Veracode Reviews

In my previous organization, we used to use Veracode throughout all verticals. It is a cloud-based platform, and you need to upload the code for static analysis. The code has to be uploaded as per the compilation guide provided by Veracode. So, for different languages, you have to combine the code as per the instructions in the guide.

We used to own and manage the platform. We also used to manage the users. If there was a particular project team that needed to use Veracode to do their code scan, they used to approach us. We used to create the user accounts for them so that user accounts were limited to just the code. We also used to guide and train them on how to upload the code on Veracode, how to combine the code, and how to initiate the scan. After the scan is completed, we used to tell them and guide them about how to treat the vulnerabilities in that code, how to fix and mitigate them, and what's the next process. Apart from that, we used to create a project team to build their CI/CD pipeline, where we used to create DevSecOps automation.

It is a cloud-based platform, so every organization or every security team in the organization is concerned about uploading their code because ultimately the code is intellectual property. The most useful thing about Veracode is that if you want to upload the code, they accept only byte code. They do not accept the plain source code as an input. The code is converted into binary code, and it is uploaded to Veracode. So, it is quite secure. It also has the automation feature where you can integrate security during the initial stages of your software development life cycle.

Veracode provides integration with multiple tools and platforms, such as Visual Studio, Java, and Eclipse. Developers can integrate with those tools by using Jenkins. The security consultation or the support that they provide is also really good.

Its user management is also good. You can restrict the users for a particular application so that only certain developers will be able to see the code that has been scanned. 

Their reporting model is really good. For each customer, they provide a program manager. Every quarter, they have their reviews about how much it has scanned. They also ensure that the tool has been used efficiently. 

There are few languages that take time for scanning. It covers the majority of languages from C to Scala, but it doesn't support certain languages and the newer versions of certain languages. For example, it doesn't support SAP and new JavaScript frameworks such as Node.js and React JS. They can include support for these. If you go to their website, you can see the list of languages that are currently supported.

The false-positive rates are also something they can work on.

I have been using Veracode for the last four years.

From my perspective, it is really good. It is one of the best SaaS solutions that I have come across. Veracode is also a leader in Gartner Quadrant.

It is pretty good in terms of scalability. There are many users of this solution. There are also many customers of Veracode. We had around 1,000 plus users.

The support that Veracode provides is really fabulous. They are very responsive. They provide you with a thorough analysis. If you have any questions or doubts, they help to clear them in a very simple manner.

I've used Checkmarx and HPE Fortify. Now, I am using Micro Focus. As compared to Veracode, Checkmarx takes input as plain text. It takes the code as it is and does not compile the code. This is the main difference between Checkmarx and Veracode. Checkmarx also has an on-prem solution, but Veracode does not have an on-prem solution. 

There is also a major difference in the cost and licensing model. Veracode's license model is quite complex. Comparatively, Checkmarx's license model is straightforward. You can upload any amount of code. For example, it could be 1 Gig or 2 Gig. They charge based on the number of applications, but Veracode's licensing model is pretty different. They charge based on the amount of code that has been analyzed.

It is pretty much straightforward. It is a cloud-based solution. So, creating a user in Veracode is pretty much easy. It involves just a few clicks. Uploading the code is also pretty much easy. It is user-friendly and developer-friendly.

When I used to maintain this for 1,000 developers, two or three people were enough to maintain it.

Veracode is costly. They have different license models for different customers. What we had was based on the amount of code that has been analyzed. The license that we had was capped to a certain amount, for example, 5 Gig. There would be an extra charge for anything above 5 Gig.

Veracode is well-suited for modern programming languages. Veracode is not for scanning large legacy applications with a huge codebase. It also doesn't support some unique languages such as SAP. This could be a challenge for certain people. 

More organizations are taking the left shift approach for application security and trying to integrate security early into their software development life cycle. Veracode is good for such automation.

I would rate Veracode Static Analysis a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for Digital Health.

This solution has helped us in developing a secured product.

Veracode is fantastic! All of the features are valuable.

My experience with Veracode across the board every time, in all products, the technology, the product, the service, and the salespeople are fabulous. They are engaging.

I would suggest charging the developer for training, as it's not very expensive.

Only charge for developer training because it's a service you give now and they may need to be technical support. 

It costs them money to do that, but with the technology, an incremental user is negligible incremental costs, which doesn't really cost them. That's software economics.

I would like to see them only charge for developer training for the qualified startups and start charging for the licensing once the product goes into production, and available.

I have several years of experience working with Veracode.

When we used this solution a year ago, we used the most current version.

It's a stable solution. I would rate stability a ten out of ten.

It's a scalable product. My rating out of ten would be a ten, scalability-wise.

We have a software development manager and three other people who are using it.

Technical support is phenomenal. They are fabulous and very responsive, it's amazing.

Previously, I did not use another solution. Because I knew Veracode for many years, my approach with the company was that it was a startup and we need to do it securely. This is s why we went with Veracode.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was extremely easy and took only a few hours to deploy.

We have a team in-house to implement this solution.

The pricing for qualified startups such as Neo4j could be improved.

