With its acquisition of Helios, Snyk plans to add an ability to capture application runtime data to extend the capabilities of its application security posture management (ASPM) platform.

Manoj Nair, chief product officer for Snyk, said Snyk AppRisk will soon provide real-time insights into runtime environments using a Helios observability platform that provides them with deeper insights into issues that need to be resolved. That capability will provide developers with additional context as more responsibility for application security continues to shift left toward application development teams, he added.

Armed with that insight, it then becomes simpler to prioritize remediation efforts based on the level of risk a vulnerability actually represents to the organization, said Nair. That’s critical to close a longstanding divide between cybersecurity and application development teams that, in the absence of any real ability to determine the severity of a vulnerability, results in developers wasting what limited time they have to allocate to remediation, he noted.

Nair said the overall goal is to enable organizations to deploy more secure applications while minimizing adverse impacts on developer productivity.

Snyk last year acquired Enso Security to add an ASPM platform to its portfolio that serves as the foundation upon which Snyk AppRisk was built. It also includes Insights, a Snyk tool that makes use of multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI) models to identify, prioritize and fix vulnerabilities.

There’s often not a lot of love lost between cybersecurity teams and application developers who typically don’t have a lot of cybersecurity expertise. Most of the issues that cybersecurity teams are tasked to address start with mistakes made by developers that cybersecurity teams then need to convince developers to allocate time to fix.

Thanks to the rise of DevSecOps best practices, the overall security of software supply chains is improving, but there is still a long way to go before application security truly improves. The one thing that is certain is the level of accountability for vulnerabilities is only going to rise as more stringent regulations go into effect in the months and years ahead.

In the meantime, DevSecOps teams should assume there will be many more vulnerabilities to remediate. Developers are increasingly using generative AI tools to write code. The challenge is general-purpose large language models (LLMs), such as the one used to drive ChatGPT, were trained using examples of code of varying quality collected from across the web. A lot of the code these platforms generate, not surprisingly, contains vulnerabilities that many developers will not immediately recognize without the aid of some type of scanning tool.

At the same time, cybercriminals are becoming more efficient at discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities that exist in applications that have already been deployed in production environments. DevSecOps teams should expect that, as a result, more zero-day vulnerabilities requiring immediate attention will soon be discovered.

One way or another, the percentage of time allocated to application security issues is only going to increase. The only thing left to determine is how best to go about reducing the time and effort needed to make applications as secure as possible.