Top 5 Evaluation Criteria for Developer Security Platforms

With recommendations, questions to consider, and a scorecard to compare.

Instead of relying on a complex set of overlapping and loosely-integrated tools spanning development and production, organizations should evaluate developer security platforms that accomplish the following:

  • Cloud native instrumentation
  • Prioritized and comprehensive security insights
  • Developer education
  • CI/CD integration and developer experience
  • Understanding the impact of security on compliance

This guide walks through these criteria in detail.

Organizations hoping to manage the sharp increase in security, privacy, and compliance risks will need to reassess and replace existing traditional application security tools with platforms specifically designed to “start left”— understanding and mitigating these issues will be integral to the success of introducing and driving adoption of DevSecOps at any organization.

Developer security platforms are designed to identify critical security risks early in the software development lifecycle, minimizing the time, effort, and—most importantly—impact of vulnerable and insecure applications being released into production. Instead of relying on a complex set of overlapping and loosely-integrated tools spanning development and production, organizations should evaluate platforms that accomplish the following:

  1. Cloud Native Instrumentation: provides instrumentation with deep insights into application runtime, is non-intrusive, and scales well in cloud native applications
  2. Prioritized and Comprehensive Security Insights: delivers contextual, application-aware information such as usage information and stack traces spanning application code, dependencies, container images, and web interfaces
  3. Developer Education: educates developers with timely, contextual, and actionable security insights
  4. CI/CD Integration and Developer Experience: integrates and automates security and compliance testing seamlessly into the CI/CD pipeline
  5. Understanding the Impact of Security on Compliance: ensures the security and privacy of customer data by meeting compliance objectives