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.

Positive

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.

We use it to scan our web applications before we publish them to see if there are any security vulnerabilities. We use it for static analysis and dynamic analysis.

Veracode has helped immensely with developer security training and in building developer security skills. Before we implemented it, we would find a lot more vulnerabilities in our applications. Now, with Veracode, the developers have started doing a lot more secure coding and they have much better coding practices.

It has also helped our organization to review code quicker, about 50 percent quicker, and to deploy more secure code.

And when it comes to the solution's ability to prevent vulnerable code from going into production, so far, I haven't seen any instances in which we've had false negatives. So it's pretty effective at that.

Among the most valuable features are the ability to 

• submit the software and get automated scan results from it
• collaborate with developers through the portal while looking at the code
• create compliance reports.

Otherwise, we would have to do working sessions with developers and pull together all the different findings and then probably manage it in a separate mechanism like Excel. And to have to go through source code manually would be quite time intensive and tedious.

The solution also provides you with some guidance as well as best practices around how vulnerabilities should be fixed. It points you in that direction and gives the developers educational cues.

In addition, the policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is pretty comprehensive, especially around PCI. If you do the static analysis, the dynamic analysis, and then a manual penetration test, it aggregates all of these results into one report. And then they create a PCI-specific report around it which helps to illustrate how the application adheres to different standards.

The solution also integrates with developer tools such as Visual Studio and Eclipse.

It's pretty efficient, but sometimes the static analysis is prone to a lot of false positives. But that's how it is with most static analysis tools. In some cases, they might have other mechanisms which would deal with a particular vulnerability, but it wouldn't be captured in the code. I would estimate the false positive rate at about 20 percent.

Upon review, the developers understand the solution. But when they get the initial list of findings, it can be a bit daunting to them if it's not managed appropriately.

Also, the static analysis can sometimes take a little while. The time that it takes to do a scan should be improved. There are times when we need a quick turnaround but it will take a little while. We might have something scanning and not get a result until the following day. It's not too critical, but it does increase the delay. Most of the time, when developers submit their code, because of the way that we use it, it's because in their minds they're ready to have that code deployed into production. But the security testing, especially with the feedback, introduces additional time into the project, especially if a security fix is needed.

I have been using Veracode for about two years.

There have been no issues with the stability. We haven't had any outages or any unavailability of the system, so far.

We have about 40 developers but we use this product per project rather than per developer. All our projects will pass through this product. At any given time we have about 10 to 12 projects going on. Outside of developers, it's just the five security team members who also use Veracode.

Any increase of usage will be based on the business and if there are more software projects. Whenever there are additional software projects, we will then increase our usage.

Their technical support is good, but we haven't really had to use it much, so far.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward but, depending on the type of applications or the types of code that you're using, the setup requirements may be a little different. It takes a little getting used to, based on the environment in which you're working.

For example, for Visual studio, it might have specific requirements that are needed to package an application for scanning, whereas an Angular application would have different requirements. For me, as a non-developer, the issue would be around understanding those different requirements for each development environment.

Our deployment didn't take long; it took a couple of days. There were three people involved in, including a developer, someone setting it up, and a code reviewer. By "setting it up" I mean putting in the applications, saying what the application does—providing the business rules of the application.

We didn't have a specific strategy for deploying it. The software is pretty straightforward, once you have the application bundles to be scanned. There's not a whole lot to do after the packaging.

Maintenance-wise, it doesn't take much because it's SaaS. We don't really do much on our end.

We did it in-house with Veracode. Working with Veracode for the deployment was pretty easy, pretty straightforward.

We've seen ROI in that we've cut down on the number of penetration tests we've been doing by about 50 percent, and also because of the stage at which the vulnerabilities are found, before they get into production. That means the risk has also been reduced.

It has reduced the cost of application security for our organization, but more than it has reduced the cost, it provides better software assurance.

In addition to the standard licensing fees there's a support cost and an implementation cost at the beginning.

This year I looked at other vendors in the market, including Synopsys, Contrast, and Checkmarx. What I didn't like about them is that their licensing models are based on how many developers you have. That wasn't a good fit for me. In addition, Checkmarx didn't have a SaaS solution.

If you are doing pipeline-based implementation, it would be more complex than the way that I'm doing this, but I didn't see any real challenges that would be tool-specific or vendor-specific, with implementation.

Your development model will really determine what the best fit is for you in terms of licensing, because of the project-based licensing. If you do a few projects, that's more attractive. If you have a large number of developers, that would also make the product a little more attractive. But if you have maybe one or two developers doing many projects, then you might look more towards software that has a developer-centric model.

