Veracode Reviews

We utilize it to scan our in-house developed software, as a part of the CI/CD life cycle. Our primary use case is providing reporting from Veracode to our developers. We are still early on in the process of integrating Veracode into our life cycle, so we haven't consumed all features available to us yet. But we are betting on utilizing the API integration functionality in the long-term. That will allow us to automate the areas that security is responsible for, including invoking the scanning and providing the output to our developers so that they can correct any findings.

Right now, it hasn't affected our AppSec process, but our 2022 strategy is to implement multiple components of Veracode into our CI/CD life cycle, along with the DAST component. The goal is to bridge that with automation to provide something closer to real-time feedback to the developers and our DevOps engineering team. We are also looking for it to save us productivity time across the board, including security.

It's a SaaS solution.

Our needs are primarily foundational and Veracode provides the efficiencies that we need.

The product is being used to replace another solution and we recognize in our early implementation that Veracode DAST is identifying more vulnerabilities in application code than our previous solution did.

Also, at this juncture, I have received no feedback of false positives from our development team. It seems to be fairly good in that regard and probably has minimal false positives. We haven't gotten feedback one way or another from developers about how the false positive rate affects their confidence in the solution, but if there were significant false positives, or even one in our environment, we would certainly be engaged with the vendor to discuss it. But that has not been the case so far.

Overall, I think that if it's implemented correctly for the business, Veracode is highly effective in preventing vulnerable code from going into production.

The visibility into application status helps reduce risk exposure for our software. Today, any findings provided by the DAST are reviewed by the developers and we have internal processes in place to correct those findings before there can be a release. So it absolutely does prevent us from releasing weak code.

Because we're so early in our implementation, we have had minimal feedback in terms of room for improvement. We have seen some minor things within the interface itself that we would love to see some improvements on.

One of those is scheduling, which can be a little difficult. For instance, if you set up recurring scheduled scans and a developer comes in and says, "Hey, I have this critical release that happened outside of our normal release patterns and they want you to scan it," we actually have to change our schedule configuration and that means we lose the recurring scheduling settings we had. We have to change that over to a one-time scan. It would be lovely if we could run ad hoc scans without changing our recurring schedule. That can be a little painful because it happens a lot, unfortunately. I think that will change, so I don't want to knock them completely. Right now, we run a manual configuration setup, but once we integrate this via API into our CI/CD life cycle, that issue should go away.

We have been using Veracode for four months.

So far, my impression of Veracode's stability is very good.

It appears to be very efficient when it comes to scalability. We're a smaller shop, so I may have a different interpretation of what scalability is. We're under 100 licenses at this point, but so far we have had success.

There are some great, positive things about Veracode and the relationship they try to form with the clients.

Regarding tech support, I've mostly had positive engagements, especially because they have one engineer who is, frankly, a rock star. I cross my fingers that I get him every single time because he's very thorough, he's educational, and he is quick. For the most part, it has been positive, especially when I do get assigned that particular engineer. I had a little frustration in the early days because they didn't quite understand the situation, but that was the only time I had a negative engagement with Veracode on support.

Our previous solution was difficult to configure. Setting up the login process was very difficult, as it was tied to your browser and there were a lot of hoops you had to jump through. The reporting was also hard to follow sometimes and didn't provide a good view into previous findings versus new findings. That made things difficult too. Once we did the evaluation of our old solution against Veracode, it was very clear that it was finding fewer vulnerabilities, which lowered our confidence level in that tool.

The initial setup was straightforward for us, and minimal, since it is a SaaS product.

The major component is being granted access to the tool. They then engage a customer success manager to help you understand and give you an overview of the interface itself and to walk you through some example setups. We were able to work with the CSM to configure a couple of our production scans. He did some hand-holding for us through the process until we felt that we understood it enough and had repeated it enough to do it on our own. He also provided detailed reviews of reporting, et cetera.

Deployment took less than an hour, although we have a small environment today. It would, obviously, take much more time with a larger organization.

Because we were migrating from one solution to another, it was an easy migration path. We just needed to collect the information from the previous solution and replicate that within Veracode.

One thing that can be difficult—and it was in our previous solution—is creating the login component for the scans. The learning about how to create that was a little daunting at first, because you have to create what they coin a "login script," but it is really just a recording of a login. Once you get it down, creating those "login scripts" takes less than a minute.