It allows startups to develop a secure product, but it takes time for startups to get money for the products. 

Veracode could provide the services, at a significantly lower price during that period with a condition that the moment that it becomes production, Veracode has to be paid.

If they would change that, it would be phenomenal for the entire industry and for them.

Licensing cost is on a yearly basis and there are no additional costs, the pricing is straightforward.

At the time that we used this solution, we were a startup, the software may not have been that complex. It's not like Oracle.

My advice to others who are interested in using this solution is to pay attention to the full instructions.

I would rate Veracode Developer Training a ten out of ten.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is used to detect vulnerabilities in open source libraries, which are used by our customers for their own product. 

We are a consulting company who provides consulting services to clients. We don't buy the software for our own internal use. However, we advise customers about which solutions will fit their environment.

Most of our clients use SCA for cloud applications. 

For application security, the SCA product from Veracode is a good solution. It has a good balance. Altogether, the balance between the outcome of the tool, the speed of the tool, and its cost make it a good choice. 

One of the reasons why we recommend Veracode because it is very important in that SAST and SCA tools, independently from the vendor, should work seamlessly within the build pipeline. Veracode does a good job in this respect.

In this day and age, all software is developed using a large amount of open source libraries. It is kind of unavoidable. Any product application has a lot of embedded libraries. In our experience, many times customers don't realize that it is not just a code that can be vulnerable, but also an open source library that they may take for granted. In many ways, this has been a learning experience for the customers to understand that there are other components to open source libraries, and that SCA is an invaluable tool to address those issues.

SCA provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities. It provides extensive guidance for both writing secure code and pointing to vulnerable open source libraries are being used.

From the time it takes for the solution to detect a vulnerability, both in the source code and the open source library, it is efficient. 

Within SCA, there is an extremely valuable feature called vulnerable methods. It is able to determine within a vulnerable library which methods are vulnerable. That is very valuable, because in the vast majority of cases where a library is vulnerable, none of the vulnerable methods are actually used by the code. So, if we want to prioritize the way open source libraries are updated when a library is found vulnerable, then we want to prioritize the libraries which have vulnerable methods used within the code. 

The Static Analysis Pipeline Scan is faster than the traditional scan that Veracode has. All Veracode products are fast. I have no complaints. On average, a piece of code for a customer takes 15 to 20 minutes to build versus the Static Analysis Pipeline Scan of Veracode that takes three or four minutes. So, that is 20 to 30 percent of the total time, which is fairly fast.

Most of our time is spent configuring the SAST and SCA tools. I would consider that one of the weak points of the product. Otherwise, once the product is set up on the computer, it is fairly fast.

Like many tools, Veracode has a good number of false positives. However, there are no tools at this point in the market that they can understand the scope of an application. For example, if I have an application with only internal APIs and no UI, Veracode can detect that. It might detect that the HTML bodies of the requests are not sanitized, so it would then be prone to cross-site injections and SQL injections. But, in reality, that is a false positive. It will be almost impossible for a tool to understand the scope unless we start using machine learning and AI. So, it's inevitable at this point that there are false positives. Obviously, that doesn't make the developers happy, but I don't think there is another way around this, but it is not just because of Veracode. It's just the nature of the problem, which cannot be solved with current technologies. 

Once we explain to the developers why there are false positives, they understand. In Veracode, embedded features (where there are false positives) can be flagged as such. So, next time that they run the same scan, the same "vulnerability" will be still flagged as a false positive. Therefore, it's not that bad from that point of view.

Veracode has a few shortcomings in terms of how they handle certain components of the UI. For example, in the case of the false positive, it would be highly desirable if the false positive don't show up again on the UI, instead still showing up for any subsequent scan as a false positive. There is a little bit of cluttering that could be avoided. However, that is not necessarily a shortcoming of the product. I think it's more of a shortcoming of the UI. It's just the way it's visualized. However, going forward, I personally don't want to see any more vulnerabilities that I already flagged as a false positive.

It does take some time to understand the way the product works and be able to configure it properly. Veracode is aware of that. Because the SCA tools are actually a company that they acquired, SourceClear, the SCA tool and SAST tool are not completely integrated at this point. You are still dealing with two separate products, which can cause some headaches. I did have a conversation with the Veracode development team not too long ago where I voiced my concerns. They acknowledged that they're working on this and are aware of it. Developers have limited amounts of time dedicated to learning how to use a tool. So, they need quite a bit of help, especially when we're talking about this type of integration between the SAST and SCA. I would really like to see better integration between the SAST and SCA.

I have been using it for almost a year.

It is stable. One of the selling points is that it is a cloud solution. The maintenance is more about integrating Veracode into the pipeline. There is a first-time effort, then you can pretty much reproduce the same pipeline code for all the development teams. At that point, once everything runs in the pipeline, I think the maintenance is minimal.

We have deployed the solution to FinTech or technology medium-sized companies with more than 100 employees.