We don't use the Static Analysis Pipeline Scan because of the build process that our  developers use. They don't really have an automated build pipeline in which they push the code to production. Also, with the false positive rate, it's a bit tricky when you implement that into the pipeline, as it might stop a developer from pushing code out to test. We use it more like a gate. The developers submit the code to us and then we scan it and review it with them.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Veracode is that you need to manage it with the developers, so that you speak through the findings with them. It's not just a tool that you throw down their throats.

Overall, I would rate it at seven out of 10. Ideally, I would prefer a product that had the interactive testing, as well as the ability to scan a little faster.

We use the Veracode SAST solution to scan the Java, Node.js, and Python microservices as part of our CI/CD pipeline, wherein we are using our CI/CD server as Bamboo, Jenkins, and GitLab CI/CD. 

We have teams for both our cloud pipeline and on-prem pipeline, and both teams use this solution. We are using Veracode to constantly run the internal application source code and ensure the code's security hygiene.

Before, the pentesting was happening at later part of the SDLC. Now, we have been getting early feedback about insights from Veracode, including traction around the application security aspects. Developers keep coming to us and asking the questions. Vericode has built a bridge between the development and security teams, which is something really helpful in an organization.

Veracode has helped us build security training in our clients' organizations.

The solution’s policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is very helpful. We use Veracode to scan for vulnerabilities. This help us comply with regulatory standards for the European region. While the policy scanning takes time, it is very good from a compliance point of view.

There are quite a few features that are very reliable, like the newly launched Veracode Pipelines Scan, which is pretty awesome. It supports the synchronous pipeline pretty well. We been using it out of the Jira plugin, and that is fantastic. 

We are using the Veracode APIs to build the Splunk dashboards, which is something very nice, as we are able to showcase the application security hygiene to our stakeholders and leadership. 

We have been using Veracode Greenlight for the IDE scanning. 

Veracode has good documentation, integrations, and tools, so it has been a very good solution. 

Veracode is pretty good about providing recommendations, remedies, and guidelines on issues that are occurring.

It is an excellent solution. It finds a good number of the securities used, providing good coverage across the languages that we require at our client site.

We have been using the solution’s Static Analysis Pipeline Scan, which is excellent. When we started, it took more time because we were doing asynchronous scans. However, in the last six months, Veracode has come with the Pipeline Scan, which supports synchronous scans. It has been helping us out a lot. Now, we don't worry when the pentesting report comes in. By using Veracode, the code is secure, and there are no issues that will stop the release later on in the SDLC. 

The speed of the Pipeline Scan is very nice. It takes less than 10 minutes. This is very good, because our policy scans used to take hours.

Veracode is good in terms of giving feedback.

We would like to see fewer false positives. 

Sometimes, I get feedback from a developer saying, "They are scanning a Python code, but getting feedback around Java code." While the remediation and guidelines are there, improvement is still required, e.g., you won't get the exact guidelines, but you can get some sort of a high-level insights.

Veracode has a little bit of noise. Sometimes you will get a lot of issues, which you just need to triage. While the solution is excellent, it does come with a little bit of noise.

We have been using the solution for a year and a half.

The stability is good, except every month it needs maintenance. So far, we haven't had an outage during UK working hours, e.g., where we are unable access the platform. There were some issues out-of-the-box, but now it's pretty much fine.

More than 100 people are using the Veracode solution in our organization. Mostly, the guys who use Veracode are developers, QA engineers, product owners, Scrum Masters, and some data scientists.

We have a three-person team of security guys who maintain the entire service. The security guys have automation skills and can write the code. We are one squad in a company out of 21 squads. We are a security who helps other development teams with Veracode as part of their DevSecOps.

We have adapted Veracode across three line of our client's business. In the future, we may expand Veracode into more lines of business. 

The technical support sometimes takes 48 hours to get back to us. Some of the support staff are not that great. There is no extra support on Slack channel nor is there a chat. Instead, we just have to wait for an email. They gave us a mobile number, which sometimes doesn't work. Then, if it does, it takes time. The technical support is something that needs to be improved.

Veracode's application security team is very helpful. If we are not getting the answers that we need, this team will come and assist us. For example, we had a call with their application security team who helped us determine best practices. They are good and very professional. 

Their account team is helpful and knowledgeable.

We use the solution’s support for cloud-native applications, like AWS Lambda. We have a cloud pipeline, where some of our microservices functions are getting developed there. Less than five of our squad use this service.

