From metrics to meaning: Optimizing your AppSec program with Apiiro Reports

Regulations like the new CISA Secure Software Development Attestation Form and precedent-setting lawsuits, like the Solarwinds vs. S.E.C. case, are making AppSec a board-level topic like never before. Now, AppSec leaders and CISOs need to be thinking about not only how they’re securing their applications but also how they’re measuring and attesting to that level of security.

To accurately report on your security posture and how it trends over time, you need an intimate understanding of your application attack surface, reliable benchmarking of current risk, and holistic visibility across the risk lifecycle. But synthesizing that data to create a complete picture is hard when it’s coming from multiple sources and tools.

Solving that challenge is one of the (many) benefits of application security posture management (ASPM) platforms—especially for enterprise organizations. 

Enterprise-grade AppSec reporting with Apiiro

To make it easier for our customers to get a complete picture of application risk and measure their AppSec program efficacy, we’re excited to unveil Apiiro’s flexible, granular, and, of course, exportable Reports! 

Reports are built seamlessly into Apiiro’s ASPM platform and are equipped with robust filtering, drill-through, breakout, and exporting capabilities. Reports are broken into two types:

• Risk Reports deliver a comprehensive high-level snapshot of your organization’s risk landscape and how it evolves over time. Designed for org-level benchmarking, these reports are suitable for executive consumption and can help portray your security landscape, measure your program’s performance, and make informed decisions for optimizing resources and managing risk.
• Application Reports provide insights into risks within and across applications or application groups. Designed for business leaders to compare metrics across the organization, these reports help with risk forecasting, understanding the impact of specific initiatives, and identifying opportunities for future investment and secure development training.

Whether you are looking at an org-wide or application-centric view, Apiiro Reports enable you to benchmark your application risk and performance, track your risk trends and AppSec resilience, and optimize your AppSec program based on quantifiable data.

Benchmark your application risk and performance

In order to track your AppSec posture over time, you need accurate benchmarking. Apiiro maps and monitors your risk landscape so you can understand how much risk you’re carrying at any given time and under specific conditions.

Report fine-tuning for granular benchmarking

Apiiro’s flexible filters allow you to slice and dice your reports by: 

• Time period: When a risk was discovered and/or resolved
• Location: Application, application group, repository, repository status, component, business impact
• Types of risk: Risk level, risk category, policy name, whether there is PHI data, PII data, or payment data, whether the risk is in applicative code, deployed, internet exposed

This granularity enables you to create hyper-relevant reports for any stakeholder and use case—whether for governance and compliance evidence or to get a snapshot of the risk of an M&A application. 

Tracking risk age to understand window of exposure

Apiiro tracks the age of each risk (in days) by risk severity, so you can measure and track how long risk persists across your application attack surface. 

With this report, you can also pinpoint any areas of concern (i.e. critical risks older than 30 days that need to be addressed to remain PCI compliant) and measure the effectiveness of your remediation and response efforts now and over time. 

Track your application risk landscape trends and resilience

The most common question stakeholders want to understand before jumping into strategic conversations around AppSec is, “How well are we reducing risk across our applications?” With Apiiro’s trend-based reports and MTTR tracking, you can answer that question with great granularity.

Open vs. resolved risk tracking

One way to understand how your application risk posture is trending is to compare the volume of discovered and closed risks for a specified period of time, by application, or both:

Assessing the delta between open and closed risks helps to understand patterns or events that affect your ability to resolve issues and validate that teams working on each application are prioritizing and closing critical risks. For example, if the number of discovered risks is rapidly and consistently outpacing the number of resolved risks, it suggests that the current processes in place for risk prevention and remediation aren’t up to par. 

MTTR trends

Mean time to remediation (MTTR) is a great metric for gauging how efficiently your security and development teams respond to application risks. 

To leverage MTTR as a resiliency metric, it’s important to put it in the context of the volume of risks. Apiiro reports show MTTR vs. risks resolved over time and by application:

Tracking MTTR is a great way to gauge the impact of your developer enablement efforts, justify current and future AppSec investments, and guide your overall remediation strategy.

Optimize your AppSec program based on quantifiable data

Tracking the volume of new and resolved risks and whether your remediation rates have accelerated or slowed over time are not only great indicators of your current AppSec efforts but are great to leverage when making strategic decisions for the future. Whether you’re investing in training, tooling, processes, or headcount, slicing, dicing, and drilling down into risk-specific insights within the Application Reports can help you optimize your AppSec program.

MTTR comparisons across applications

By surfacing the applications with the shortest and longest MTTR, you can compare tactics to potentially replicate successes or determine where to reallocate resources to areas that need improvement:

Identify areas for improvement

In addition to analyzing risks across applications and time, Apiiro segments risks by risk category such as exposed secrets, pipeline misconfigurations, open source license risks, and more in the application risk heatmap: 

This report surfaces the top risk categories which may be an indication of an area to up-level your secure development training. By shedding light on the top risk categories by application, you’re able to identify the most common risk types you see within your organization and use this to shape a training curriculum for developers within a specific application. Plus, you can track how these categories and risk counts shift over time to measure and prove training impact.

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AppSec performance metrics are indispensable in guiding CISOs toward more robust cybersecurity strategies aligned with organizational goals and industry best practices. By regularly reporting on these metrics and KPIs in Apiiro, you can maintain visibility into your organization’s security posture, allocate resources more efficiently, and take a data-driven approach to bolstering your application security program.

See how Apiiro helped SoFi improve their MTTR from 8 days to 10 minutes and click the button below to get sample Apiiro reports.