One of the struggles we have had with that recording process is that we have had to redo it more often than not if our developer has changed, even in some minor way, the way they collect information for the login. That does affect the script. That can be a little frustrating at times, but unfortunately, it is a known behavior apparently. It's just the nature of the beast if you do make any modifications to login.

As for admin of the solution, we have one person involved and it probably takes a quarter of their time or less. There is no maintenance since we have the SaaS product, other than ensuring that the scans that we have set up are still scanning successfully and that we don't have any failures.

Veracode has not reduced the cost of AppSec in our organization yet, but that's only because we are very early in the implementation.

We primarily looked at Netsparker as an alternative. 

My advice would be to understand how you want Veracode to function within your environment from a workflow perspective. That way, you can potentially start taking advantage of a lot of the functionality it offers out of the gate, which is something we are not doing yet. We're on a delay until 2022. That is really important. 

Also, in introducing the product to those who will be receiving the output, the findings reports, it would be great to include them in some conversation and collaboration on the move down that Veracode path or, frankly, any path that leads to scanning applications.

Veracode provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities, although we haven't actually had to utilize that. But as a part of our licensing model, they provide us a certain number of opportunities to engage with someone for consultation.

We are not focusing on using the solution to enhance developer security training right now, although it is a part of our roadmap. We are banking on being able to utilize that aspect of Veracode because we are an Agile environment and we want developers to be able to engage that training. Also, when there are findings, we want our developers to get that assistance in real-time. That is a part of our 2022 strategy. 

We have started out with a much more narrow policy for ourselves because we are just learning about how the tool works and how it functions. But we did evaluate some of Veracode's policies, out of curiosity, and they seem to be very aligned and very helpful. However, I would not be able to speak to whether they are on the money for utilization against compliance frameworks.

I'm an automation practice leader and we are customers of Veracode.

The valuable features are the static analysis and the dynamic analysis. The security is also a good feature.

The solution has issues with scanning. It tries to decode the binaries that we are trying to scan. It decodes the binaries and then scans for the code. It scans for vulnerabilities but the code doesn't. They really need two different ways of scanning; one for static analysis and one for dynamic analysis, and they shouldn't decode the binaries for doing the security scanning. It's a challenge for us and doesn't work too well. 

As an additional feature I'd like to see third party vulnerability scanning as well as any container image scanning, interactive application security testing and IAS testing. Those are some of the features that Veracode needs to improve. Aside from that, the API integration is very challenging to integrate with the different tools. I think Veracode can do better in those areas.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

I haven't had any issues with the stability. 

The solution is scalable but if we scale too far then the performance is impacted. We have around 300 developers using Veracode. 

The technical support is good. Whenever we have any vulnerability issues, we can easily contact them and then have a triage with the technical support team.

The initial configurations were okay, but then the integration to the CI/CD pipeline was not so smooth. We had multiple rounds of calls with the Veracode engineers to get it up and running.

Veracode is very, very expensive, one of the most expensive security scanning tools available.
We pay an annual license fee that is over $1 million. 

For any company wanting to use Veracode and buying vendor binaries from third party vendors, it's important to get the legal and compliance clearance from the vendor as well. Some vendors have a policy that they're selling you the binary of a particular software but you're not supposed to decode it. Those are the general terms and conditions that every vendor gets you to sign but Veracode does decode and then scans for the vulnerabilities. It's a challenge for any company purchasing the solution from vendors.

I rate the solution six out of 10.

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.

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.

In India, we have a digital development center. I'm from the security team. There are teams who develop all the applications for security features and coding security analysis. We use the Veracode Static Analysis for all projects and applications within our organization.

All the top vulnerabilities are detected. This makes sure all our applications are up-to-date on market threats, which are occurring. It gives a good workaround process for the developers to secure their code and ensure all our applications are secure. Up-to-date vulnerabilities are detected. It detects the vulnerabilities in the market on time. We keep running the scan over regular intervals, which ensures that we are secure.

Veracode has helped with developer security training and building developer security skills. I had never used Veracode previously. The training portals really helped teach me how to run the scan, know the Veracode processes, what processes should be followed, and what Veracode is all about. The training has really helped everyone.

Veracode covers most policy scans of most of the top vulnerabilities, like mobile. It pretty much covers all the policies per our compliance guidelines.