Because of my consulting background, I have used other solutions prior to the use of Veracode. However, Veracode was the first solution implemented of its type. Before Veracode, developers didn't know how they could develop secure software. After Veracode was implemented, developers knew when they wrote code that they could scan it in their IDEs. Also, while pushing a deployment, they can get feedback from the Pipeline Scan.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us three months to deploy the entire solution across all the squad at our site via Pipeline Scan as well as have the squads adopt it. If you are familiar with security, you can be up and running with the solution in a week's time.

Our implementation strategy was to give the Greenlight ID plugin to all the developers and enable the microservices. Then, we wanted to let the non-human account use the new unlimited account and all the source code. This has helped us in last year and a half, as we have over 150 microservices being scanned by the Veracode platform.

Customer support was amazing during the evaluation phase.

The ROI seems good so far. The client is happy with what they invested in Veracode. Having our developers now think about security is also helping us out.

The solution has reduced the cost of AppSec a little bit for our organization through the automation of pentesting.

We have seen a 30 percent reduction in pentesting. Using Veracode, we can do faster releases.

Veracode's price is high. I would like them to better optimize their pricing. 

Veracode's price is a little higher than other tools. However, they are the market leader.

Micro Focus Fortify doesn't have good APIs. Instead, they are relying on CLI. Whereas, Veracode is more API and DevSecOps friendly. Veracode's scanning time is better than Fortify's. 

It is an excellent solution. I would recommend adopting it. If you come from a security background, Veracode is an easy solution. If you don't come from a security background, the adoption of Veracode will take a bit of time.

Veracode has been integrated with our IDEs. It has been also integrated with our DevOps CI/CD server, which is Bamboo, Jenkins, or GitLab CI/CD. It is all pretty neat and clean. 

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

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 the Static Analysis, Dynamic Analysis, and SCA, the software composition analysis.

The Static Analysis has identified flaws.

From a developer point of view, it has really helped me to know about many security best practices that I need to follow.

There are also security specialists, although it's not my area, who work on strategy to mitigate flaws. It classifies things into three levels: high, medium, and low, the latter being the ones that you can live with. It tells you which are very critical and you need to fix. That helps management to determine the strategy of what to fix next.

When you reach a level of security in your application and you get verification from Veracode that your app is secure, that helps in selling products. Mitigating flaws and being sure that your product is secure is going to give you higher credibility with clients and better performance.

In our use case, some of our products have dependencies in separate apps. Before going into production, each dependency has its own sandbox to help us identify the vulnerabilities in that certain dependency. Then there is the software composition analysis, the SCA, that helps us scan all the vulnerabilities when those modules are integrated with each other. Before deploying the whole app into production, we fix the flaws and increase the score. We have a whole company policy that some high-level security experts put in place. Before we move on to the next level of scanning we need to get to a certain score. That has really helped us. Each time, they make the analysis a little harder, to dive deeper into the code and go through different scenarios to find more flaws. That has really helped us have the minimum required number of issues and security flaws, when we go into production.

The most valuable features are the application analyses: 

• Static Analysis
• Dynamic Analysis
• SCA, the software composition analysis, to scan all the models together. 

These are the three features we've mostly been using.

It is easy to use for us developers. It supports so many languages: C#, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and it even scans some of our JavaScript. You just need the extension to upload the files and the reports are generated with so much detail. 

You can detect which line is causing the issue and it gives you some insights about, for example, if you have a dependency problem in your inputs or some known vulnerabilities. It even gives you an article so that you can read about it and know how to mitigate it in some cases. Sometimes there are well-known flaws in third-parties and you should upgrade to another version to resolve your issues. Veracode guides you.

I haven't tried any other platforms, but from what I have seen, it is really fast. You just upload the files, which is easy to do, and you can follow the scanning progress on the platform. Once it's done you get an email and you just access the platform. I don't know what other tools are like, but for me, Veracode is user-friendly.

I would like to see them provide more content in the developer training section. This field is really changing each day and there are flaws that are detected each day. Some sort of regular updates to the learning would help. 

I would also like to see more integration with other frameworks. There were some .NET Core versions that weren't supported back when we started, but now they're providing more support for it.

I've used Veracode since October, 2018.

The solution we are using is stable. So far, it seems to be really practical.

In our company, other products are using it, not just our product. So it's surely being used by other developers. There is also management between the applications. Each team has its own hierarchy in the company and the organizational levels are handled well in the solution. We have an upper manager and the administrator of the app. And each product has its own dashboards and its own access rights, so I cannot see the results of other people.

There was a time when we needed support from them. We organized a call because the license the company had included the possibility to have a support call with one of the Veracode guys, when we first started using it. They were very helpful, showing us how to use it. They provided support on how to integrate the extension. We had a one hour call with them and they were really helpful.

They also asked for some feedback. It feels really good to have that community working together. We feel engaged with the whole Veracode community.

