What is an application security testing program?
An application security testing program is a structured, organization-wide process for continuously assessing and addressing threats, vulnerabilities, and risk exposure across internal and external applications, as well as APIs. The goal is to catch web application vulnerabilities before they reach production—whether those apps are customer-facing or used internally by employees.
As damaging breaches continue to make headlines and regulatory pressure increases, more companies are adopting application security programs to proactively discover and resolve security issues in their web applications and APIs.
Collaboration across security and development
A successful application security program requires deep cross-functional collaboration between security, software development, auditing, executive leadership, and business unit stakeholders. Unlike more siloed efforts such as vulnerability management, application security must be integrated into the broader development lifecycle—ensuring that security concerns are understood and acted on by every team involved in shipping or maintaining software.
Without this alignment, security issues can be deprioritized or missed altogether, putting both data and business operations at risk.
Application security in the SDLC
To be most effective, application security must be integrated early and consistently throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—from planning and design to development, release, and updates. This is the foundation of DevSecOps, where development and security teams work together to automate secure coding, continuous testing, and risk mitigation.
Embedding security testing into each SDLC stage not only helps identify vulnerabilities sooner (when they're cheaper and easier to fix), but also improves developer efficiency and reduces time to remediation.
How it differs from vulnerability management
While vulnerability management focuses on discovering and remediating known issues across live infrastructure, an application security testing program is designed to identify and prevent vulnerabilities before they are deployed. This proactive approach gives teams the opportunity to catch coding flaws, logic errors, and configuration issues during development—not after attackers have had a chance to find and exploit them.
Benefits of an application security testing program
Companies implement application security programs for several reasons. A well-structured program can protect data, meet regulatory requirements, and build trust with customers, employees, and stakeholders.
Protecting sensitive data and meeting compliance
An application security program can help shield and safeguard sensitive corporate and customer data. It can also aid in compliance, since some businesses may be required to have an application security program in place for regulatory purposes. An effective application security testing program can also help shield a company from the legal, financial, and reputational consequences of a breach.
Enhancing customer trust and brand reputation
With greater public awareness of data security concerns in light of ongoing high-profile data breaches, customers expect the companies with which they do business to protect their personal information. An application security program can boost customer confidence and enhance a company’s brand reputation by demonstrating that the organization is performing due diligence with respect to customer data.
Creating a security-first culture
Employees that work in a company with a strong security culture can highlight and champion the importance of their employer’s investment in security. They also become more knowledgeable about how to protect customer information, such as personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI).
Strengthening competitive advantage
Ultimately, an application security program can even potentially put a company in a stronger competitive position compared to other market players that fail to properly prioritize application security in their own environments.
Key elements of an application security program
While there are many ways to structure an application security program, most organizations rely on proven frameworks and toolsets to build a scalable and effective foundation.
OWASP SAMM as a framework
Although there are many frameworks for implementing an application security program, OWASP’s Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) stands out as the method most businesses use. SAMM helps companies evaluate their existing software security practices, build a balanced software security assurance program in well-defined iterations, demonstrate concrete improvements with quick wins, and define and measure security-related activities within the organization.
The SAMM framework includes a toolset and several resources for creating a strong application security program. It can also be adapted to fit an organization’s current risk tolerance model or evolve with it over time. As part of early-stage security planning, organizations can also incorporate threat modeling to proactively identify potential attack vectors and prioritize protections based on application architecture and business risk.
Application security testing tools
Companies may use one or more application security testing tools as part of their program. These may include:
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Identifies vulnerabilities in source code before the application is compiled or run.
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Analyzes running applications to identify exploitable issues from the outside, without needing access to source code.
- Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): Works inside the application while it's running to identify vulnerabilities in real-time, often with more context than DAST or SAST alone.
- Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP): Monitors application behavior during runtime to automatically detect and block active threats.
In addition to these tools, a web application firewall (WAF) can help block known attack patterns at the perimeter level, adding another layer of defense for applications exposed to the internet.
SAST and DAST can automate the process of identifying potential vulnerabilities before or during execution. IAST and RASP go a step further by identifying whether known vulnerabilities in code are exploitable and monitoring the application's behavior to stop threats as they occur.
Supporting security and development collaboration
In addition to helping detect vulnerabilities, application security tools can also facilitate better collaboration between the security and development teams. These tools improve developer visibility and ownership over remediation, allowing security teams to focus on broader priorities—such as risk scoring, policy enforcement, and stakeholder communication.
When properly integrated, these solutions foster a culture of shared responsibility and enable a more proactive approach to application security.
Best practices for building an application security testing program
These four tips can help you ensure the success of an application security testing program:
Address security early in the SDLC
Your organization can reduce the cost and time involved in addressing vulnerabilities by looking for them early in the SDLC. Otherwise, you may risk putting applications with vulnerabilities into production, increasing the possibility of a breach. You may also find that it costs far more money, staff time, and frustration to remediate issues later on in the SDLC than at the beginning.
Foster collaboration between teams
For your application security program to succeed, your security team, development team, and application team must all be aligned toward a common goal. If the development and application teams are not brought into the application security program early on in a collaborative way, security concerns may fall by the wayside and may not be properly prioritized.
Security teams can help foster good collaboration with their development colleagues by helping to automate integrations or implementing ChatOps. In the absence of such collaboration, however, the process could grind to a halt and the security team could simply end up throwing things over the fence that never get fixed.
Choose the right testing tools
SAST and DAST are powerful tools for finding vulnerabilities and bugs within code earlier in the SDLC. These tools can even support better collaboration by giving developers far more visibility into and control over their own remediation activities.
This way, they can more easily address potential vulnerabilities well before an application goes into production. The security team is then free to focus on other priorities like quality assurance, measuring risk in the pre-production environment, and securing stakeholder buy-in for security initiatives.
Validate tools with proof-of-concept testing
Once you’ve selected an application security tool for use in your application security program, test it out with a proof-of-concept (PoC) to see how it operates live in your environment. This way, you can understand the impact the tool has on both your environment and your teams, highlighting potential integration or automation requirements that you may want to address prior to purchase.
The importance of continuous application security
An application security testing program is the most effective ways to proactively protect applications against modern threats. With continuous testing, strong cross-functional collaboration, and early integration into the SDLC, organizations can reduce risk, protect sensitive data, and gain a competitive advantage.