We give the developer a specific SLA period to fix each severity part of the vulnerabilities. So, they have a certain time limit to fix it. They are very comfortable in receiving these threats and working on fixing them. 

We are very much confident in the SCA scanning mechanism. If things are going fine, we can push it into production. On scale from one to five, I can give it a four and a half.

There have been a lot of benefits gained from Veracode. Compared to other tools, Veracode has good flexibility with an easy way to run a scan. We get in-depth details on how to fix things and go through the process. They provide good process documents, community, and consultation for any issues that occur during the use of Veracode.

SCA enables developers to write secure code from the start. During the development process, we run the scan. If any threats or vulnerabilities occur, we make sure to fix them, then rerun the scan. Then, we move to production. We have all the applications of our organization on Veracode using CI for our pipeline.

We use the Static Analysis Pipeline Scan, and it provides a good benefit for our developers. Previously, we didn't have any of these kinds of tools within the organization. We were using a code quality tool, but Veracode also gives us code quality. It also detects the vulnerabilities within the application, which makes sure the quality of the application is treated well. Therefore, I can give it a rating of four and a half out of five.

The scanning could be improved, because some scans take a bit of time. 

Many developers have commented on the packaging. It is quite different compared to other tools, so the packaging of codes could be changed. They should make it more uniform.

On the reporting, there should be an option like sending reports to groups or task ID.

We have been using Veracode for one year within our organization.

The stability is good; there is nothing unstable about it.

SCA scales well. 

Most of the users are developers, about 90 percent. 100 to 150 employees are using Veracode as of now.

We have more than 30 applications. Some use it on a daily basis, then others use it on a biweekly or monthly basis.

We do have plans to increase usage. All our developers across our organization, across the globe, will start implementing Veracode within all their platforms or applications that they are developing very soon.

We receive guidance for fixing vulnerabilities in case something is new to us, or we are stuck from there. We can very easily get consultation through calls and emails, which gets things easily clarified. That means we get things done quickly.

We were using SonarQube previously, but just as a code quality tool.

The initial setup was somewhere between straightforward and complex. I am not a developer, so I would not know how to package these codes and send them in for a scan. What I prefer is if there could be some mechanism where if I am a layman, then I just need to run a scan of the application. After that, there should be some option where I can get the project details. Instead of doing the packaging or some changes in the uploading part, this change would really help anybody who had to run the scan.

We have multiple applications developed at our organization, but it didn't take much time to deploy the solution to each. If a new application comes into picture in our organization, we provide access, so they can start running the scan in one or two days.

SCA reduced the cost of AppSec for our organization, because of things like stability.

It scans quickly versus other tools, like Qualys, Burp Suite, SonarQube, and Nexus. 

I can be confident about more of our applications in production. We can be more confident against many kinds of external threats. The lesson learnt is about being proactive, which is a good thing in security.

Veracode integrates with our developer tool 95 percent of the time. It is supported very well because developers get to know why the security features are really important in any organization or application along with what they develop. They get to know the market standards of what the security threats are and how to fix them, making sure the coding or the applications are secure enough to move to production. However, with MuleSoft, it does not support most of the API parts.

We use cloud-based applications and take support from the community.

At the moment, we are only using SCA and Static Analysis, which we have been very satisfied with. However, we are not using their DAST or pen testing. 

In our organization, we concentrate on high-end and medium alerts, but we really don't bother much with false positives.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

Veracode has both static application security testing as well as dynamic application security testing, also called Dynamic Analysis. Our primary use case was on the static analysis side, not on the dynamic, because we have an automated tool in the dynamic analysis scope. So our primary use was static analysis security testing.

Application security improved a lot because the teams got a list of all vulnerabilities, they analyzed them, and then they incorporated the fixes. It helped ensure that these kinds of issues would not happen when they wrote code in the future, because when the fix was applied, it was applied to all the vulnerabilities. That means our AppSec improved greatly once we started using Veracode.

It has SAST, DAST, as well as SCA—software composition analysis, which is used for finding vulnerabilities in third-party components. All these are in one tenant. Veracode provides a uniform view that enabled us to see the vulnerabilities of an application holistically. Our primary use case was the SAST. The DAST and SCA were not for our products. It definitely helped reduce risk exposure because, no matter how secure the code you write is, ultimately, you end up using third-party libraries. So finding vulnerabilities in the third-party libraries is also essential and this unified view gave us a holistic security profile of the application, rather than just our code or just the third-party code or only static or only dynamic. All these pieces are combined to give a unified view. It helped give a holistic picture of the security status of the application.

