A few years ago DevSecOps became the popular new kid on the agile AppSec block. Embedding security into the DevOps cycle has become the standard, although many organizations are still trying to figure out how to ensure that security is shifted left and integrated throughout the DevOps cycle.

Adopting a DevSecOps approach requires a change of attitude across the organization, and it applies to processes, people, and the tools that they use.

Automation is at the Heart of the DevSecOps Approach

While this kind of organizational change is always a challenge, more and more enterprises and organizations are making a concerted effort to shift security practices left and incorporate them into the DevOps cycle, ensuring that implementing essential security checks don’t impede time to market.

One of the main components of the DevSecOps approach is automation: as early and often as possible, throughout the SDLC, ensuring security is woven into the entire development life cycle, saving time and money while reducing friction between security and development teams.

We’ve put together a list of some of the top DevSecOps tools that organizations can integrate into their DevOps pipeline, to ensure that security is handled continuously throughout the development lifecycle.

#1 Codacy

Coday offers development teams a quality automation and standardization solution so that they can shift as far left as possible, identifying new issues early in the development process. Their static code analysis tool helps developers to automatically identify and address security issues, duplication, complexity, style violations, and drops in coverage with each commit and pull request, directly from their Git workflow.

Codacy covers over 20 programming languages and integrates easily into developers’ workflow, providing them with visibility over their code quality so that they can track their projects’ quality over time to easily address any technical debt they might have.

The Codacy crew made it their mission to help software development teams make great engineering decisions and create productivity through quality, and it appears that they are doing a good job. Codacy boasts saving developers thousands of hours of time in code review and code quality monitoring so that they can focus on development while Codacy makes the process of creating high-quality software easy.

This open source project developed by SonarSource also focuses on helping developers through automation. SonarQube is an automatic code review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities and code smells in your code. It integrates with development teams’ native workflows to provide them with continuous code inspection across all of their project branches and pull requests.

SonarQube supports nearly 30 programming languages, and offers continuous code inspection so that small developement teams and enterprises alike can spot bugs and fix vulnerabilities that compromise their apps, to keep undefined behavior from impacting end-users.

Acunetix offers an All-in-One website security scanner to help developers find vulnerabilities at the earliest stage.

Acunetix sets out to help companies with a major web presence that have to protect their web assets that are at high risk from hackers, by providing specialized technologies that help developers to detect more issues and fix them quickly. The solution is easy to use, and enables centralization, automation, and integration.

Acunetix is a strong solution, and one of the best-established solutions on the market because it focuses on web security, and boasts high-speed scanning, minimal false positives, ease of use, unique technologies, and SDLC integration.

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Datasheet

Logz.io is another company built by engineers, for engineers, that offers scalable cloud observability powered by ELK & Grafana, so that developers can easily monitor, troubleshoot, and secure production.

Among the many helpful features that this log management and log analysis solution provides, are security analytics to help organizations of any size address threats and stay compliant. Logz.io’s security analytics allows developers to integrate security into their DevOps pipelines with the tools and data used for operations, so that they can identify more, without sacrificing speed or agility with advanced threat detection and correlations. In addition, it provides built-in reports, rules and integrations to help organizations stay compliant.

GitLab is a web-based DevOps platform that offers a complete CI/CD toolchain out-of-the-box in one single application. It supports collaboration between Development, Security, and Ops teams and helps them speed up delivery, and address security vulnerabilities without slowing down the CI/CD pipeline, by simplifying toolchain complexity.

Besides being named a CI leader, GitLab offers the full package to help organizations shortening their DevOps cycle time by bridging silos and stages, and supporting a unified workflow that reduces streamlines activities that used to be separate, like application security, and CI/CD.

This crew offers a Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) and an Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) solution to help organizations create self-protecting software.

Contrast Security’s solutions integrate into users’ apps and work continuously in the background. The first part of the Contrast Security Suite, named Contrast Assess, alerts developers when a vulnerability is discovered. The second part of the suite, called Contrast Protect, uses the same embedded agent, and works in the production environment, looking for exploits and unknown threats, and reporting what it finds to a SIEM console, next generation firewall, or any other security tools an organization already has in place. Contrast Security also recently improved their already-impressive offering and introduced Contrast OSS, to help organizations cover open source security with automated open source risk management.

Aqua security helps save the day, providing container security throughout the DevSecOps pipeline. Aqua’s cloud-native security platform provides users with full control over containerized environments, with tight runtime security controls and intrusion prevention capabilities, at scale.

The platform supplies users with an API for easy integration and automation. The Aqua Container Security Platform provides complete SDLC controls for securing containerized applications that run on-premises or in the cloud, as well as on Windows or Linux. The platform supports a variety orchestration environments.

XebiaLabs has been around since the early days of DevOps, to help enterprises speed up their releases and support large organizations’ typically diverse infrastructure and complex processes.

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform offers a complete Application Release Orchestration (ARO) solution that covers everything from release orchestration, to deployment automation, and DevOps intelligence. Teams can use it in practically any environment, including containers, the cloud, middleware, and mainframes.

The platform integrates seamlessly into the DevOps pipeline, and unifies all of an organization's DevOps tools into a single interface so that they can orchestrate and automate the entire software delivery and deployment process, including CI, security, database, analytics, environment provisioning, and issue tracking, and reporting.

Another type of risk that many DevSecOps tools don’t focus on is open source vulnerabilities. Considering today’s typical application will include 60%-80% open source code, it’s very important that organizations don’t neglect open source security management, and deploy a dedicated solution that will track and alert users about open source risks throughout the DevSecOps pipeline.

WhiteSource integrates into the DevOps pipeline, and is compatible with over 200 programming languages, as well as a wide variety of build tools and development environments. It runs automatically and continuously in the background, tracking the security, licensing, and quality of open source components and matching them against WhiteSource’s comprehensive database of open source repositories to provide real-time alerts as well as prioritization and remediation.

Honorable Mention: Secure Code Warrior

We couldn’t close this list without giving these guys a shout-out. Secure Code Warrior provides Developers with the help that they need in order to think and act with a security mindset, by guiding them on how to master secure coding. This clever solution teaches developers to both identify and remediate vulnerabilities in application code in a gamified environment.

Secure Code Warrior wants to help developers address security code securely by providing them with the skills to write secure code from start.

In addition to the competitive Developer Quality Assurance gaming platform, the solution also allows managers executives with the visibility and metrics that they need in order to track their developers’ proficiency.

Which DevSecOps Tools are Right for You?

Adopting the DevSecOps approach throughout an organization is no simple feat. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day and organizational changes don’t happen overnight. Choosing the right automated DevSecOps tools is a great way to start. Think about your organization’s systems and networks, processes and teams, and start out with the tools that will help you most and are an easy fit.

Using the right automated tools that help to secure your product throughout the SDLC allows your development teams to power through to meet release schedules with high-value deliverables, without the need for security to send them back to the drawing board as they near the finish line.