As applications become more important to almost every company, real-time, actionable data about an organization’s application security posture—including information about vulnerabilities and attacks—is increasingly critical. Unfortunately, organizations using multiple legacy application security tools must do extensive manual work to generate such information.

This lack of observability creates a number of problems. Organizations are unable to define granular metrics by which to measure the success of their application security efforts, and therefore are not aware of areas where they could be improved. This results in incomplete information for strategic planning and investment decisions. It also impacts compliance, with staff members spending hours compiling audit reports and organizations deriving fewer business benefits from technical achievement of standards. Additionally, it hampers internal and external communications about application security—especially in a crisis situation such as an attack. Finally, it creates significant operational inefficiencies that pull security team members away from more strategic efforts.

As long as organizations lack security observability, they will continue to struggle with application security. The cycle of late identification of vulnerabilities, slow remediation, and mounting security debt will continue, and organizations will have trouble preventing intrusions that impact operations, brand reputation, and the bottom line.