Their technical support is less than stellar. They have essentially two tiers: the technical support and the consulting support. With the consulting support, you have the opportunity to talk to people who have intimate knowledge of the product, but this usually takes a bit of effort so customers still like to go through the initial technical support that is less than stellar. We rarely get an answer from the technical support. They seem a lot more like they are the first line of defense or help. But, in reality, they are not very helpful. Until we get to the second level, we can't accomplish anything. This is another complaint that I have brought up to Veracode.

One of the reasons why we decided on Veracode is because they have an integrated solution of SAST and SCA within the same platform. Instead of relying upon two different, separate products, the attraction of using a Veracode was that we could use one platform to cover SAST and SCA. 

The SAST tool is pretty straightforward; there is very little complexity. The pipeline works very well. The SCA tool is more complex to set up, and it doesn't integrate very well with the SAST tool. At the end of the day, you have essentially two separate products with two separate setups. Also, you have two different reports because the report integration is not quite there. However, I'm hopeful that they are going to fix that soon. They acquired SourceClear less than two years ago, so they are still going through growing pains of integrating these two products.

The setting up of the pipeline is fairly straightforward. It works a lot of the main languages, like Java, Python, etc. We have deployed it across several development teams. Once we create a pipeline and hand the code to the developers, they have been able to make a little adjustment here or there, then it worked.

For both SCA and SAST tools, including documentation, providing the code, writing the code for the pipeline, and giving some training to the developers, a deployment can take us close to two weeks. 

Deploying automated process tools, like Veracode, Qualys, and Checkmarx, does take more effort than uploading the code manually each time.

As long as developers use the tool and Veracode consistently, that can reduce the cost of penetration testing.

Checkmarx is a very good solution and probably a better solution than Veracode, but it costs four times as much as Veracode. You need an entire team to maintain Checkmarx. You also need on-premise servers. So, it is a solution more for an enterprise customer. If you have a small- to medium-sized company, Checkmarx is very hard to use, because it takes so many resources. From this point of view, I would certainly recommend for now, Veracode for small- to medium-sized businesses. 

Compared to other similar products, the licensing and pricing are definitely competitive. If you see Checkmarx as the market leader, then we are talking about Veracode being a fraction of the cost. You also have to consider your hidden costs: you need a team to maintain it, a server, and resources. From that point of view, Veracode is great because the cost is really a fraction of many competitors. 

Veracode provides a very good balance between a working solution and cost.

There are other products in the market. However, some of those products are extremely expensive or require a larger team to support them. Often, they have to be installed on-prem. Veracode is a bit more appealing for our organizations who don't have larger AppSec teams or where budget is a constraint. In this respect, SCA is a good solution.

We have been using Checkmarx for years, but mainly for their on-prem solution. They do have an offering in the cloud, but we haven't done any side-by-side tests in respect to speed. We did do a side-by-side comparison between Veracode and Checkmarx two or three years ago from a technical ability standpoint. At that time, Checkmarx came in a bit ahead of Veracode.

Checkmarx is more complex to set up because it is on-prem with multiple servers as well as there are a lot of things going up. If you have a larger budget and team, look into Checkmarx because it is a market leader. However, when it comes to a price, I would choose Veracode for a smaller company, not a large enterprise. 

Another consideration for Checkmarx, as an on-prem solution, is that you are pretty much ascertained that your code doesn't leave your company. With companies like Veracode, even if they are saying that you only upload the binary code, that's not quite true. The binary code can be reverse-engineered and the source code can be essentially reconstructed. For example, Veracode would not be suitable for a government agency or a government consultancy. 

For DAST, our customers like to use Qualys Web Application Scanning. There are very few players out there that can test APIs, but Qualys is one of them. 

Another promising solution that allows for testing APIs is Wallarm. We have done a couple of PoCs with them.

We tested Black Duck a few years ago, but they only had a SCA solution. They didn't have a SAST solution. I think they do now have a SAST solution because they acquired another company, Fujita.

I don't think that Veracode has helped developers with security training, but it helps developers have a reality check on the code that they write and their open source library. That is the best value that developers can get from the product. 

Veracode products can be run as part of the development pipeline. That is also valuable.

It integrates with tools like GitHub or Jenkins. At a high level, it does integrate with most of the pipeline of tools. It would be a showstopper if the incorporation of security was not in the developer workflows. We are past a time when developers or software engineers run a SCA or DAST scan on the code, then hand it off to the development team. What works instead is to inject a security tool in a development pipeline, which is why it is absolutely paramount and important that tools, like Veracode, be a part of the build pipeline.

We limited the user to SAST and SCA. We haven't used any of the penetration testing, especially for the DAST solution that they have. For that, they are behind the curve, meaning that there are other products in the market that are being established. In my opinion, they don't have a viable product for DAST, because I believe they are not even testing APIs. So, it's not mature enough. We also have never used their pen testing because that is one of the services that we provide.

At this point, Veracode is one of the best solutions available, though it's not perfect by any means, but you have to work with whatever you have.

I will give the solution a seven (out of 10). When they integrate the SCA and SAST portions more tightly together, I could probably bump it up to an eight. Also, if they make improvements to the UI and the support, they can get a better rating. However, at this point, I would still pick Veracode for a company who doesn't have a million dollar plus budget.

