Veracode Reviews

We are using the static application security testing from Veracode and the Software Composition Analysis solution for the main product that we are developing. We don't use the Software Composition Analysis for checking license requirements, but only for finding problems in third-party dependencies.

It has given our management a view into issues with all of our product lines. We have three products and all of them were scanned. As a result, the project lead for each product has taken measures to improve things.

We also use a third-party dependency check from OWASP that is included in one of our other solutions. The Software Composition Analysis from Veracode is on top of that. It offers integration with the Veracode platform so that we can visualize all of these security problems at once. It is great to have an overview of all of the security problems that we have on all of our applications.

The most important thing that we have used Veracode for is the static application testing. That was our main target.

The UI is messy because it freezes sometimes and some of the UI components are blocked and I do not know why that is happening. It's not happening only to me. Colleagues have reported to me that they have this issue.

We have been using Veracode for more than a year, but we have only been using the Software Composition Analysis for a few months.

We haven't run it often enough to check if it is stable or not.

The support guys are good professionals. We have received valuable comments on proposals from their side. They are reliable partners and have good expertise.

We use various techniques to improve our security. We use an OWASP software application networking model to improve security in our different products. We use a number of native plugins to check licenses and vulnerabilities in the third-party libraries that are part of the application. We also have several plugins from SonarLint that are integrated in another tool that we use for quality assurance.

We put Veracode in place because we have an agreement with SAP and we must fulfill some security checks to become partners for their solution. Veracode's functionalities resolve all of the security checks that were demanded of us.

We use a different company for pen tests, three times per year, and it usually takes two or three weeks each time.

There isn't much of an implementation. We upload binaries to the Veracode platform and they are scanned and processed according to certain policies and security requirements. Then we get the results.

We are working on implementing Veracode SCA with our biggest product.

We want to integrate the software composition analysis with our CI pipeline and we are working on it, but because of the size of the application we have encountered some difficulties, things we have to tackle technically.

It's problematic if you want to integrate it with your pipelines because the documentation is not so well written and it's full of typos. It is not presented in a structured way. It does not say, "If you want to achieve this particular thing, you have to do steps 1, 2, and 3." Instead, it contains bits of information in different parts, and you have to read everything and then understand the big picture. Hopefully, then, you can integrate it.

Regarding the recommendations provided by Veracode scanning engine, we have our own way of dealing with the software composition issues. We plan to change them, but not very soon because it was really hard to impose Veracode on our whole group and for all product lines, as Veracode is a relatively new technology for us. We have had it for one year, but the change has not been so easy. We will try to combine all of our strategies in the Veracode platform in the future.

We hope that we will have a successful integration in the near future and that it will bring major benefits, at least for the managers and the people who are responsible for analyzing the flows and for keeping security under control. The amount of management effort will be reduced at that point.

For our company, the price is reasonable for the benefits that we get.

We paid for a one-year license. The contract was reasonable in terms of financial features. The pricing itself depends on the size of the company and on how much the company is willing to pay for these security extensions and how much the company is willing to invest in security in the first place.

Veracode was rated by industry reviews as the top player in this field for static application security testing and SCA. My advice would be to investigate the market because it will give you an idea of what is the best and most cost-effective solution for your company.

We use Veracode for static and dynamic code analysis, as well as software composition analysis (SCA). Using it ensures that our products are compliant, and it also provides an external method to assure our customers that our products are free from any flaws, or application security issues.

Our product resides on the Azure Cloud, and we have Veracode access it directly.

Using Veracode has helped to improve our organization in that we now have discipline in terms of periodically scanning our systems. We do this every six months, and it is done to meet our compliance requirements.

We are now at the point where it is integrated as part of our software lifecycle automation. I can't point to a particular example of how it has improved our product, although it has helped in terms of validating our product. Also, it has shown us the competency of our teams.

The certification levels are helpful. They are different levels where I think that five is the highest, and we are at level four. Having that badge and showing that we are compliant to that level helps one's reputation in the market.

The interface is easy to use.

The training lab is not very user-friendly and takes a long time to set up. This is an area that should be improved because we've not used it as much as we should have.

We have been using Veracode for more than a year, since January 2021.

This is a pretty stable product. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I can't specifically speak to scalability because we only engage with them for a single product. However, I do think that scaling might be expensive and is probably something that needs to be negotiated.

The Veracode technical support is very good. They are responsive and very knowledgeable. Every time we wanted to set up a meeting, they responded very quickly. In terms of the instructions that they provide, the details are very explicit and although there's a lot to refer to, we can get what we want fast. We don't get lost in what we need to look at.

I would rate the customer support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We did not use another similar solution prior to Veracode.

I was not heavily involved in the initial setup and deployment, although I understand that it was straightforward. We were able to start using it and scanning our code on day one.

It's all on the web, so there is not much to set up. We just have to configure the access so that the web tool can connect, and it takes it from there.

Except for the Lab component, we didn't have to keep contacting our Veracode account manager.

We completed the deployment ourselves.

There were two people involved. The first was our IT person, and the second was a senior member of the engineering team. There is no maintenance required.

It's too early to say whether we have seen ROI because we're marketing our product and services to newer customers. We haven't had visibility from that perspective, yet.

The pricing is a little on the high side but since we combine our product into one suite, it is easy to do and works well for us. It's an expensive product but we are paying for quality.

We evaluated two or three different products before choosing Veracode. 

The reasons that we chose Veracode were their reputation and ease of use. Also, one of the senior people on the team had previous experience with it.

Another point is that their pre-sales team was very professional. Their discussions helped us in terms of getting to what we wanted.