I've participated in some of the online courses, which helped. There are some levels that the team should have. You follow some courses, you get to level one, and then you move on to the next level. Each level of certification was really useful to learn about some of the flaws and some of the vulnerabilities that we could face. They give you some great use cases and how to remedy things in C# and many different languages. The online course also shows you how a developer can make some mistakes in his code, and how those mistakes can be used to bypass app security. By knowing that, you can avoid doing it in the future.

There were also some events organized recently—security labs—and they were also useful. There were tasks and I even had to work on them outside of work, but they were really helpful and a challenge.

The training also helped us to identify the existing vulnerabilities in our code and some of the third-parties that we are using that have vulnerabilities in them. We know we need to upgrade them.

My advice is that you should follow the training, initially. It was really helpful, even at the first level. Then, go on and read all the detailed documentation online. There are even some video tutorials which are really helpful. These are the steps that I followed.

There is a section on the supported frameworks. Veracode supports a wide variety of languages, but it would be good to check that before diving into the analysis and why it's not detecting your code.

I have been really satisfied with the areas of Veracode that I have had a chance to work with.

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. 

We use it for static scans. It is mandatory in our company for every sort of project.

Veracode provides the organization an understanding of security bugs and security holes in our software, finding out if the software is production-ready. It is used as gate management, so we can have a fast understanding if the software is suitable for deployment and production.

My job is to help projects by getting the data integrated in Veracode. I don't own the code or develop code. In this area, I am a little bit like an integration specialist.

We use Azure and AWS, though AWS is relatively fresh as we are now just starting to define guidelines and how the architecture will look. Eventually, within a half year to a year, we would like to have deployments there. I am not sure if dynamic scanning is possible in AWS Cloud. If so, that would be just great.

The possibility to integrate Azure is very valuable because you can have every build integrated into the content integration pipeline. So, you can have every build scanned and determine when a new bug was introduced. Thus, you can keep great track of your code's security.

You can easily integrate it with Azure DevOps. This is an added value because we work with Azure DevOps. Veracode is natively supported and we don't have to work with APIs.

Third-party library scanning would be very useful to have. When I was researching this a year ago, there was not a third-party library scan available. This would be a nice feature to have because we are now running through some assessments and finding out which tool can do it since this information needs to be captured. Since Veracode is a security solution, this should be related.

I would recommend that they keep working on the integrations. For Azure DevOps, the integration is great. I am not sure what the integration possibilities are for the Google platform or AWS, but I would suggest every other platform should have this easy and great integration. It takes a lot of time for companies, so this feature is a big plus.

I have been using it for about three years.

There have been no issues at all. There has been no downtime registered.

I worked with the technical support to integrate some things. One of our private cloud providers only had old routers. It was possible only to open network connections to IP addresses, while Veracode only provided the URL in their guide. So, I asked the technical support if it was possible to provide some fixed URLs that we could give our provider since it is unfortunately against the concept of the cloud to provide the IP addresses that work just for some time. The technical support's response was within a day, and it was prompt and clear. Also, all their reasoning made sense so the support was very good. I would rate the technical support as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We also use SonarCloud, which is a code quality tool. We use both of them because both these platforms are good in some areas. While the Veracode is very good at finding security-related issues, the SonarQube Sonar suite is very good at determining code quality. Also, when I was looking into the topic, the SonarQube team answered that there is no point for them to go further into code security since there are already great competitors who have years of experience and development behind them, specifically mentioning Veracode as masters in their field. That is the reason why we use both solutions: We benefit from using them both. These solutions compliment each other.

I evaluated WhiteSource Bolt specifically for third-party library scanning, but I did not have a lot of time to create a proper PoC. I had a call with WhiteSource and told them that I would like to do a PoC, but I was not very satisfied with their support. It was like, "Just try the free solution then contact us again." However, the free solution didn't provide me enough things to make a decision. So, I just put it off until sometime possibly in the future. If Veracode offered third-party scanning, then we wouldn't need WhiteSource Bolt at all.

If you have Azure DevOps and would like to understand your code and how secure it is, then there are not a lot of better options. Also, there are not many choices in this area at the moment.

Once your code is scanned by the static scan of Veracode, you get some evaluation scores based on some criteria. For the management, when it is above a certain number, it is fine, but when it is built below, then it is no-go for production. Even though there is a possibility to create a sandbox environment for projects, they don't get it. That is understandable to me. I try to explain to them that there are no issues if you are working in a development environment and you get difficult scans. It is fine then because you can create a sandbox environment, which will not screw up or make the production releases worse because it is in a separate bucket.

We are happy using the solution. I would rate it as nine out of 10.