The use case is that we have quite a few projects on GitHub. As we are a consulting company, some of these projects are open source and others are enterprise and private. We do security investigating for these projects. We scan the repository for both the static analysis—to find things that might be dangerous—and we use the Software Composition Analysis as well. We get notifications when we are using some open source library that has a known vulnerability and we have to upgrade it. We can plan accordingly.

We are using the software as a service.

It has improved the way our organization functions mostly because we can perfect the security issues on our products. That means our product managers can plan accordingly regarding when to fix something based on the severity, and plan fixes for specific releases. So, it has improved our internal process. It has also improved the image of the company from the outside, because they can see in the release notes of our products that we take security seriously, and that we are timely in the way that we address issues.

The solution has helped with developer security training because when we open a ticket with information coming from Veracode, it explains, for example, that some code path or patterns that we have used might be dangerous. That knowledge wasn't there before. That has really helped developers to improve in terms of awareness of security.

The feature that we use the most is the static analysis, by uploading the artifacts. We have two types of applications. They are either Java Server applications using Spring Boot or JavaScript frontend applications. We scan both using the static analysis. Before, we used to do the software composition on one side and the static analysis. For about a year now, we have had a proper security architect who's in charge of organizing the way that we scan for security. He suggested that we only use the static analysis because the software composition has been integrated. So in the reports, we can also see the version of the libraries that have vulnerabilities and that need to be upgraded.

It is good in terms of the efficiency of creating secure software.

My team only does cloud-native applications. Ultimately, the part that we are interested in, in testing, works fine.

There are some false positives, like any products that we have tried in this area, but slightly less. I would trust Veracode more than the others. For example, we had quite a few issues with Snyk which was much worse in terms of false positives, when we tested it for open source.

Also, the solution's ability to prevent vulnerable code from going into production is perfectly fine. It delivers, at least for the reports that we have been checking on Java and JavaScript. It has reported things that were helpful.

What could improve a lot is the user interface because it's quite dated. And in general, as we are heavy users of GitHub, the integration with the user interface of GitHub could be improved as well. 

There is also room for improvement in the reporting in conjunction with releases. Every time we release software to the outside world, we also need to provide an inventory of the libraries that we are using, with the current state of vulnerabilities, so that it is clear. And if we can't upgrade a library, we need to document a workaround and that we are not really touched by the vulnerability. For all of this reporting, the product could offer a little bit more in that direction. Otherwise, we just use information and we drop these reports manually.

Another problem we have is that, while it is integrated with single sign-on—we are using Okta—the user interface is not great. That's especially true for a permanent link of a report of a page. If you access it, it goes to the normal login page that has nothing that says "Log in with single sign-on," unlike other software as a service that we use. It's quite bothersome because it means that we have to go to the Okta dashboard, find the Veracode link, and log in through it. Only at that point can we go to the permanent link of the page we wanted to access.

Veracode has plenty of data. The problem is the information on the dashboards of Veracode, as the user interface is not great. It's not immediately usable. Most of the time, the best way to use it is to just create issues and put them in JIRA. It provides visibility into the SAST, DAST and SCA, but honestly, all the information then travels outside of the system and it goes to JIRA.

In the end, we are an enterprise software company and we have some products that are not as modern as others. So we are used to user interfaces that are not great. But if I were a startup, and only had products with a good user interface, I wouldn't use Veracode because the UI is very dated.

Also, we're not using the pipeline scan. We upload using the Java API agent and do a standard scan. We don't use the pipeline scan because it only has output on the user interface and it gets lost. When we do it as part of our CI process, all the results are only available in the log of the CI. In our case we are using Travis, and it requires someone to go there and check things in the build logs. That's an area where the product could improve, because if this information was surfaced, say, in the checks of the code we test on GitHub—as happens with other static analysis tools that we use on our code that check for syntax errors and mapping—in that case, it would be much more usable. As it is, it is not enough.

The management of the false positives is better than in other tools, but still could improve in terms of usability, especially when working with multiple branches. Some of the issues that we had already marked as "To be ignored" because they were either false positives or just not applicable in our context come down, again, to the problem of the user interface. It should have been better thought out to make it easier for someone who is reviewing the list of the findings to mark the false positives easily. For example, there were some vulnerabilities mentioning parts of libraries that we weren't actually using, even if we were including them for different reasons, and in that case we just ignore those items.

We have reported all of these things to product management because we have direct contact with Veracode, and hopefully they are going to be fixed. Obviously, these are things that will improve the usability of the product and are really needed. I'm totally happy to help them and support them in going in the right direction, meaning the right direction from my perspective.

I have used Veracode for quite a long time now, about two years. I have been working here for three years. In my first year, the company was using a different product for security and then it standardized on Veracode because every department had its own before that. There was consolidation with Veracode.

The stability is good. What I have seen in the stats is that there is downtime of the service a little too often, but it's not something, as a service, where you really need that level of availability on. So I'm not really bothered by that.

We don't have to do anything to scale, because it's SaaS. 

We started with a smaller number of users and then we extended to full single sign-on.