My advice for anybody who is looking into Veracode is that it's one of the very few solutions that can perform dynamic, static, and software composition analysis.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Veracode for static and dynamic analysis.

Veracode supports a broad range of code technologies, and it can analyze large applications. Fortify takes a long time and may not be able to generate the report for larger applications. We don't have these constraints with Veracode.

I've been using Veracode for four or five years.

We have about 230 users. 

We've raised a few tickets with Veracode support. Sometimes, their frontline support can resolve the issue, but we may need to escalate it and get their global team involved. The problem is usually resolved in a couple of days. Overall, support is not a concern. It's fine.

Veracode is an easy-to-use browser-based solution. It isn't a standalone product like Fortify, so there's no installation. You put in the credentials and start the scan. 

While Veracode is way ahead of its competitors on Gartner Magic Quadrant, it's a bit more expensive than Fortify. It's a good solution for the cost, but if we had a high budget, we would go with Checkmarx, which is much better than Veracode. 

Veracode and Micro Focus Fortify SSC are both making progress. Fortify's cloud-on-demand model is an improvement over the past. Both solutions handle the analysis part well, but Fortify needs to improve a lot of things. For one, Micro Focus Fortify hasn't been updated in a long time. They acquired the solution from HP long back, but I haven't seen much improvement. 

Veracode's browser-based solution doesn't have cloud-on-demand functionality. You only need to give consent once on Veracode's access URL, but Micro Focus requires another consent for Dynamic Application testing for WebInspect server, so we need to use SQL Server Express for the WebInspect server. 

We have some difficulties in a SQL Server because a client might not be able to install that in their environment. We may be able to install WebInspect, but we face some challenges dealing with SQL Server Express and other dependents. We have issues with those other supported plugins, libraries, or framework installation parts.

I rate Veracode Static Analysis eight out of 10. I recommend Veracode over Micro Focus. Some companies prefer Micro Focus because they can get a discount and buy it for less than the market price. That's the only reason to use Micro Focus. Otherwise, I don't think Micro Focus can compete with Veracode.

We have a website built on the Microsoft stack, with .NET. Veracode comes in and scans our code and, for the static side of it, we zip up the CS files and the JavaScript files, and upload them for scanning.

It gives us peace of mind regarding what our website's security environment looks like. It provides that quality check to make sure that we have as few vulnerabilities as possible.

The dynamic scanning tool is what I like the best. Compared to other tools that I've used for dynamic scanning, it's much faster and easier to use.

I've seen slightly better static analysis tools from other companies when it comes to speed and ease of use.

Also, with the dynamic tool, sometimes a scan gets stuck and it can be hard to get a hold of the right person in a timely manner to find out why it got stuck and to get it unstuck, or to create a new one.

Overall, speed and customer support could be improved.

I have been using Veracode at my current job for about two years and I used it at my previous job for at least six years or so.

It's very stable. It's very good that way. I haven't run into too many times where their website is down. Usually, it's just for maintenance and they'll let you know ahead of time.

Since it's a cloud offering, we don't have to worry about its scalability.

We don't utilize our current offering to its fullest, so we don't have plans to expand use of it.

Their technical support is pretty good. It depends on who you get. As I mentioned, sometimes it's hard to get an answer from them quickly about why a scan got stuck or what's going on with it. 

Neutral

I've used Checkmarx and IBM AppScan.

I don't know what ROI might be in terms of a dollar amount, but the peace of mind and quality it gives us, making sure we don't get hacked, are types of ROI.

The "gold star" goes to Veracode's dynamic scanning capabilities. I've used other static scanners that may be a little bit better than Veracode, but the dynamic is a lot faster and a lot easier to use. The other ones I have used can be very complex when setting up the scans.

Veracode only has a cloud offering. You upload your binary files for static scanning, or you whitelist your IP and have them come in and scan your website. It doesn't require any maintenance on our end.

Overall, it's really good. It's a lot better than other offerings I've seen. The dynamic scanner works really well. The static scanner is still good, but it could be improved.

We have found the static analysis to be useful in Veracode Static Analysis. However, we are in the process of testing.

Veracode Static Analysis could improve the terminology. For example, I do not know what the sandbox scan does. The terminology and the way they have used it are quite confusing. They should have a process of capturing problems that users are having on their end.

Veracode Static Analysis should adapt and detect the vulnerability which is coming from customers.

I have been using Veracode Static Analysis for one and a half years.

Veracode Static Analysis is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 10 people using this solution in my organization. However, we do not use it daily.

We previously used a free tool that is integrated into the Eclipse.

The initial setup of Veracode Static Analysis is in the middle range of difficulty. We had some minor issues but we had some guidance and support. It took us approximately one month to scan all of the microservices.

Our IT team did the implementation with support from the Veracode team. The Veracode team was very good.

The price of Veracode Static Analysis is on the higher side.

My advice to others would be to follow the instructions and they will not have any issues.

I rate Veracode Static Analysis a seven out of ten.

My company produces a SaaS application that is used by very large customers for pricing analytics and sales workflows. The data that our customers put into our software is very sensitive and confidential. This means that they want a high degree of confidence that our solution is secure.

We use Veracode as one of the pillars that we can point to as helping us to deliver on the promise of having a secure product. We have a multi-dimensional security program and Veracode is one important aspect of that.

Veracode provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities. It provides guidance to help us understand what it flags, and what we can do about it. It still takes some interpretation and insight on our side, but we aren't generally security experts, so we get good information from Veracode to help inform us.

The developers are able to understand the types of issues Veracode looks for, and then as they see that happen, it helps them to learn. It's good because they consider it the next time and hopefully, we don't need Veracode to flag the issue because there is no issue.