The most valuable feature, from a central tools team perspective, which is the team I am part of, being a DevSecOps person, is that it is SaaS hosted. That makes it very convenient to use. There is no initial time needed to set up an application. Scanning is a matter of minutes. You just log in, create an application profile, associate a security configuration, and that's about it. It takes 10 minutes to start. The lack of initial lead time or initial overhead to get going is the primary advantage. 

Also, because it's SaaS and hosted, we didn't have any infrastructure headache. We didn't have to think about capacity, the load, the scan times, the distribution of teams across various instances. All of this, the elasticity of it, is a major advantage.

There are two aspects to it. One is the infrastructure. The other one is the configuration. There are a lot of SaaS solutions where the infrastructure is taken care of, but the configuration of the application to start scanning takes some time to gain knowledge about it through research and study. That is not the case with Veracode. You don't have any extensive security profiles to consider. It's a two-pronged advantage.

Veracode also reports far fewer false positives with the static scanning. The scanner just goes through the code and analyzes all the security vulnerabilities. A lot of scanning tools in the market give you a lot of false positives. The false positive rate in Veracode is notably less. That was very helpful to the product teams as they could spend most of their time fixing real issues.

Veracode provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities and that is one of their USPs—unique selling propositions. They provide security consultations, and scheduling a consultation is very easy. Once a scan is completed, anybody who has a Veracode login can just click a button and have a security consultation with Veracode. That is very unique to Veracode. I have not seen this offered in other products. Even if it is offered, it is not as seamless and it takes some time to get security advice. But with Veracode, it's very seamless and easy to make happen.

Along those lines, this guidance enables developers to write secure code from the start. One of the advantages with Veracode is its ability to integrate the scanning with the DevOps pipeline as well as into the IDEs of the developers, like Eclipse or IntelliJ or Visual Studio. This type of guidance helps developers left-shift their secure-coding practices, which really helps in writing far better secured product.

Another unique selling point of Veracode is their eLearning platform, which is available with the cloud-hosted solution. It's integrated into the same URL. Developers log into the Veracode tenant, go through the eLearning Portal, and all the courses are there. The eLearning platform is really good and has helped developers improve their application security knowledge and incorporate it in their coding practices.

One of the things that Veracode follows very clearly is the assignment of a vulnerability to the CWE standard or the OWASP standard. Every vulnerability reported is tied to an open standard. It's not something proprietary to Veracode. But it makes it easy for the engineers and developers to find more information on the particular bug. The adherence to standards helps developers learn more about issues and how to fix them.

We use the Static Analysis Pipeline Scan as part of the CI pipeline in Jenkins or TeamCity or any of the code orchestrators that use scanning as part of the pipeline. There's nothing special about the pipeline scan. It's like our regular Veracode Static Analysis Scan. It's just that if it is part of the pipeline, you are scanning more frequently and finding flaws at an earlier point in time. The time to identify vulnerabilities is quicker.

Veracode with the integrated development environments that the developers use to write code, including Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, etc. It also integrates with project and portfolio management tools like JIRA and Rally. That way, once vulnerabilities are reported you can actually track them by exporting them to your project management tools, your Agile tools, or your Kanban boards. The more integrations a scanning tool has, the better it is because everything has to fit into the DevOps or DevSecOps pipeline. The more integrations it has with the continuous integration tools, the IDEs, and the product management tools, the better it is. It affects the adoption. If it is a standalone system the adoption won't be great. The integration helps with adoption because you don't need to scan manually. You set it up in the pipeline once and it just keeps scanning.

When it comes to the speed of the pipeline scan, one of the things we have found with Veracode is that it's very fast with Java-based applications but a bit slow with C/C++ based applications. So we have implemented the pipeline scan only for Java-based applications not for the C/C++ applications.

For C++ based languages, or languages where there is a platform dependency—for example, if I write C language code it is dependent on whether I'm executing that on Windows, or on Linux, or another platform—and with some of these platforms-specific languages, Veracode makes something called debug symbols that are introduced into the code. That gets cumbersome. They could improve that or possibly automate. If Veracode could quickly analyze the code and make file-line flags, that would be great. It is easy to do for Java, Python, and Pearl, but not so easy for C++. So when it comes to the debug symbols, guidance or automation could be improved.

