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Aviv Mussinger is CEO & co-founder of Kodem, forging the future of AppSec with a builder’s mindset to shape tomorrow’s security landscape.
In today’s digital-first economy, application security is both mission-critical and perpetually in flux. As businesses pivot to cloud architectures, microservices and APIs, the old guard of static scanning and manual processes can’t keep pace with modern development—and cybercriminals know it. Organizations are facing a perfect storm of fragmented tools, relentless alert fatigue and mounting remediation bottlenecks. Yet, hidden within these challenges lies an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we build, deploy and protect software.
The Shifting Threat Landscape
Over the past decade, application security has evolved from an afterthought to a board-level priority. Attack surfaces have surged with the rise of APIs, containerized workloads and cloud-native environments. One overlooked software patch or container misconfiguration can quickly escalate into a breach affecting millions of users. Indeed, we see many organizations struggle to manage security workflows across diverse ecosystems—from local development to CI/CD pipelines and production—due to both organizational silos and accelerating release cycles.
Meanwhile, many security teams find themselves in perpetual firefighting mode, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of security alerts and spending precious hours chasing down false positives. This alert fatigue drains resources and delays fixes for critical vulnerabilities. It’s no surprise that the average time to fix serious issues hovers around 22 days, according to our research, granting attackers ample windows to exploit weaknesses.
The Legacy Of Fragmented Tools
One of our most revealing insights, echoed by IDC’s 2023 North American Tools/Vendors Consolidation Survey, is the prevalence of fragmented toolsets. During our own research, speaking with hundreds of business leaders, we found that many organizations rely on five or more security solutions—ranging from static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) to specialized container, API and cloud-native scanners. Although each solution addresses a specific niche, their lack of integration fosters data silos, duplicative reporting and blind spots. This complexity hampers everything from vulnerability triage to compliance audits, ironically undermining the very protections these tools promise.
When each business unit adopts its own AppSec stack, the result is a fragmented landscape that defies centralized oversight, making security at scale nearly impossible. Consolidating these disjointed tools is increasingly imperative, enabling real-time visibility, consistent policies and streamlined remediation workflows.
Shift-Left Adoption Vs. Reality
Of course, application security doesn’t begin after deployment. The “shift left” approach enables detecting vulnerabilities early in development when they’re cheaper and easier to fix. Yet, we found that only half of those organizations meaningfully integrated these checks into day-to-day developer workflows. It’s one thing to run scans in a pipeline; it’s another to weave secure coding, automated testing and real-time feedback into a developer’s normal routine.
This partial adoption often leads to friction. Developers see security checks as speed bumps, particularly if they produce too many false positives. Security teams, lacking context about business priorities, may treat every issue as equally urgent. Vulnerabilities linger, releases stall and trust between teams erodes.
The Rise Of Runtime Security
Although shifting left is crucial, some threats don’t materialize until an app is running under real-world conditions. Runtime intelligence answers the key question: Is a vulnerability truly exploitable in our current environment?
That context helps teams zero in on genuinely high-impact threats, rather than chasing theoretical worst cases. By integrating runtime insights and automation, organizations are able to move from reactive firefighting to proactively safeguarding their most critical innovations.
Automation: From Reactive To Proactive
If alert overload is draining security teams, automation may offer salvation. Automation is essential, not only for triaging alerts but for identifying the “true signals” that warrant human attention. The potential goes far beyond simple scanning: AI-driven solutions can predict exploit likelihood, automatically apply risk-based policies and guide developers toward best practices.
The Human Element
Still, technology alone can’t solve everything. Even the best tools fail without the right people and processes in place. Continuous training, cross-functional collaboration and a culture that views security as a shared responsibility are essential.
Increasingly, companies recognize that “shift left” must also mean giving developers the right data at the right time, rather than overwhelming them with noise. In my experience, security teams that foster a DevSecOps mentality—prioritizing transparency, accountability and collaboration—are already seeing faster remediation and higher-quality deployments.
A Glimpse Of The Future
We can already envision a world where security is woven into every step from code to production, teams act on contextual data rather than static threat lists and automation handles repetitive tasks. This approach, centered on proactive resilience and cross-team ownership, replaces the chaos of tool sprawl and endless patch sprints with a more unified, adaptive framework.
Ultimately, the future of application security isn’t about another scanner or drowning teams in metrics. It’s about building a holistic workflow that prioritizes what truly matters, empowers the people on the front lines and seamlessly embeds security into how we create and deploy software every single day.
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