With respect to efficiency when it comes to creating secure software, Veracode is able to help us with very low overhead. There's not a lot of work needed on our side unnecessarily. Once we've wired everything together, it's seamless to get the scan done and get the results back and know what we need to do about them.

We use Veracode for some of our older, more monolithic software, as well as for our newer solutions, which are designed to be cloud-native. We've found Veracode useful in both use cases; first, with our huge monolithic software, as well as with our microservices cloud-native solutions.

In terms of AppSec, there are a lot of benefits that cloud-native design brings in terms of not only cost and scalability, but testability and security. Certainly, the design patterns of cloud-native are well aligned with delivering good security practices. Working with products that support cloud-native solutions is an important part of our evolution.

Using Veracode has helped with developer security training and skill-building. It's definitely a good way to create awareness and to deliver information that's meaningful and in context. It's not abstract or theoretical. It's the code that they've written yesterday that they're getting feedback on, and it is a pretty ideal way to learn and improve.

The static scan capability is very powerful. It's very good in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio. The findings that we get are meaningful, or at least understandable, and there's not a bunch of junk that some other code scanning tools can sometimes produce. Having results like that make it hard to find the valuable bits. Veracode is highly effective at finding meaningful issues.

The speed of the static scan is okay. It meets or exceeds our expectations. For our monolithic application, which is a million lines of code, it takes a while to scan, but that's totally understandable. If it could be done magically in five minutes, I wouldn't say that's bad. Overall, it's very reasonable and appropriate.

Veracode has policy reporting features for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations. We have one such policy configured and it's helpful to highlight high-priority areas. We can address and help focus our effects, which ensures that we're spending our time in the best way possible for security movement. The policy is a good structure to guide results over time.

We use Veracode as one metric that we track internally. It gives us information in terms of knowing that we are resolving issues and not introducing issues. I cannot estimate metrics such as, for example, Veracode has made us 10% more secure. I can certainly say it's very important when we talk to our customers about the steps we follow. We do external pen tests, we do web app pen tests, and we also use Veracode. It's certainly very helpful in those conversations, where we can state that it is one of our security practices, but there's no outcome-based quantitative statistic that I can point to.

The static scan is the feature that we use the most, as it gives us insight into our source code. We have it integrated with our continuous integration, continuous delivery system, so we can get insight quickly. We're doing scans daily, so that's the most important feature for us.

The interface is great. It allows us to look at our different applications, understand all of the different types of scans, as well as the results. The types of testing include SAST, DAST, and SCA, and it pulls all of the information together into a single view. It also produces reports that we can give to our customers when requested.

Veracode certainly provides a quick and intuitive way to understand the results, to see the context of them, and to identify what we need to do to address them. In general, it's a pretty quick way to get the information that we need in the most useful way possible. Then, we can turn around an action plan.

We have it integrated with our build pipeline and that works well. It's very important because we don't have to complete a separate, manual step of sending the software up to Veracode to scan it and get the results. It's great. the more things that we can integrate into the build pipeline, the better. It's a very positive thing.

Veracode is very good in terms of not having a lot of false positives. It would be very frustrating if a tool gave you 10 good results but 50 false positives. Even with the issues that we get that we choose not to address, we can still understand why they're being flagged. We have found that the results are meaningful and accurate, which gives us confidence in the solution when fixing vulnerabilities. 

We may choose not to address them for different reasons. For example, it could be because it's an issue about input sanitization, but we have another layer on top of that component to handle that task. We can recognize that it's important that Veracode is flagging those things at that lower level, and that they're bringing that additional insight and consideration to the designs that we're choosing. Overwhelmingly, even the issues we choose not to address are still valuable and meaningful, so the actual false positive rate is quite low.

This is a very useful and powerful tool that ensures our code is well-designed and correctly implemented. It is important that it's only one aspect of a security program and not the only insight or the only test. That said, it provides us with some pretty important feedback and insights that we wouldn't have a great way to get otherwise.

The ideal situation in terms of putting the results in front of the developers would be with Veracode integration into the developer environment (IDE). They do have a plugin, which we've used in the past, but we were not as positive about it. The pricing model was expensive and the results were not the same as the full solution analysis. It gives a differently scoped "just in time" analysis within the context of the IDE, so it didn't speak to the same problem space.

The best situation would be the one where the developers don't even need to log into the web portal, and the results from the scans would be delivered into their IDEs. It would be an asynchronous job, but if they could see the results right there, while they're working on the code, then they wouldn't need to go to a separate tool to look at the information to figure out what to do next.

The workflow today on the build side is optimal, so imagine that's still doing the same thing but then in the backend, whenever a developer has that project open in the browser, if they chose to, they could enable a view to see the most recent Veracode results of that module. That scan might be from last night or six hours ago or any other point, and that's fine. It would be the best possible situation to put the results and the actions right in front of the developer, in the tool that they're already using when they're touching the code.

The only other thing that we've found a reasonable workaround with is how to work with microservices in the context of Veracode. This was necessary because Veracode's licensing model and the interaction model are built around an idea of an application. When you're talking about a section of business logic that's being delivered by possibly dozens of microservices, there is some friction with Veracode in terms of how that application gets defined and how the scans occur and get reported on.

When we reached out to Veracode about this, I got a slide deck that provided us with different options of how they recommend proceeding in this context. It was helpful, and clearly a question they've considered and they had answers ready to go on. The ideas helped us and essentially reinforced what we were already thinking. It's getting the job done, but it still feels like a little bit of a square peg in a round hole and it could be a little smoother in terms of that interaction.

