end encryption for code and findings both in transit and at rest
- Granular role-based access controls that can match or exceed on-premises permissions
- SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications verifying security practices
- Regular penetration testing and security assessments
Maintaining protection during transition
The migration process includes:
- Parallel running of both platforms during the transition period
- Step-by-step application migration with verification at each stage
- Policy verification to ensure consistent security standards
- Results comparison to validate detection capabilities
- Clear milestones and success criteria for each phase
This structured approach ensures continuous protection throughout the migration process, allowing organizations to move at their own pace without creating security gaps.
When users migrate from CxSAST to Checkmarx One, they can migrate:
- Existing users and expand identify management
- Previous triage work
- Previously customized presets
- Previously customized queries
What does this mean in practice?
Let’s take the example of a large US financial institution that recently upgraded from their on-premises SAST to Checkmarx One: By moving they streamlined their workflow and enhanced efficiency.
The result? A 2000% increase in scan volume and 100% vulnerability backlog reduction.
By evolving your application security strategy, you can move faster, reduce risk, and build software with confidence. Explore our migration resources for best practices, insights, and resources.
Ready to take the next step to modernize your AppSec program?
Whether you’re currently using an on-prem Checkmarx solution or a competitor’s legacy tool, now’s the time to see what a modern, cloud-native platform can do for your organization.
Request a demo of Checkmarx One to explore what migration looks like in practice for you.