Organisations have continued to shore up their application security defences over the last year, according to the 2024 State of Code Security survey, sponsored by OpenText and produced by Dark Reading.
“This trend is in essence a response to rising concerns over software supply chain security issues, vulnerability exploits, and other threats to application security,” says Paul Meyer, security solutions executive at OpenText premier partner iOCO Application Management.
The report highlights the high percentage of organisations that have adopted a formal programmatic approach to securing internally developed apps while deploying a range of other mechanisms to protect commercial, third-party, and open source applications.
“The survey of 107 IT, security, and application development professionals reveals broad improvements in enterprise patch management practices and in testing and assessing business-critical apps, third-party apps, and Web applications. The report notes the growing use of containerised applications, microservices architectures, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect applications and services. This is said to be fuelling new security concerns and attempts to address them in many businesses,” says Meyer.
Many companies were observed to be stepping up their efforts in identifying, assessing, and addressing risks stemming from direct and indirect code dependencies. “Most respondents were reported to appear confident about their AppSec capabilities despite several red flags such as a relative lack of focus on issues presenting the biggest threats namely a growing gap between IT security teams and application developers on AppSec matters and a lack of funding and resources,” he adds.
Key takeaways from the survey include:
- 44% of organisations have been practicing formal, programmatic application security for one to five years.
- 23% of respondents say their biggest application security risk is attackers with deep knowledge of application vulnerabilities.
- 72% of those surveyed focus primarily on securing business-critical applications.
- 55% of organizations keep up to date on patching their most important applications.
- 74% consider their dependency scanning/software component analysis (SCA) practices very or somewhat effective.
“In conclusion the survey shows that an increasing number of organisations over the previous year have adopted DevSecOps practices and improved patch management capabilities,” Meyer says. “Additionally, they are conducting more testing, monitoring, and assessments of their business-critical, third-party, and Web applications.
“Most respondents were said to appear confident about their application security posture. However, the survey shows a disconnect between what IT and security leaders perceive as the biggest app security risks versus what they are focusing on.
“A lack of funding and dearth of security skills are highlighted as is a gap in application security knowledge between developers and IT security teams – which are said to be undermining some of the progress organisations made last year.”