The problem boils down to how we fit the microservices architecture into the Veracode notion of an application. We need to be able to get a holistic view across the microservices, which is extremely challenging, especially when those microservices are owned by different teams who have different needs to see and respond to the scans. 

I have been using Veracode for between five and six years.

The stability is great. They've probably had some downtime, but I don't know about them. From our perspective, it's been solid.

I know the web portal has some planned downtimes because I see the splash screens about them. They're good about warning you, but they're also performed at very weird times, like the middle of the night, so it's never blocked me from getting in when I need to get in.

We use Veracode for all of our software development. We have more than 100 engineers, and our entire engineering team is using it. Obviously, every team has some designated people who look at this more than others, so not everybody's in there every day, but in terms of the software we write, we know that it's all being scanned constantly.

Over the last few years, we've made a couple of acquisitions of other companies and when we've done that, we very quickly brought those solutions in as well. We've seen the value and because of that, it's part of our onboarding process when we integrate other companies into our environment.

If we create another solution or we acquire another company, we will certainly expand our use of Veracode to match within our current solution stack.

The support has been good at understanding issues. There are two aspects of technical support. One concerns issues with the platform in terms of functionality, and the other is that they will provide you with assistance in terms of interpreting your findings.

Our experience from the technical side is that they helped us with figuring out how to best use the platform for microservices applications. They were very helpful in that conversation.

We also have experience with the other layer of technical support that Veracode provides, which is where you can get consultations about the findings. We've done a few of those where you set up an appointment with a Veracode engineer. It helps to understand the results if the platform isn't totally clear on why something is a problem or what we need to do about it. For us, that's been pretty good.

Obviously, the Veracode engineer doesn't have the full understanding of what our application does and in a short call, you can't possibly do an architectural deep dive to understand the context of an issue, but their conversations have been useful when we've had them in terms of understanding issues and context and if we need to do anything.

Prior to using Veracode, we used other code quality scanning tools, but not anything at the level of Veracode for security issues.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was pretty easy to get going and we've incrementally gotten better and deeper as we've used it over the years.

The initial setup was manual uploads of applications, and then it was about incorporating it into our build pipelines and using the sandbox to support our microservices architecture. We've gotten more mature over time, but time to initial use and results were very easy.

Only a very short time is required for deployment, as there is very little that has to be done. Ours was completed within a couple of days and that's a matter of coordination in terms of getting our teams to upload a solution and figure it out. It was a learning experience for us but there was no time or delay brought on by the solution.

When we first began with Veracode, the initial strategy was just to get our first solution uploaded and scanned and see what the results looked like. We didn't have a systematic history of doing that, back then.

With approximately 500 employees, we're not a huge company. Deploying it in an enterprise company would be a different situation but for us, it was just a matter of understanding how we needed to configure the platform and how we needed to provide our software and states and get good results.

It probably took a couple of uploads of trial and error and we were running.

We implemented the solution in-house. It is not that complicated.

In terms of maintenance, there is certainly some overhead involved for each team. They have to make sure that the build pipeline integration is still working and essentially, that we're still getting results. Occasionally, for whatever reason, it breaks and somebody has to go in and fix it.

I can't say that there is no staffing required for maintenance but it's rare. In total, a few hours a month across the company is spent keeping it going. More time is spent evaluating and resolving the findings, which is part of our development work. That's not imposed by the solution but rather a positive outcome from using Veracode. As such, I wouldn't count that as maintenance. 

We have seen a return on our investment with Veracode. I can't point to a dollar figure, but I've been directly involved in customer conversations where we can talk about our security program and how Veracode is an important element. We've distributed report summaries and talked about results with our customers and having this information in those conversations is definitely valuable.

It's also very useful that we can talk about it with our security auditors. We have SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, and they don't specify that you must have a static analysis tool. But when we need to maintain secure engineering practices, having a tool like Veracode is very important for us to demonstrate that to auditors. There's certainly value there as well.

There is also a tremendous value on the marketplace that we get from having those security audits and certificates, which is a second-order of value that Veracode drives.

I can't say with certainty that Veracode reduces the cost of application security, although I would say that it focuses our effort. It gives us guidance and prioritization on where we should spend time. Otherwise, we might not know about particular issues. We might inadvertently spend time on things that aren't that valuable. So, the value is more about focusing on where we need to spend time.

From a cost perspective, it seems okay, although we will probably evaluate alternatives next time it's up for renewal because for us, it's a relatively high cost, and we want to make sure that we are using our resources most appropriately.

I like that the platform provides you with some flexibility. We had to revise our licensing because it did not fit our environment. We wanted to license based on the number of applications, rather than another measure such as the number of lines of code. There was clearly some complexity that led us to be in that situation, although it seems preventable. Ever since our last renewal, the licensing has been smooth and clear. There is a certain amount of flexibility in that regard but also, they allow us some leeway in our current model.

There have been times when for some reason, we spin up a new application on a temporary basis. It may be because we're trying a new configuration. Even though we're licensed for a certain number of applications, the platform lets us exceed that. Consequently, we receive an email stating that we can't do that forever, but it's very useful to have the flexibility for the couple of times that we've used it to briefly exceed the application account.

I am not sure what other solutions, if any, the company looked at before choosing Veracode initially. We have renewed it since that time and we pretty quickly decided to stick with Veracode, rather than switching. However, because of the relatively high cost, we will probably evaluate other options next time it's up for renewal.

We see at least quarterly updates about new features or things that have been fixed. It happens without our involvement, which is great.