Also, scan completion, as well scanning progress, is not reported accurately. Sometimes the scan says it will complete in two to three hours but it will take four or five hours. That is one of the areas where they can give a more accurate estimate.

I used to work for CA Technologies, which was acquired by Broadcom. Back in 2017, CA Technologies acquired Veracode, and that is when I started administering Veracode. Since it was a CA product, all product teams in various business units within CA were asked to adopt Veracode for their static analysis. My team is the central tools team and had the responsibility of enabling and deploying Veracode for all the product teams. So we used Veracode starting in 2017. I used it both in a DevSecOps lead role and as a Veracode admin and security admin.

It's quite stable because everything is in the cloud. I really don't need to worry about the stability at all or the frequency of the scans. It's all taken care of by the Veracode platform.

It is scalable. We had about 500 applications, out of which 200 were being scanned regularly. It was in the AWS infrastructure and it was quite scalable. The elasticity was all taken care of. We were scanning a huge set of enterprise products.

We had roughly 2,000 Veracode users. Generally they were developers but there were QA people, as well as the program managers because they needed to add the vulnerabilities and see the health of the product. We also had security champions to advise the product teams on their scanning and vulnerabilities. In addition, general security also accessed it to provide consultation on how to fix vulnerabilities. We were able to give privileges and access control based on each individual.

We stopped our use of Veracode on November 1st, 2020, about 30 days ago. But when we were using it for the three-and-a-half years, the usage was very extensive.

The customer support was two-pronged. One was the security consultation and that was top-notch. The security support helped teams understandable the vulnerabilities 

The regular customer support for issues was quite prompt and had good SLA turnarounds.

Veracode is one of the more expensive solutions in the market, but it is worth the expense because of the eLearning and the security consultations; everything is included in the license. It's a good return on investment because it improves the application security for all the different types of scans.

It reduced the cost of AppSec for our organization because otherwise we would have had to go through multiple vendors for application security. With Veracode, one solution fit all our needs. It reduced the AppSec cost by reducing the numbers of vendors. Typically, you would have different products for different types of scanning. For static analysis you might use one tool, and for dynamic another, and for third-party software composition analysis you might use another. And after using all those tools, you might still have to consult with another vendor. Veracode combines all this into a single solution.

I would estimate that it saved us $500,000 a year.

We have been using the Synopsys tool from Coverity for our static analysis.

Veracode is superior in terms of infrastructure because it is cloud-hosted. We don't have that with Coverity on-premise. We need to take care of capacity planning, infrastructure procurement. Also, with Coverity we have to invest some time to enable various checkers. The security profile configuration takes time compared to Veracode.

Coverity, on the other hand, is more robust and it works with the C programming languages.

We use it for dynamic scanning and Static Code Analysis as well as for Software Composition Analysis (SCA).

We do use this solution's support for cloud-native applications.

We are a startup with 350 employees. The AppSec program initially was focused and aligned with regulatory audit, and compliance. However, over the past two years, we have "shifted left" : integrating AppSec early in our SDLC process. Having this tool has fast-tracked our response times in terms of scanning the code for third-party library vulnerabilities. 

The SCA, which detects vulnerabilities in third-party and open source libraries, was something new for us and is very well done. It provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities. 

When we go from the dynamic scan to static scan to SCA, there is a huge change in the UI. This was not relayed to us when we were buying the product nor during the demo. They mentioned, "Yeah, this was an acquisition. The third-party library scanner was an acquisition from SourceClear."

You can see there is a huge difference in the user experience in terms of both the display as well as the usability of the product. That is one of our pet peeves: They are not normalizing the UI across the three product segments. We had numerous calls with them early on because we were new to the platform. The sales team is not aligned with the support team. The support team keeps telling us to use a different UI versus the one that the sales team showcased during the sales cycle.

There is much to be desired of UI and user experience. The UI is very slow. With every click, it just takes a lot of time for the pages to load. We have seen this consistently since getting this solution. The UI and UX are very disjointed. It is ironic that they claim themselves as agile AppSec tool, but their UI doesn't reflect that.