The staff of Veracode is very good. They're very supportive. When the product doesn't report something that we need and is not delivering straight away, they always help us in trying to find a solution, including writing custom code to call the APIs.

From that point of view, Veracode is great. The product, much less so, but I believe that they have good people. They are promising and they listen so I hope they can improve.

We started with WhiteSource, but it didn't have some features like the static analysis, so it was an incomplete solution. And we were already using Veracode for the static analysis, so when Veracode bought SourceClear, we decided to switch.

The initial setup is easy and quite well documented. I was really impressed by the quality of the technical support. When I had problems, that the product wasn't good enough for me, they were always there to help and give suggestions.

Being a service, there wasn't really much of an implementation. It's not complex to use.

My job is mostly technical. I don't own a budget and I don't track numbers. But as the customers are really keen on having us checking security issues, I would definitely say that we have seen a return on investment.

Most of our customers tend, especially in the software composition analysis, to apply their own in-house tools to the artifacts that we share with them. Whenever we release a new version of software and Docker images, they upload it to their systems. Some of them have the internal equivalent of Veracode and they come back to us to say, "Hey, you haven't taken care of this vulnerability." So it is very important for us to be proactive on each set of release notes. We need to show the current status of the product: that we have fixed these vulnerabilities and that we still have some well-known vulnerabilities, but that there are workarounds that we document. In addition they can check the reports that we attach, the reports from Veracode, that show that the severity is not high, meaning they don't create a big risk.

It delivers because we haven't been thinking, "Okay, let's consider another product." We might see some savings so I think the pricing is right.

For open source projects we mostly tested Snyk, which works quite well with JavaScript but much less so with other technologies. But it has some bigger problems because Snyk considers each file inside a repository of GitHub as a separate project, so it was creating a lot of false positives. That made it basically unmanageable, so we gave up on using it.

We have also been using an open source project called the OWASP Dependency-Check that was doing a decent job of software composition analysis but it required a lot of effort in checking false positives. To be honest, it would have been a good solution only if we didn't have a budget for Veracode, but luckily we had the budget, so there was no point in using it.

Another one that we tried, mostly because it was a small company and we had the opportunity to speak directly with them to ask for some small changes, was a company called the Meterian. It doesn't do static analysis, but otherwise the software composition analysis and the library report were the best of the bunch. From my perspective, if we didn't have the need for static analysis, I would have chosen Meterian, mostly because the user interface is much more usable than Veracode's. Also, the findings were much better. We still use it on the open source project because they offer a free version for open source—which is another good thing about some of these products, where the findings are available to anyone. For a company like ours, where we have both open source and enterprise products, this is quite good. Unfortunately, with Veracode, if we scan the open source project, we cannot link the pages of Veracode with the findings because they are private. That's a problem. In the end, for the open source projects, we are still using Meterian because the quality is good.

My main issues with Veracode, in general, are mostly to do with the user interface of the web application and, sometimes, that some pages are inconsistent with each other. But the functionality underneath is there, which is the reason we stay with Veracode.

Usually, we open tickets now using the JIRA/GitHub integration and then we plan them. We decide when we want to fix them and we assign them to developers, mostly because there are some projects that are a little bit more on the legacy side. Changing the version of the library is not easy as in the newer projects, in terms of testing. So we do some planning. But in general, we open tickets and we plan them.

We also have it integrated in the pipelines, but that's really just to report. It's a little bit annoying that the pipeline might break because of security issues. It's good to know, but the fact that that interrupts development is not great. When we tried to put it as a part of the local build, it was too much. It was really getting in the way. The developers worried that they had to fix the security issues before releasing. Instead, we just started creating the issues and started doing proper planning. It is good to have visibility, but executing it all the time is just wrong, from our experience. You have to do it at the right time, and not all the time.

The solution integrates with developer tools, if you consider JIRA and GitHub as developer tools. We tried to use the IntelliJ plugin but it wasn't working straightaway and we gave up.

We haven't been using the container scanning of Veracode, mostly because we are using a different product at the moment to store our Docker images, something that already has some security scanning. So we haven't standardized. We still have to potentially explore the features of Veracode in that area. At the moment we are using Key from IBM Red Hat, and it is also software as a service. When you upload a Docker image there, after some time you also get a security scan, and that's where our customers are getting our images from. It's a private registry.

Overall, I would rate Veracode as a five out of 10, because the functionality is there, but to me, the usability of the user interface is very important and it's still not there.

We used it for initial discovery and analysis and for reviewing the product. We were doing a trial. We had uploaded code on the Veracode server for analysis.

We used the cloud service or the cloud website where you could interact and identify the artifacts that you wanted to be reviewed, analyzed, and reported on. There was a plugin that we used with some of our IDs. It probably was Greenlight.

It pointed out some areas to be improved that we were not aware of. That was very helpful because if you don't know that there is a problem, you can't fix it.

The analysis of the vulnerabilities and the results are the most valuable features.

It can have more APIs and capabilities to handle other things well. We were doing a trial for it. There were two things that I looked at: one was uploading some Java-related content and the other was uploading database SQL files and having the review done on the quarterback. 

