What is our primary use case?
GitGuardian Platform is a security tool preventing the exposure of secrets. It is particularly valuable as a tool because it doesn't just identify exposed security issues, but works as a platform that gives developers an intuitive and easy way of reacting to and fixing the issues.
How has it helped my organization?
GitGuardian Platform captures all the major secret types we care about. It tends to be a bit overzealous in some categories, but it covers all the ones that we want to track and keep an eye on. It has great coverage over those.
GitGuardian Platform has helped save significant time for the security team by eliminating the need to seek out development teams and work with them on exposed secrets, as much of this is now handled proactively. The built-in process for developers interacting with exposed secrets saves them time fixing security problems before returning to their tasks. We can also provide customized remediation guidelines to developers.
Automated validity checks are super critical for us. If something is confirmed as valid in the platform, we know there is some externally accessible value that's exposed somewhere. It's then the top priority for us to engage in. It also gives us a lot of confidence. When the development teams come back and say that they have fixed it, GitGuardian Platform confirms that.
We rely a lot on GitGuardian Platform's self-service functionality so that developers handle incidents without us having to take action. We don't rely on automated severity scoring for incident management. While the severity rating is decent, we focus more on the validity feature and detector categories than on GitGuardian's high-risk ratings. We have customized remediation guidelines by providing specific internal context for handling exposed secrets. We use GitGuardian's integrations with other tracking platforms, but we don't have everything funneled into Jira. We use our own prioritization to see which ones we want to funnel into Jira.
The platform has given us a clear picture of the historical landscape, showing what has been fixed versus what remains hidden in historical data. This clarity has been helpful in planning security measures around issues that don't get self-healed.
We have it scanning our GitHub environments, Atlassian suite (Jira tickets, Confluence), and Slack messages. That gives us a nice coverage across the business.
What is most valuable?
The validity and self-healing playbook features of GitGuardian Platform is one of the most useful features for us. It automatically reaches out to developers for any leaks, notifying them immediately via email. We have Slack notifications set up, allowing developers to respond, provide feedback about sensitive values, and self-close issues by attesting completion on the platform. A high number of our exposures are remediated by developers before security needs to step in, as the self-healing playbook process engages them automatically. This results in issues being resolved within minutes, saving significant effort from the security team in tracking down or communicating with developers.
What needs improvement?
The analytics in GitGuardian Platform have a significant opportunity to better reflect the value provided to security teams and demonstrate actual activity occurring. While the self-healing capability and proactive developer actions are important features, the analytics do not provide information around this activity. They only track actions inside the platform when security team members assign themselves to issues and respond. The self-healing activity by developers isn't reflected in the analytics, requiring us to collect this data ourselves. This presents an opportunity for them to better showcase their developer-first remediation mindset.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using GitGuardian Platform for approximately nine months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable platform, we don't often have to think about it. The SaaS platform has experienced two significant moments of downtime or instability in the last six months, requiring notices and retrospectives. We also run a self-hosted cluster which has not experienced these issues, though we've faced some challenges upgrading Kubernetes that required support assistance to prevent internal downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
My product security team administrates the platform, with a few other security people accessing it. Access to respond to incidents is deployed for every engineer. Team-based provisioning is not yet supported with SCIM, which makes team-based grouping a hassle, so we do not use it.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using a home-grown solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of the self-hosted cluster was moderately complex. We faced some issues because of the environment we had. We had to fix some installation errors and bugs in their Helm configuration.
In terms of deployment model, we self-host a cluster out of necessity. We have an internal GitHub Enterprise server. We self-host GitGuardian Platform to connect to that environment. We also use their SaaS version for Slack and Atlassian integrations.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
The majority of our incidents for critical detectors and important secret types are remediated automatically or proactively by developers through GitGuardian's notification system, without security team involvement. It saves a lot of time for the security teams and the developers. It probably saves approximately 10 hours per week. Previously, we needed an extra 20% of our time focused on this subject area, which has now been saved because of this platform.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's competitively priced compared to others. Overall, the secret detection sector is expensive, but we are happy with the value we get.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated other vendors on the market. The secret detection capabilities of most vendors are basically equivalent, capturing all major types of secrets. The management and administration of findings after scanning is what differentiates vendors. Many alternatives lack strong administration capabilities for security teams after finding detections. GitGuardian's dashboard, self-healing playbooks, and ways for the security team to monitor, track, and deduplicate detections make it easier to manage the program compared to competitors.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend GitGuardian Platform to other users due to the ease of management for the security team with the dashboard. It offers easy administration of results. The proactive self-service capabilities provided to developers remove the burden from the security team and enable faster remediation of exposed values.
My overall rating for GitGuardian Platform is an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other