We had a couple of consulting calls, and perhaps it may be the engineers that we got, they were not really up to speed with our frameworks. They were very focused on .NET and Java, which are legacy frameworks for us. We don't use these at all in our code base. We are using the newer, modern web frameworks, like Django. They have very little coverage or knowledge base on these, especially on the mobile side.

There are a lot of faults with the Static Analysis Pipeline Scan tool. Their tool seems to be very good with legacy products, which are developed in .NET and Java frameworks, but there are false positives when it comes to using modern web frameworks, like Python and Django. The C++ code doesn't even scan. We have spent at least three weeks worth of time going back and forth because it won't support the use cases that we have.

We have been using Veracode for over a year now.

It hasn't gone down. Nobody has complained about the Pipeline Scan being broken. The couple of times that they have, it was more to do with our ineptitude than with the platform capabilities. Once we understood how the platform is working and the gotchas associated with it, we were able to have a workaround within its constraints.

For our use case, it is sufficient. It has been up and running for quite some time and we haven't had any downtime experience with it. We get proactive notifications from Veracode about any upcoming maintenance, batch schedules, and other things. They have been pretty good with that. 

There haven't been any issues with multiple users logging in and slowing it down. It has just been inherently slow. 

We clearly mentioned during our purchase cycle that we have C++ code, a Swift code from a US perspective, Python libraries, etc. We were given assurances that these were absolutely covered under the solution. However, when we started investigating through support tickets, they admitted that these were not supported. We have very limited support for C++ code scans and other things. That was a bummer from my perspective.

The support has been good. However, we work in an agile environment and our release cycles are literally every two weeks. Their response times have been very delayed, especially as we are in the Pacific Time Zone and they are in the Eastern Time Zone. 

They have a great support portal to do self-service. We have been pretty impressed with that, but we soon realized that anything you pick is 10 days to two weeks out. That has been a non-starter for us. We had to constantly escalate through our account team to get an engineer on the call, because we were in the middle of a release and needed to scan the product at the moment.

At this point, we are doing sandbox scanning. We have implemented it with our Jenkins CI/CD tool to really scan the code, upload, etc. It took awhile for us to figure it out because the support wasn't really helpful. We had to hack our way into getting through the documentation. Since the time they acquired SourceClear, they haven't really cleaned up or integrated the documentation well, and that may be one of the reasons. However, we were able to find the right combination of keys to make it work.

We were previously using WhiteHat Security. Their lack of customer service prompted us to switch. Every question that we asked was just going into a black hole. The only time that we got any response was when our account was up for renewal. We had a long discussion with them to get a rationale behind their lack of response, and that was the only time they listened. There was no follow-up. That is when we decided that this is not a partnership that we wanted to continue anymore.

Veracode has automated a lot of the manual stuff that we were doing in terms of scanning third-party libraries. With any given release, I was spending from eight to 10 hours manually scanning through all 3rd-party libraries for vulnerabilities. Now, it is all within the Pipeline. So, I am saving about 10 hours in a given month with it.

The initial setup was moderately complex. The onboarding of the tenant, single sign-on, and access control were easy, but when it came to the real work of integrating the Pipeline Scan and our ticketing system, that is broken at this point. I spend most of my time manually doing this, and if they could fix that portion, that would save me another two hours worth of my time with every release.

The deployment took two to three weeks.

Because this was a SaaS service, we just onboarded one team, then looked through some of the gotchas from login and access perspective. Once the pilot users were all cleared up for any potential issues, we then onboarded the rest of the team. We have a small team of 40 users from a development perspective.

It's pretty straightforward from an onboarding perspective because it is all SaaS. We just needed to whitelist some IPs from Veracode for scanning some of our code, which are not publicly available. Beyond that, everything was pretty straightforward.

The solution was implemented by an internal consultant and me.

The time savings has been tremendous. We saw ROI in the first six months.

It is very reasonably priced compared to what we were paying our previous vendor. For the same price, we are getting much more value and reducing our AppSec costs from 40 to 50 percent.

We bought the product for its expected benefits, in terms of all the bells and whistles that we saw during the sales cycle. When it came time to really implement it, that is where we have been having buyer's remorse.

We evaluated Micro Focus, Black Duck, SonarSource, and Coverity. We felt Micro Focus was the closest to really addressing all three of our needs, which is SAST, DAST, and the third-party software composition analysis. Micro Focus had the most complete execution from an implementation perspective, but it was very expensive for us. We went with Veracode because it was within our price point. 