The Java portion of it worked fine, and it was pretty seamless, but the database portion was not. We uploaded some files to use for vulnerabilities, and the tell-all portion of it was pretty easy. We uploaded a war file and Java files, and we got the reports back on these. They were pretty clear to understand. We did the same thing for the database portion for the most part. However, the content wasn't getting uploaded in a predictable fashion, and it was slow and hard to get done. We had to do it over and over. After it indicated that the content was uploaded, there were no results. There were zero search findings. It was possibly a user error, something that we didn't do correctly, but they had acknowledged that it was something they were currently enhancing. This is something that could be made easier if they haven't already done that. I don't know how many releases they've had in that timeframe. I haven't looked at it since then. It was a trial period.

It seemed fairly stable other than the database portion where the SQL files didn't seem to get uploaded.

I didn't think there would be any concerns. We didn't exercise that. We didn't, in other words, try to upload gazillion artifacts and files. We just uploaded a few just to see how they handle it. It seemed fairly robust.

There were about ten Java and database developers who were using this solution. We were all collectively reviewing it and getting feedback on it.

We didn't use their technical support.

There was no other solution.

I wasn't that involved in the setup. I was basically a reviewer after it was all done.

I don't think there was any in-house work. I think it was just all on their server. We didn't have any equipment or any software per se other than just downloading a plugin or IDE, which essentially did the same sort of code analysis.

Its cost for what we needed it for was too high. It wasn't too high for other companies and it was competitively priced, but for us, it just didn't fit. We did plan to use it and increase the usage. In the end, it may have been abandoned because of the cost, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. So, even though we had planned on using it more and more, because of the cost and the business conditions of things, we didn't have the opportunity to really use it more.

There were a few other solutions we had looked at, but they didn't seem to be as robust. They also didn't have good reviews. That's why we chose this solution.

It is a robust software service for security analysis. It seemed to be pretty full-featured. We didn't exercise every single thing. Just a few of the features didn't seem to be up to snuff for our needs.

I would rate Veracode Manual Penetration Testing an eight out of ten.

We introduced SCA scanning to satisfy customer-requested open-source library scans as part of a contractional agreement. This led to expanding SCA scanning across our other applications to compliment SAST/DAST application scanning.

We knew we had a technical debt from not updating open-source libraries for years, and were not aware of the vulnerabilities in these libraries at the time. SCA scanning is now a first-class scan component of our current practices and included in our external security audits going forward.

Veracode SCA enables awareness of open-source library vulnerabilities and versions to upgrade and eliminate these problems. It links to SWE flaws and provides guidance on remediation.

The nature of discovering a vulnerability included in many places of the application code base makes initial findings look overwhelming. However, we found more the 80% of the time, simply updating the build project configuration to include new versions, rebuild, and rescan, resolved the vulnerability finding.

The remaining ~20% of findings required refactoring for deprecated methods or a shift in usage model to update to a newer version.

Multiple "Policy" profiles can be created to apply differently to different classifications of applications that include grace periods per severity. I find this a great way to manage team expectations and regulatory compliance on a per-scan and time-period cycle, leading to self-service compliance remediation.

The dependency graph visualization provides the ability to see nested dependencies within libraries for pinpointing vulnerabilities.

The Vulnerable Methods feature helps with sorting through those vulnerabilities that matter to my application codebase.

Three areas that we continue to struggle with are

1. Identifying and flagging false positives that reappear in other locations, where a rule that can catch other occurrences such that we don't have to repeat the override each time would help in productivity, and 
2. Improving sorting through findings reports to filter by only what is critically relevant will help developers focus on issues,
3. Add enterprise aggregate reporting, showing teams grouped in business units with trends per team and at the group level that can be sent by email as a digest with drill-in back to the dashboard.

We have been using SCA for one and a half years and SAST/DAST for two and a half years.

Scanning is reasonably consistent and reliable. Occasionally, a scan will fail or get stuck with a defect in the scanner or some unsupported implementation requiring escalation to Veracode to fix or work-around. 

Platform scan performance has improved over the years. Refrain from putting too much in your application package for scanning such that you keep a reasonably short scan time.

Veracode needs a more standard microservice pricing strategy such that optimizing SaaS solutions into microservices from monolith applications is not penalized. 

Technical support was difficult at times due to off-shore support that seemed to be reading from a script and not really understanding our issue. The time delays in response with the off-shore team and language concerns made resolving issues painful at times.

As we grew, we were assigned a local Security Program Manager as a point person for all escalations and that made all the difference. Our escalations are now taken seriously, with a consultation of the issue and swift resolution if warranted.

We previously use WhiteSource open-source scanning and switched to Veracode for consolidation of scanning tools with one vendor dashboard.

The initial setup for manual scan uploads is straightforward. Pipeline uploads can take some effort to get to work right. Setting up policy rules and charts for results is reasonably easy.

We implemented it through an in-house team. This a Quality Engineering Shared Service team with a part-time custodian that performs other roles, as well. We found the need to have a designated custodian per application scrum team to assure scans capability, and the scan frequency for that team is maintained, escalating any issue to the shared service team and/or Veracode directly, and for shepherding vulnerabilities through the backlog routinely.