My advice for anybody who is considering Veracode is to test it. Although I have not compared Veracode against other products as part of an evaluation process, it would be very useful and very easy to actually try it. Top-load your application, get the results and take a look at what Veracode finds. This is the most useful activity somebody could do.

This is a product that lives up to its promise. It's easy to use, and it's predictable. There are some improvement opportunities but on the whole, it's very good at what it does. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

There are three areas where we started using Veracode immediately. One is static component analysis. The second is their static application security test, where they take a static version of your code and scan through it, looking for security vulnerabilities. The third piece is the DAST product or dynamic application security test.

We also use their manual pen-testing professional services solution in which they manually hit a live version of your product and try to break it or to break through passwords or try to get to your database layer—all that stuff that hackers typically do.  

One of the big things for us, and something that I realized because of my experience with engineering teams for more than 20 years, is that when it comes to security, changes are happening so fast. The vulnerabilities are being uncovered so quickly that we cannot go at this alone. No matter how big an army of engineers you have internally, who scan systems, study security engineering best practices, and do a lot of research, there is no way for an individual organization to keep up with everything that's going on out there. Leaning on an expert like Veracode, a company where this is their only job, is absolutely critical for us and game-changing. It really took it up a notch for us in terms of identifying challenges before they occur.

We were using best-coding practices already, but the question was, is that good enough? The first thing we got out of Veracode was a quick validation of our processes. They said, "Oh this is great. What you've been doing is extremely good. Now keep doing what you're doing from a design and development perspective." But, yes, the world is changing so fast that we also want to make sure that we stay ahead of best practices.

When OWASP, which is the main group that puts out lists of the top ten security issues, updated their list recently, Veracode provided it to us, even though it was something that was right off the OWASP website. When you're with Veracode and you're talking about it, your engineers pay extra attention to it. They look through it and they think about what they can do better when they code. We felt we couldn't go at it alone. We needed a partner. Veracode has been a great partner so far for us.

The four products we have from Veracode give us visibility into application status and help to reduce risk exposure for our software. That is one of the things we like about Veracode a lot. There is a single area on the dashboard where you can get a full view of all of the tests and the results from everything. There is a nice, very simple graphic that shows you the types of vulnerabilities that were found, their severity, the scoring, and in what part of the code they were found. All the details are together in one place. Having one area where we get all these results, rather than having to run around and pull reports together from four or five different places, is very helpful to us.

The solution has also definitely reduced the cost of application security for our organization. But the point is almost moot. Thinking about security engineering costs in a silo doesn't make sense anymore. You need security to be integrated completely into your product. Ten years ago, or even five years ago, we would have hired a couple of security engineers who would have been solely and entirely responsible for software security. They would have done their best using some integrated tools and some manual tools. But in no way would they be close to being as efficient and capable as Veracode's tools.

Hiring engineers would be a bad idea because, aside from their being more expensive than Veracode's tools, guaranteed, two security engineers are not going to come close to identifying all of the issues and challenges that Veracode is uncovering for us. Veracode has a large team that is constantly learning, growing, and engaging the industry as a whole, to understand the latest and greatest for security best practices and security vulnerabilities. Two engineers don't have the time to do that much work. To me, it's not even a question of budget. It's more a question of leveraging an industry leader that has core competency in this area. We need a partner like that to work with us.

With the static component analysis, they scan your code statically and they look specifically at third-party libraries and at any third-party code that you have in your product for vulnerabilities, updates, and changes in licensing. For example, if one of them changed from a license that allowed for more changes on your side to something that is more restrictive, they would flag that for you so that you can evaluate it and know immediately that you need to take some action. They keep abreast of the latest and greatest regarding third-party components. That has been good and very helpful for us to know how secure our product is as a result of using third-party libraries, as we didn't write that code.

The SAST component looks directly at our own code and any best practices we haven't followed and whether there is a security challenge or loophole. We get immense value from that as well. They've been able to flag items and say, "While this is a low-risk item, we would suggest you refactor it or add it to your roadmap to close that loophole, just in case a very clever hacker tries to get around your system. That has been very helpful to us too.

And the SAST is very quick. It sniffs through the product very quickly and almost immediately gives us the results we need. Static analysis is something you do every once in a while, in a very regimented and rigorous way, so you don't need it to be super-duper fast, but you need it to be efficient. You don't want to wait days for them to give you an analysis. And Veracode's static analysis comes back in a very short period of time.

With the DAST, you provide their product with a dynamic instance of your operational product, by pointing the dynamic testing tool at your product. It beats it up, pokes around, and tries to find ways to penetrate its defenses and find security issues and challenges within your product.

Veracode also has a very good report that gives us best practices regarding ensuring compliance, and we can go back to them for additional consulting. We've not had to do that. We typically scan through it and say, "Okay, it's good that it meets those best practices." We rely on them to make sure that their products are kept updated, so that we don't have to review a lot of these standards issues.

Also, as we did our analysis of Veracode, we loved the fact that they are completely integrated into GitHub. You can trigger everything using GitHub Actions. You don't want to go too far out of the application, move something into another repo, and have to write or copy and paste it over. Veracode easily integrated into our GitHub repos.

One thing I would strongly encourage Veracode to do, early on in the process—in the first 30 days—is to provide a strong professional services-type of engagement where they come to the table with the front solution engineers, and work with their customer's team and their codebase to show how the product can be integrated into GitHub or their own repository. They should guide them on best practices for getting the most out of Veracode, and demonstrate it with live scanning on the customer's code. It should be done in a regimented way with, say, a 30-minute call on a Tuesday, and a 30-minute call on a Friday.

