Fast application security testing with the Polaris platform

Digitalization is speeding up business cycles across all industry sectors, so no matter what business you’re in, you need to keep up. Every business depends on software technologies—from microservices and serverless computing to containers, APIs, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) files—to build and run apps fast, in a distributed manner, and without being tied to physical hardware infrastructures.

Simple, scalable, and flexible security solutions can help businesses securely navigate the increasing speed of development cycles, especially as that work shifts to cloud-native development models. And while cloud-native flexibility helps save time and money across the entire software development life cycle (SDLC), it also requires that businesses pay attention to application security and find tools to test at the speed of business.

Black Duck Polaris™ Platform is an enterprise solution that simplifies application security testing (AST) at speed and on demand. The Polaris platform’s AST tools bring simplicity, scalability, and power to your development process—without slowing down your teams.

Security at speed for both SAST and SCA

Although development teams carry the bulk of the responsibility for application security testing, triage, and vulnerability remediation, the responsibility for overall application security (AppSec) program success generally falls to security teams, especially in midsize to large organizations. Until now, most cloud-based application security testing platforms forced security teams to give up one or more of their basic demands. For example, an intuitive platform might not be powerful enough to uncover security problems in complex applications. But a tool that is fast locally might not scale for enterprise. Most cloud-based AppSec testing systems perform well for static application security testing (SAST) but poorly for software composition analysis (SCA), or vice versa.

The Polaris platform does both. Polaris fAST Static and Polaris fAST SCA services are built on the same powerful analysis engines at the core of Synopsys market-leading Coverity® and Black Duck® products, and are integrated and delivered from the cloud via the latest version of the Polaris platform.

Fast, flexible security anyone can use

The Polaris platform gives your organization access to AppSec testing with all the benefits of cloud-based security as a service (SaaS). Polaris fAST Static and Polaris fAST SCA offer a cost-effective way for your organization to access best-in-class AST tools without having to purchase and maintain expensive hardware and software installations in-house.

The Polaris platform also means that your application security testing is no longer dependent on in-house expertise or a complicated infrastructure. Your organization can rapidly scale your AppSec testing efforts as needed without incurring additional costs or hiring new staff.

Because they are cloud-based, Polaris fAST Static and Polaris fAST SCA can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so your developers to work remotely and collaborate with team members around the world. They can set up continuous AppSec testing to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities across your entire SDLC, ensuring that your organization is secure—from coding, to build integration, to preproduction deployment.

Polaris fAST Static and Polaris fAST SCA enable teams to run multiple types of AppSec scans concurrently and deliver comprehensive test results that can be viewed from a single unified platform. The Polaris platform can be easily integrated into existing DevOps workflows and toolchains, and it can be used to test applications developed in most language or frameworks, which makes incorporating security testing into the development cycle easy. Developers can easily onboard and offboard projects at any time, without having to rely on the AppSec team, making security testing easier to perform earlier and minimizing the risk of issues being pushed downstream. And easy security testing is security testing that will get done.

Access vulnerability trends, monitoring security health, and test security status

The Polaris platform makes it easy for dev and DevOps to perform security testing activities right in their workflows. It also provides ease-of-use for your security teams, so they can focus on the overall health of your organization. And vulnerability trend analysis provides vulnerability severity and type information across applications, projects, and test types, so security teams can identify AppSec hotspots in your portfolio.

Polaris fAST Static and Polaris fAST SCA continuously monitor your codebase, alerting developers to vulnerabilities as they arise. Real-time test status and application security monitoring give security teams a comprehensive view of current and previous tests across applications, projects, and teams. With detailed test metrics, logs, policy management, expert triage services, and more, the Polaris platform helps security teams fine-tune test coverage to increase the accuracy of your findings.