We are getting huge value out of the dynamic scan and third-party library scanning. However, the initial euphoria has died down at this point, so we will be looking at additional tools to augment some of the solution's shortcomings.

It is good for third-party scanning and if your code base is all modern web frameworks. It is also great for the third-party analysis. However, the Software Composition Analysis is not good if you have C++ code or anything legacy, as it does not cover that. It also does not cover iOS code. It has a lot of constraints.

The solution’s policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is fine. We are using it for internal reporting, but we haven't really dug into the policy definitions and tweaking them. We are using its default policies.

As part of our validation and testing, we are able to catch vulnerable code early on. That has been helpful. Automating some of the process has been really helpful, at least from our team's effort perspective. The tool highlights the risk associated with vulnerabilities. That effort is very much automated with this tool.

I would rate this solution as a six out of 10. If you have legacy applications, the solution is great. Their SaaS scanning is geared towards that. If you have modern frameworks, the SaaS scanning and dynamic scanning don't provide much value. My advice to anybody looking at Veracode: Use them for third-party scanning. They are really good at that because of their SourceClear acquisition. For the rest of their products though, just keep looking.

We use Veracode for static analysis of source code as well as some dynamic analysis.

It's valuable to any business that has software developers or that is producing software that consumers use. You have to do some type of application security testing before allowing consumers to use software. Otherwise, it's risky. You could be publishing software with certain security defects, which would open up your company to the likelihood of a class action lawsuit.

I don't have any examples of how it improved the way our company functions. However, I did use a lot of the findings to put pressure on our vendors to try to improve their security postures.

Veracode has helped with developer security training and helped build developer security skills. Developers who get the tickets can go into it and take a look at the remediation advice. They have a lot of published documentation about different types of security issues, documentation that developers can freely get into and read.

The integration with JIRA helps developers see the issues and respond to them.

The most valuable features are that you can do static analysis and dynamic analysis on a scheduled basis and that you can push the findings into JIRA.

Static Analysis Pipeline Scan was able to find security defects in the software we were sending its way. For both Android and iOS that worked very well. It did have a lot of false positives though, but at least we knew it was working. The speed of the pipeline scan was completely reasonable. I don't have any complaints about the time it took.

The efficiency of Veracode is fine when it comes to creating secure software, but it tends to raise a lot of false positives. It will tell you about a lot of issues that might be hard for an attacker to actually manipulate. Because of that it's very difficult, sometimes, to sort through all of the findings and figure out what you actually ought to pay attention to. Maybe calling them false positives isn't entirely accurate. There were a lot of things that it would raise that were accurate, but we just didn't consider them terribly important to address because it would be very hard for an attacker to actually use them to do anything bad. I think it frustrated the engineers at times. 

Also, the policies you have, where you can tune the findings you get, don't allow you not to file tickets about certain findings. It will always report the findings, even if you know you're not that concerned about a library writing to a system log, for example. It will keep raising them, even though you may have a ticket about it. The integration will keep updating the ticket every time the scan runs.

We couldn't make it stop. We tried tuning the policies. We had several meetings with the Veracode team to get their feedback on how we could tune the policies to quiet some of these things down and nothing ever resulted in that. Ultimately we couldn't stop some of these alerts from coming out.

Even stranger, for some of the issues raised, such as the ones that were in the vendor code base, we would put the status in Veracode that we communicated this to the vendor, but then, the next time the scan was run, it would find the same issue. One time it would respect that update and the next time, afterwards, it wouldn't respect it and it would generate the issue again. It was really weird. It was reopening the issues, even though they should have been in a "closed" state.

Another significant area for improvement is that their scanning had a lot of problems over this last year. One of the biggest problems was at first it wasn't able to read packaged Go. When I say packaged Go, I mean packaged the way the Go programming language says you're supposed to package Go to deploy the software, when you're using multiple build modules together to make an app. That's a totally normal thing to do, but Veracode was not able to dig into the packages and the sub-modules and scan all the code. It could only scan top-level code.

Once they fixed that problem, which took them until August, we found that it kept reporting that there were no problems at all in our Go code base. That was even scarier because it would usually give all these false positives on our other repositories. I had the application security engineer write a bunch of known defects into some Go code and push it in there and scan it, and it didn't raise anything with any of that. They're advertising that they have a Go scanner, but it doesn't actually function. If our company was going to continue in business, I would have asked them for a refund on the license for the Go scanner at our next renewal, but since we're going out of business, I'm not renewing.