I would ask Veracode to be a lot more engaged with the customer and set up live sessions where they force the customer to engage with Veracode's technical team. Veracode could show them a repo, how they should do things, this is what these results mean, here is a dashboard, here's the interpretation, here's where you find the results. And they should say, "If you don't understand something, here's how you contact customer support." A little bit more hand-holding would go a long way toward the adoption of Veracode's technology.

I'm familiar with Veracode from a couple of companies. One is my previous company. We had examined the platform and trialed it for use. When I joined my current company, about six months back, I looked at various platforms that we could use for both static and dynamic testing of our code and I naturally picked Veracode. I had familiarity with them and experience with them. We did some research on them and we did a couple of reviews with my engineers, and then I decided to sign up with Veracode.

It's a very stable solution, absolutely. We've had no issues with it. We have not had to poke around and report bugs or anything of that sort.

We have not had any scale limitations thus far, not even close. Maybe it's the size of our repositories and what we do, but for our needs, it has been super-scalable.

It's being used by all my teams now. I'd like it to be used even more often by building a tighter integration into our regular SDLC practices. I'm hoping that that happens over time. That is one of my focal points as I start to plan for next year.

We bought their premier service package and that allows us to have access to their consultants, their customer support, and their customer success manager so that we get a higher level of service from them. We took the premier package from day one because we needed the consulting hours, help, and training from them.

Every month or so we have a call with their customer success group. Sometimes we come prepared and say, "Hey, we want to talk about these specific five things," and other times we just ask them to give us their latest and greatest and to update us on what has happened since the last time we spoke: What did you add to the product? What did you find? What should we be watching out for? They alert us to new vulnerabilities and things that we should be looking for.

We also do a hands-down, tactical Q and A, where we ask questions like, "Hey, we tried to do this and it failed," or about challenges we had and how they suggest we go about resolving them. I pretty much have my entire team on these calls and that helps us stay on top of things. As VP of engineering, I'm a big believer in shift-left practices. I would like to make sure that my team takes full responsibility for quality assurance and security.

We did not have a previous solution for application security testing in this company.

The initial setup was straightforward. That was something I really liked about it in my previous job, and it bore fruit right away in what we are doing in my current company. That's one of the reasons I chose them. It's very easy to set up. You can get going quickly and you don't have to learn a whole lot. We were able to integrate it into our system fairly quickly, and start, almost immediately, to generate the results we needed to improve our product.

They do an immediate kickoff right after you sign the contract so you can ask questions like, "How do we set this up? What do we do?" We went through that and, once they trained us on those things, we did not really have a reason to go back to customer support. The product is pretty intuitive. They sent us a couple of videos and provided some early consulting for setup. They have a good process, including a 30-day check-point. Very recently, there was one small thing we needed in terms of knowledge and education and they came back to us with a quick response.

We were ready to run tests within two weeks of setup, and we accomplished running it within a month of buying the product.

It does require much maintenance at all. I love the fact it's a SaaS product. Every time we use it, we're getting the latest version. It's updated automatically. We get decent updates about product management and the roadmap.

In terms of implementation services, we didn't go to any third party. Veracode was pretty good. They were very responsive and answered questions. We were able to get the help we needed.

If Veracode thinks that it's best to bring in an integrator for the first 30 days, they should build that into the cost of the contract. I don't think I would have blinked if they had told me, "We suggest paying a little bit extra for the first year because we want you to purchase a professional services contract from this company. They will work with you for a month and guarantee to get you up and running with best practices within 30 days."

I was impressed with the pricing we got from Veracode. I was able to make it work very well within our budget.

When I came to my current company, I looked at a few options for security testing, and then zeroed in Veracode as the best option for us and for what we needed to do. We didn't go through too many competitors. Because I had experience with it, I said we should use it. I felt that it was the right product for us.

One of the advantages of Veracode is that it is a one-stop shop for everything you need. I did not want to hunt around for five different solutions and have to put them together and have to use five different dashboards. I really wanted a single solution for all our needs, and that's what I got from Veracode: static, dynamic, and the manual pen testing.

My advice would depend on the size of your company and whether you have dedicated security engineers. For us, given the size of our company, Veracode has been very important. We needed a turnkey solution, and one that integrated directly into our product. We wanted something immediate. We couldn't take the time to hire a bunch of security engineers and have them figure it out and then do an RFP. That was not us.

If you're in that position, where you need something that really meets all of your software security needs during the development life cycle, check out Veracode for sure. Look at a couple of their competitors. It's fine to kick the tires a bit and then what you can get from others, but I would definitely recommend that one-stop-shop type of thinking. You really want to get your solutions from one vendor, a partner that is strong in this area.

For the manual pen testing, there's a full day where they engage your product. It takes us about half a day of planning and putting it together, and then providing them with a live website. They then bring their team together and go through all the reports about what they saw and, typically, within a period of three days from the time of the manual pen test, we get results from them. Along with that, they also offer any kind of service you need to interpret or understand the results. You can also get some follow-on from them in terms of best practices and how to fix things.

In terms of false positives, I like my security scans to be a little more conservative, rather than being aggressive about eliminating things without me seeing them. I'm okay with the fact that, every once in a while, they flag something and bring it to our attention, and we see that it is really a non-issue. The reason that is my approach is that, when you do a static scan or a pure dynamic scan, these products don't completely understand your application environment. They cannot guess that this or that code is not used in this fashion. They can only flag something to bring it to your attention, and then you make the judgment call.

Veracode has flagged a few issues for us that we decided were non-issues. In their dashboard, you can actually provide a dispensation for each of those items. So we have gone in there and checked a box and put a comment saying, "Not applicable to our workflow." I was very happy that they caught those things. It gives us some confidence that they're looking deep into our product. We haven't had any major issues with false positives. What they flagged to us was reasonable, and we were able to decide that they were not really an issue for us.