We feel that security scanning is a necessary cost of doing business, especially with FedRAMP and other prescriptive certifications. The effort we put into scanning keeps our applications healthier with higher quality confidence.

When our scan pipelines work as intended, there is little human capital cost. If there are problems with the scan pipelines and/or scan results then this can become time-consuming to address.

The Veracode price model is based on application profiles, which is how you package your components for scanning. Veracode recently included SCA pricing and support pricing as a factor of the SAST scan count cost. When using microservices, you may need to negotiate pricing based on actual application counts where microservices are usually a portion of an application.

Synopsis and Checkmarx were explored for SAST/DAST scanning in 2017, prior to the use of SCA.

Veracode has evolved to be a good partner, overall, in working through our learning needs and problem escalations. There are layers of training and consultation available, as well as recurring support engagements if the enterprise scanning needs warrant it.

We focus on these two use cases: 

1. Our first use case is for Static Analysis (SAST). The purpose of it is to scan our code for any vulnerabilities and security breaches. Then, we get some other reports from the tool, pointing us to the problematic line of code, showing us what is the vulnerability, and giving us suggestions on how to fix or mitigate them.
2. The second use case is for the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool, which is scanning our open sources and third-party libraries that we consumed. They scan and check on the internal database (or whatever depository tool it is using), then they return back a report saying our open sources, the versions, and what are the exposures of using those versions. For any vulnerability, it suggests the minimum upgrades to do in order to move to another more secure version.

Veracode provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities. It enables developers to write secure code from the start by pointing them to the problematic line of code, and saying, "This function/method has security vulnerabilities," then suggests alternatives to fix it. Then, we adopt their suggestions of the tool. By implementing it in the right way, we can fix the issue. For example, if the tool has found a method where it copied one piece of memory into another piece of memory in the code. The tool points to problematic methods with the vulnerability and provides ways to code it more securely.  By adopting their suggestions, we are fixing this vulnerability.

Once you run the tool and realize that it is not secure to use a certain method or function, then you fix it. Next time that you want to add new code, you don't want to repeat that mistake. So, you're already adopting the original suggestion, then writing more security code.

If we continued to scan and fix issues, which is an ongoing battle because every day as there are new vulnerabilities, we are on the safe side.

It is faster to adopt and use because it's a SaaS software. As a service tool, we didn't have to deal with any installation emails. We also didn't have to download packages, upgrade, or maintain their on-prem machine, which is usually the case for on-prem solutions. This is a critical point that we needed to consider when adopting the right tool. So, SaaS was a deal breaker for us. 

I don't have any complaints about the policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations. It is good and a mandatory part of our process.

We tried to create an automatic scanning process for Veracode and integrate it into our billing process, but it was easier to adopt it to repositories based on GIT. Until now, our source control repository was Azure DevOps Server (Microsoft TFS) to managing our resources. This was not something that they supported. It took us some sessions together before we successfully implemented it.

About six months.

The technical support was good. Even with the time zones changes, they took the examples that we provided about how our call works and investigated them. When they didn't get an answer initially, they contacted someone else to assist. Overall, our experience was good.

The turnaround time and response times are good. We always got a response, even if they said, "It will take a while, as we are still investigating." One day after always, we always got a response, even if it was, "We need time to investigate." 

I would differentiate between the initial response time for our needs and the resolution time for the issue. The representative themselves respond pretty quickly to our needs. We exchange phone calls with them or email, and they responded quickly. Some of the issues that we experienced were due to our specific code languages and packages that didn't work smoothly with the tool. For those, the representative had to approach the Veracode R&D team. It took more time to involve R&D, but we eventually got a resolution from them after a few days.

To get into the solution, it took some tries to understand the structure of our repository and the code that we were using to write dependencies, etc. So, it took a bit of time, but then in the end, the solution was easy to connect.

It took about a month until we completed integration of Veracode tools into our own systems. Eventually, the tools needs to scan our code that resides on our machines in our on-prem environment. The integration of Veracode on the cloud with the on-prem repository and our processes took time. We worked with the Israeli representative of Veracode to help us. However, it was about a month overall until we stabilize it.

An Israeli sales representative for Veracode came to our office and worked very closely with us. They escorted us through the process of doing the PoC, examining the results and tools, and how to use them. We found it straightforward. There were some hiccups and some problems in the beginning, but not something significant in the general overview. It was easy and fast to adopt.

Our customers demand that we provide secure software. Veracode is giving us the mandate of claiming that our code is more secure because we are using an external third-party, neutral tool to examine our code and expose vulnerabilities. By fixing them, Veracode takes some of the responsibility, which is kind of a diploma that we can wave when we are negotiating with our customers.

We compared it with other tools as part of our proof of concept to adopt the right tool. Eventually, we selected Veracode because the tool provided us the easiest, fastest solution for our two use cases.