I would also love to see them make it easier to debug the JIRA integration. Right now, all of the logs that are generated from the JIRA integration are only visible to the Veracode engineering team. If you need to debug this integration, you have to have a live meeting with them while they watch the debug messages. It's utterly ridiculous. Their employees are really nice, and I appreciate that they would go through this trouble with me, but I think it's terrible that we have to bother them to do that.

I have been using Veracode for about a year.

It's highly stable.

It scaled fine. We didn't have any problems with it not being available or going down during our scans. We have used it 100 percent, meaning we've taken advantage of every license we bought.

Their support was really good. I would give them a B+ and maybe an A-. The only thing that's really taking support down is the product itself. You and the support team are fighting against the product. The people at Veracode were great though.

We didn't have a previous solution. 

The initial setup was pretty complex. We had to integrate it with our CI/CD pipeline. This required writing custom code. Once it was integrated there, we had to have the development team make some changes to how they pushed a release to a special branch so it would go to Veracode on a weekly basis. And once it started raising the issues, we had to work on that JIRA-Veracode integration, which was not straightforward at all and required a lot of debugging help from the Veracode engineering team. They provided that and that was great, but ideally it would show you the error messages so that you don't need their help.

The initial deployment took about two or three weeks and then we had to come back and tune it several times, so there were another two to three weeks of tuning. Altogether, it was about six weeks of effort on our part.

Initially, we had one person working on the deployment, and then I started working on it as well. Later, there were four of us working with Veracode during these calls to try to do the policy tuning and figure out if we could make it work better for everyone.

We had six people using the solution: four software engineers and two security engineers.

I'm not sure if we have seen ROI. We didn't have any high-severity security defects being raised by Veracode, and that's just a function of the development team members we had. It helped in protecting ourselves from potential class action lawsuits.

The pricing is really fair compared to a lot of other tools on the market.

It's not like a typical SaaS offering. Let's say you got SaaS software from G Suite. You're going to get Google Docs and Google Drive and Google Sheets, etc. It's going to be the same for everybody. But in Veracode, it's not. You buy a license for specific kinds of scanners. I had two licenses for static analysis scanners and one license for a dynamic analysis scanner. 

I chose Veracode over others because it supported the programming languages we're using. It had the best language support. A lot of the other solutions might have supported one of the languages we're using, but not all of them.

My advice would be to definitely have some code that has a lot of security defects embedded into it and to run it through the scanner to test it early on in the process, ideally during the evaluation process. If your company works in five programming languages, you would want to create some code in each of those languages, code that has a lot of security defects, and then run the scanner over it to just make sure it can catch the security vulnerabilities you need it to catch and that it's consistent with how it raises those vulnerabilities.

Veracode provides guidance for fixing vulnerabilities but that doesn't enable developers to write secure code from the start. The way the product works is it scans code that has already been written and then raises issues about the security problems found in the code. That is the point at which the developer sees the issue and can look at the remediation advice Veracode gives, and the possible training. But it doesn't allow them to write secure code in the first place, unless they really remember everything. It does educate them about it, but it's usually after the fact.

The solution provides policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulation. While those features were not applicable to us, they were in there. I think they would be very useful for anyone working in a high-compliance industry.

It also provides visibility into application status across all testing types, including SAST, DAST, SCA, and manual penetration testing, in a centralized view. If you buy the SAST and DAST license, of course you'll see those scan results inside that view, but to see the pen testing that means you'd have to buy pen testing from them as well. Seeing those testing types in one view didn't really affect our AppSec. It's nice for the security team, but it's just not that important because they weren't in there everyday looking at it. Since we had the JIRA integration, the defects would flow into JIRA. The software engineers would take a look at it and categorize whether it was something they could fix or something that was in a vendor's library. The software engineers would prioritize the things that they could fix, and if it was in a vendor's library, I would batch those up and communicate them to the vendor.

Overall, I would grade Veracode as a "B" when it comes to its ability to prevent vulnerable code from going into production. It will find everything that's wrong, but it doesn't have enough tuning parameters to make it easier for organizations without compliance burdens to use it more effectively.

Overall, it's pretty solid. I would give it an eight out of 10.