Our confidence level is very high, thanks to Veracode's solution and our internal focus on shift-left methodology. I push my engineers to make security a part of the design, development, and testing processes. It can't be something that is done as an afterthought. We need shift-left thinking all the way to the left. You want to tackle an issue before it occurs.

Overall, Veracode has affected all our application security in a very strong, positive way, and I look forward to using their products and technology to continuously improve our security best practices.

I would give it a 10 out 10. It really is a strong solution for the industry. I'm looking forward to engaging Veracode in an even stronger way in 2022. I want to tightly align what we're doing, from a security best-practices perspective, even more with what they have to offer.

We use software composition analysis and static code analysis. We use a software composition analysis component to identify third-party vulnerabilities in our software. And then we use the static composition analysis to analyze flaws within our application on the front-end and the back-end.

We also use Veracode for static composition and software composition analysis and static code analysis because we need a way to identify vulnerabilities and flaws in the application and relay that information to our developers.

The manual penetration testing is not really used as much.

Having a centralized view is probably one of the most important aspects of the platform. We need to have some way of looking at all the flaws and all the vulnerabilities in one centralized view. 

Having this has improved our visibility into application status. It's very important because it's the way that we communicate flaws to our developers. And without it, we'd be missing out on an opportunity to explain what seems to be fixed and what needs to be managed.

Veracode helps us to reduce security debt. We're finding that issues like cross-site scripting injection, injection, and those sorts of vulnerabilities are getting addressed more quickly. And we don't really have to worry about where those are, whether that's being fixed or not because we can see them in the platform and we can see the score increase every time those get fixed.

The solution's ability to help create secure software is very valuable. We're a zero-trust networking company so we want to have the ability to say that we're practicing security seriously. Having something like Veracode allows us to have confidence when we're speaking to people about our product that we can back up what we're doing with a certification, with a reputable platform, and say, "This is what we're using to scan an application. Here's the number of vulnerabilities that are on an application. And here's the risk that we're accepting."

Using Veracode SCA helped increase productivity for our security and development teams. Every week we do a vulnerability report and we look at the flaws that were reported by Veracode. Our process essentially goes by meeting with developers, looking at the report, finding out which flaws are the most important ones to fix first. After we've done that, we set up a sprint and we have developers work out two to three of those tickets until they're complete. We've done that now for about six months. We increased our application score from a pretty low level all the way up to Veracode Level Three, so above 90. We don't have any high severity or high vulnerabilities and we don't have any mediums and applications anymore. Following that process is extremely helpful. We also utilize the Veracode dashboards as well. We use the Veracode dashboard to monitor our progress in triaging flaws. Then we want to make sure that things are actually getting fixed. And then we can count those metrics by looking at those dashboards.

It has definitely improved our security posture and communication with developers. I think that now developers are taking our security seriously, whereas before it was something that was always important, but there was no real way of actually tracking what was getting done. Now that we have the tool that we can use to track what's getting done, we're making objectives and setting goals, and working towards this.

We use the screening process to help our security professionals and developers fix flaws in the code. It's probably the most utilized security tool that we have at our company.

Scanning with Veracode SCA reduces scan times by a few seconds. It also helps to increase our fixed-rate by 14%.

The scanning process helps to significantly improve our standards and best practices.

The mitigation recommendations provided by the scanning engine of Veracode are important for developers to understand. They need to know how to fix things. So just giving them a blank vulnerability and saying, "this is the issue," doesn't really help. They need something that tells them how to fix the flaw and where to fix the flaw.

Veracode helped us with certification and audit. We're working towards Veracode Level Four right now, we've achieved Veracode Level Three status, and we're looking forward to reaching the next certification level. The goal of that is to eventually have all of our third-party vulnerabilities and mitigate them so that we're in good standing and we don't have anything coming from a third-party library that could possibly compromise our application. Once we get to that fourth certification Veracode Level Four, that would be great.

The JIRA integration automation aspect of it could be improved significantly. We want to have a way to create tickets that are going to allow people to work through those flaws that we're finding. We don't want people to feel like they're missing out on something or that they're not following directions in the right way. And we have a process in place where there's a set of tickets and people can work on them. It just seems that people are more focused. They tend to pay attention to what they're doing and there's accountability. So having a more rigorous JIRA integration would be very helpful.

I have been using Veracode for over a year. 

It's a very stable product, and I think that the team at Veracode is constantly putting in more effort into trying to make it into a better platform. They take feedback seriously. They constantly improve the platform. They are working towards adding features that developers are requesting. So it's always changing, there's always something new being added to it, which is very good.

Large enterprises are probably following a very different practice from what we're following. I think that smaller organizations are going to have an easier time using something like Veracode because of the flexibility of the different API tools that they have available. An enterprise might have a more complicated time scaling it. The issue with that is that the enterprise is probably going to use a proxy and having to deal with the networking issues, it's going to become very difficult for that to scale. However, in a small company, those situations are mitigated pretty easily by getting two or three people together. So we move through those very fast, we're extremely agile. We're always forward moving. We're always rapidly developing. I think each company has its own specific way of handling scalability, it's always been easy just because we're a very collaborative team. We know how to work with each other and we're always receptive to each other's feedback. I can't really speak for other companies, but I can tell you that we find it pretty scalable. That's really just our culture though.

I run all of the administration and I direct people in what needs to be done. So, that's about it. In total, about seven people are really using it.

