What does it mean to build a holistic AppSec program? Learn what’s involved in a holistic approach and how to get started. Digital technology is the centerpiece of modern life today. All around us, technology is transforming business operations from end-to-end, from digital-first businesses to those simply updating existing processes. According to Gartner, 65% of executives report that they accelerated the pace of their digital business initiatives in 2021.

It is not hard to set application security goals. Security teams want to reduce risk. Developers want to quickly meet the requirements of security policy and hit deadlines. Executives want growth within their risk tolerance. What is hard is defining an appropriate level of risk and measuring whether your AppSec program is efficient, effective, and returning expected outcomes based on your investments.

Most developers don’t learn about secure coding in the college IT programs. And once they join the workforce, they often don’t have the time to learn about secure coding. The responsibility of training developers in secure coding best practices usually falls on security practitioners. Security practitioners are notoriously overworked, often lacking the bandwidth to train developers. Organizations are thus turning to AppSec learning experiences built specifically for development teams.

As digital transformation continues to take over the world, security increasingly becomes a concern for companies of all sizes. No matter how big of a security team you might have, it is hard to speak a common language between security and development teams on what controls you need during the software development life cycle. To tackle this problem, OWASP has released Application Security Verification Standard towards the end of 2021.