As time to market continues to be crucial for business, organizations adopt DevOps or similar agile methodologies for rapid development with increasing success. All this means that if security does not become an essential part of the software lifecycle, organizations will be releasing applications with more vulnerabilities at mind blowing speed.

In many organizations, application security is isolated to a specific team that gets involved in the final stages of development and is perceived as an inhibitor of speed. These security teams can’t keep up as development teams are staffed at an 80:1 ratio to security teams. When security vulnerabilities are found in late stages, organizations face pressure, which results in friction between teams, missed release deadlines or worse. Releases with known security defects are also being pushed to production in order to meet project timelines, in which case the business and its customers risk being exposed to attackers.

Beyond missed deadlines and team dynamics, having a reactive approach to Application Security is costlier to organizations. According to NIST, the cost to remediate security flaws is 30x more expensive in production and 10x more in testing than if they were caught in early stages of development. These issues and potential risk indicate that the only way to secure applications without compromising cost is shifting security left and take a developer-driven application security approach.