We are using it to its fullest extent. Even the manual penetration testing aspect of the platform is very useful. The manual penetration testing aspect of the platform is something that would be nice to incorporate because the cost is significantly less than other security companies. For example, InfoSec is about $3,000 more than Veracode, for any organization that wants an all-encompassing security platform. But what we get with Veracode is a platform that provides software composition analysis, static code analysis, Docker Container Scanning, manual penetration testing results, and dashboards that show the progress for moving through all of those issues. And that's probably the most important aspect of the platform.

Once they introduced the prebuilt dashboards that really reduced the amount of friction with upper management. Typically, my mentor said that almost all issues in any business organization come down to personal relationships and opinions, so when Veracode introduced those dashboards, it removed the ability for people to give opinions about what was being done and what wasn't being done.

We're driven by facts as people, so we can look at those metrics and say, "This is what's actually getting done." And there's no ambiguity. Then really that just removes all opinion from any sort of conversation.

They monitor all of the conversations in the platform on the Veracode community. My rep is very responsive. He answers community questions. He votes up really important questions and the issues are getting answered quickly. That's the most important part because then the business, if we run into an issue on Monday and we spend two or three days trying to debug the issue, we haven't figured it out. You can go to a place and actually get an answer. Whereas some organizations try to use a tool that's custom made and they're going to run into an issue where it's intractable. It can't be solved. However, with Veracode, customer support has always been able to find some sort of solution. Anytime I've ever had a problem, it's always been resolved 100%. There's never been a time where it's gone unresolved. I can't say that about every tool.

Positive

We used a combination of things. We use Sonar, Veracode, and JFrog Artifactory just give us a diverse picture of what vulnerabilities are in the application and how we can fix them. Veracode seems to always provide the best feedback. Other platforms really aren't at the same level, they provide reports and those reports are usually very static and they're not very informative. Whereas with Veracode, the platform is very interactive. You can tell that it was designed for users and Sonar is the same way. Sonar is very static. Even in Bitbucket, you can now scan your code with Snyk.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The best way to handle it is to get the Java JAR file for the upload, use the terminal on any given laptop, like a Mac or a Linux, and create a small script that uploads a couple of JAR files up to the platform.

Once that's complete, once you have a proof of concept that works with just a couple of lines, then the next step is to move that into a pipeline. Preferably something like Jenkins. Jenkins allows people to run scripts. You can just run Dash straight in a pipeline. Once you have that setup, you pull all that down into the Jenkins pipeline.

Once that's done, you now have all of the binaries that need to be scanned, and you can set the pipeline to run a scan on a weekly cadence. If you want to take it a step further, you could actually move that into a build pipeline and really follow shift-left practices where you're moving the security aspect of the development cycle further up the pipeline. Flaws are being found before they go into production rather than after they're in production. So that would be my recommended approach for working through that problem.

I went through and I actually added container scanning now, so in Veracode at this point, we're running software composition analysis, static code analysis, and on top of that Docker container scanning. So it's a pretty big product. The thing that would be more helpful is better Jira automation since that aspect keeps track of what's getting done. Then essentially you have a full pipeline setup that automates the generation of tickets, scanning, and just takes care of itself. It's a self-service security tool.

The setup took around a week.

We have absolutely seen ROI. We have buy-in from upper management and developers. We have a lot of people who are very excited about what we're doing and we're working towards that.

We've personally seen a major decrease in vulnerabilities and we've seen an increase in awareness for security. So people actually have conversations about security now, and they're taking it seriously. It's no longer an issue that gets swept under the rug. I think a lot of smaller organizations would benefit from having a tool that showed them what is being done, as opposed to someone just saying this is what we're doing if they can see the results that really improve. So, once we added that, we saw a decrease in vulnerabilities, we decreased our third-party vulnerabilities from a pretty significant level and attended the three down to single digits, which is huge for any organization.

The thing that I'll go back to is when one of my mentors said to me "Evan, security is a critical aspect of any organization. People don't always believe in it. And the best way to sell it is to explain what could go wrong." So when we compare what could go wrong, having a third-party vulnerability, like a graph library, such as the one that Equifax used, which led to a $3 million lawsuit, and their reputation was destroyed. When you compare that to paying $8,000 for an application, it's a no-brainer. Once the reputation of an organization has been tarnished, that's it. The whole thing is completely over. Really everyone loses faith and once people lose trust, it's almost impossible to get people to believe in a vision.

It's definitely worth it considering what could go wrong. The DevOps Mantra is to always be prepared for what could go wrong. Most things are going to go wrong.

Having a static cost gives people confidence. And once people start using it, if the price changes, then that's going to be dependent on how much they're getting out of it.

I definitely looked at other security platforms, but Veracode seems to have the most performance.

With Xray, essentially you upload your builds, once you've uploaded your build, you index it. And after you index it, it'll give you a security report. Now, the thing with that is you have to make a policy, you get a report, the report comes out as a PDF and the PDF doesn't really tell you how to fix it. It tells you the fixed version.

The first path of that really was just creating a pipeline that ran a curl request over to Artifactory to generate that PDF. And then on Monday mornings, that was automated. So management can go in, look at that PDF and say, "Oh, okay, these are the things that are happening in our application." Whereas Veracode, is fully automated, it runs the full scan and then creates the tickets. So that's the contrast. 

My advice would be to start with meeting with people from Veracode. Once you meet with the team from Veracode, the best way to handle that is to start asking questions and identifying the things that would be of value so that an organization doesn't start out by paying too much money. Then you're moving away from that being too scared of what the outcome is. I think once they go in and they have a meeting with people and they can actually discuss what they want to do, that's the first step towards planning out how the platform will be used.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.