When we did the PoC to compare it with other tools, before we decided to adopt Veracode, one of the benefits that we saw is its reports are more focused on real issues. Other scanning tools that we tried, they produced much bigger reports with hundreds of vulnerabilities. That is too many vulnerabilities, so you cannot manage them nor decide where to focus. Using Veracode helps us focus where we need to.

We have used a Checkmarx tool, which is a competitor of Veracode. We have also examined Micro Focus Fortify and some other monitoring tools, which gave us a partial solution, had only static code analysis, or had only the open sources for composition part. We wanted one tool which does everything; we found Veracode all-encompassing.

The solution is efficient when creating secure software. Though, it depends on how you adopt the tool and how frequently you're running it. As long as you keep it as part of your routine and frequently run the tool, you will catch vulnerabilities closer to real-time. Eventually, you will improve the security of your software.

We haven't seen a lot of false positives. However, the tool points us to vulnerabilities to fix, which because of our behavior or software, we don't necessarily need to fix because we have other protections.

We are not using it for cloud software. Our solution is only on-prem.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of 10.

We use it to scan our biggest applications, our bread and butter. We've got a lot of developers using it in our organization, and we've got quite a few applications using it as well.

The solution has helped with developer security training and has helped build developer security skills. It has definitely opened their eyes and made them more aware of things they should look for. I try to get my developers to go to the Veracode seminars if there are new things to learn or if Veracode has made an improvement or they're going to announce something new. They have participated in those quite often, a few every month.

One of the features they have is Software Composition Analysis. When organizations use third-party, open source libraries with their application development, because they're open source they quite often have a lot of bugs. There are always patches coming out for those open source applications. You really have to stay on your toes and keep up with any third-party libraries that might be integrated into your application. Veracode's Software Composition Analysis scans those libraries and we find that very valuable.

We like their Dynamic Analysis as well. They changed the engine of the Dynamic Analysis and it does a better job. It scans better.

We use the solution’s Static Analysis Pipeline Scan. It's really good for assessing security flaws in the pipeline. Sometimes my developers have a hard time understanding the results, but those are only certain, known developers in my organization. I typically direct them to support, especially if I cannot answer the question, because I have full confidence in that process. 

The speed of the static scan is good. Our bread and butter application, which is our largest application, is bulky, and it's taking four hours. That's our baseline to compare the Static Analysis Pipeline and its efficiency. If that's only taking four hours, I have no doubt about our other applications and the solution's static analysis efficiency.

The solution’s policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is really good as well. We're a state agency and we always look to be NIST compliant. We're always looking at the OWASP and CWE-IDs, and Veracode does a really good job there. I've used it often in trying to get my point across to the developers, telling them how bad a vulnerability might be or how vulnerable the application is, based on a vulnerability we may be finding. 

If Veracode was more diversified, as far as the number of platforms and the number of applications it could do in our favor, we would be using it even more. But there are a number of platforms it doesn't support. For example, I know they support C+, .NET, and Java, but there are certain platforms they don't support and that was disappointing.

They have a pretty unique process to get guidance. It's not like you send them an email. You could do that, but if you want to set up a consultation call, you have to go to the website and give them a certain amount of detail so that they can study the problem and the detail and be ready to meet with you. It's not as simple as doing an email. You have to go to their website and you have to click on the "consultation" button and pick a time to talk with an engineer. Sometimes an engineer is not available for quite a while. You have to wait at least a couple of days before you can meet. Having to wait for two days is not that efficient. You should be able to set it up within 24 hours.

And regarding announcements from Veracode, I've tried to get them to let my developers know directly, and I'm not sure if that's happening. I want to tell Veracode to make sure that happens. I don't want them to send an announcement to me and then I have to disseminate that information to my developers. I want it to go directly to them. They've got the developers' names and emails in their database so those announcements should go directly to them.

I believe the company got Veracode at the end of 2012. However, my association with Veracode has only been since about the end of 2014. So we had it for a couple of years before I got my hands on it and then I gradually started to use it and implement it to the point where it's at right now. Early 2016 is when I began administering it. I do other tasks, so it's not my full-time job. Veracode is just one of many hats that I wear. Nobody else administers it with me in our company.

Veracode support is really good. I get a lot of help from them. I've been on a few calls with my developers and they're very competent engineers. If they don't have the answers, they'll get back to you.

I feel that management would not approve it if we were not getting our money's worth out of it. We have definitely seen ROI from Veracode.

Going forward, though, what may bring that into question is our transition to the cloud. We're not getting any benefit from those applications in the cloud. I think that should be addressed sooner rather than later.  We're moving to the cloud more, and for our applications in the cloud we usually only go with FedRAMP-certified cloud vendors. So we're not actually even scanning those applications in the cloud with Veracode. Not all our applications are there, but close to 30 percent of them are there now.

And they have to address not being compatible with certain platforms that we use. That has to be addressed because the ROI question may be coming up sooner rather than later.

The solution is very pricey.

The product is very good, very reliable, and they've made a lot of improvements to the dashboards and the reports. They've made the product easy to use. There used to be a lot of things that you had to search for and maneuver to dig deep down for them, but you don't have to do that anymore. Many of the things are now at your fingertips, including performance reports. Those things are easy to get to.