How to Use Compliance as an AppSec Driver

October 1, 2024

Turning Compliance Into a Strategic Product Security Program Advantage & Business Enabler


Compliance is often viewed as a simple box-ticking exercise—just one more hurdle in the way of doing business. However, when new regulations emerge, it can feel like your entire system has been thrown off track. Chaos and urgency replace calm, and teams rush to meet deadlines. But if you’ve established a strong foundation in a few critical areas, the impact is less disruptive. In fact, compliance can be leveraged as a powerful tool to drive your application security program (AppSec) forward.


  • So, what are the key areas you should focus on?
  • Where should you begin?
  • How can compliance requirements become the catalyst for enhancing your AppSec strategy?
  • And what benefits can you anticipate from this approach?


Let’s explore.


1. Identify Overlapping Requirements Across Compliances

One of the most significant advantages of leveraging compliance as an AppSec driver is the overlapping requirements between various standards. Whether you're dealing with FedRAMP, PCI DSS, NIST, or SOC 2, many of the core controls overlap, such as vulnerability management, incident response, and access control. By identifying these overlaps, you can streamline your security program and meet multiple compliance frameworks with the same foundational security practices.


Actionable Tip: 

Map out the common controls across compliance standards. For example, many compliance frameworks mandate vulnerability management and continuous monitoring. By aligning your AppSec program to these common requirements, you can tackle multiple compliance needs at once while improving your overall security posture.


2. Assess Where Your Security Program Stands Today

Before diving into compliance-driven improvements, it's essential to assess your current security program. Where do you stand in terms of compliance readiness? Are you addressing the highest-risk vulnerabilities, or are you focusing on low-priority areas just to pass an audit? Use your compliance efforts as a benchmark for identifying gaps in your AppSec program.


Start Left® Solution: 

With Start Left® Security’s platform, you can continuously assess your security posture and map it against compliance requirements like SOC 2, NIST, and PCI DSS. Our analytics give you a clear view of where you meet standards and where improvements are needed, especially in areas such as software composition analysis (SCA), SBOMs, and secure coding practices.


3. Build a Continuous Monitoring Process

The key to leveraging compliance for AppSec is to shift away from periodic audits and embrace continuous monitoring. Compliance isn’t just about passing an audit; it’s about maintaining a secure posture year-round. Monitoring key security areas like vulnerability remediation timelines, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and application security posture management (ASPM) will ensure your program is always ready for both compliance and security threats.


Actionable Tip: 

Start Left® helps automate continuous vulnerability scanning and automated compliance checks, giving you a holistic view of your security posture. By automating these processes, you can free up your teams to focus on higher-value tasks while ensuring your organization stays compliant.


4. Report Metrics That Drive Leadership Buy-In

To truly make compliance an AppSec driver, you need to communicate the results to leadership. Metrics like time to remediate vulnerabilities, percentage of compliant systems, and incident response times will not only satisfy compliance auditors but will also demonstrate to leadership the effectiveness of your security efforts.


Start Left® Solution: 

With our Program Performance Analytics, you can automatically generate metrics that leadership cares about. These include metrics around compliance adherence, risk reduction over time, and product-specific security scores. By showing real-time data that ties back to business outcomes, you can secure leadership buy-in for further investments in AppSec.


5. Use Compliance as a Driver to Improve AppSec Outcomes

Compliance, when treated as a driver rather than a burden, can elevate your AppSec program to new heights. By continuously monitoring key areas and reporting meaningful metrics, compliance can become the backbone of a robust security program. You'll no longer be scrambling when new regulations drop—instead, you'll be proactively improving security practices and building a resilient organization.


Outcomes You Can Expect: 

  • Stronger security foundations that meet multiple compliance standards.
  • Proactive vulnerability management and continuous monitoring, reducing risk.
  • Increased leadership support for AppSec initiatives due to data-backed decision-making.
  • Streamlined compliance efforts that save time and money while improving security.


6. Leverage Security Performance Scores Across Product Teams

As part of using compliance as a driver for your Application Security (AppSec) program, integrating Security Performance Scoring across every product team and the overall program is essential. At Start Left® Security, we use this scoring to create a contextualized view of risk around each product and its relationship with the business, compliance, and technology. This context not only tells you what code is being processed, but whether it’s handling PII, PHI, payments, or any other sensitive data that might be governed by specific compliance requirements. Here’s how this scoring creates a risk-based security program and ties everything together:


1. Creating a Risk-Based Program in a Product Context

Security performance scoring helps align your security efforts with the specific business needs and compliance demands of each product. By evaluating the security posture of individual products and teams, you can assess:

  • What code is processing: Is it stateless or does it handle sensitive data like PII, PHI, or payments? 
  • Which compliance frameworks apply to the product: SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc. 
  • How critical the product is to the business and its customers: What would be the impact if it were compromised?


This creates a risk-based approach to security that ties technology, business, and compliance together, ensuring your efforts are focused on protecting the assets that matter most.


2. Feeding the Prioritization Engine

Once you've established the business and compliance context around each product, this data feeds directly into the Start Left® prioritization engine, helping teams focus on what matters most. This engine evaluates security risks based on several key factors:

  • Reachability Analysis: Is the vulnerability actually exploitable within the code or system? 
  • EPSS Score: What’s the likelihood that the vulnerability will be exploited in the real world? 
  • Data Sensitivity: Does this vulnerability affect systems handling PII or other sensitive information? 
  • KEV and Threat Intelligence: Use real-time threat intelligence, enriched by vulnerability data from vendors, to prioritize threats based on current exploits. 
  • Proof of Concept (PoC) Availability: Is there an existing exploit available that attackers could leverage? 
  • Patch Availability: Is a fix available, and how easy is it to implement?


By using this multi-dimensional analysis, your teams are not only prioritizing vulnerabilities based on severity but also considering their real-world impact on your products and compliance obligations.


3. Additional Value: Executive Awareness & Product Team Focus

Beyond feeding your prioritization engine, security performance scoring also provides several other key benefits:

  • Executive Awareness: Leadership teams can use these scores to gain a clear, real-time view of the organization’s overall security posture. This gives executives a better understanding of where risks are concentrated and where investment in security resources is most needed.
  • Guiding Product Teams: The scoring system serves as a coaching tool for product teams, showing them where to spend their efforts and time. Teams can understand not just what vulnerabilities exist but why they need to be addressed and how they tie into business objectives and compliance requirements.


How It All Comes Together

By integrating security performance scoring into your AppSec program, you transform it from a reactive, compliance-driven model into a proactive, risk-based system. This approach aligns your security efforts with your business and compliance needs while giving your teams and leadership the insights they need to stay ahead of threats.


Summary:

  • Security Performance Scoring ties technology, business, and compliance together to build a risk-based program.
  • Prioritization Engine enables teams to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities using factors like reachability, EPSS, data sensitivity, and threat intelligence.
  • Executive Awareness and Coaching guides leadership and teams, helping them allocate resources and focus on high-risk areas efficiently.


Incorporating these principles into your compliance-driven AppSec program ensures that security is embedded throughout your product lifecycle, helping you maintain compliance while building resilient, secure software.


Takeaways


Incorporating compliance as a driving force behind your Application Security (AppSec) program isn’t just about checking boxes—it’s about building a sustainable, risk-based security posture that aligns with your business objectives. Here are the key takeaways:


  1. Leverage Overlapping Compliance Requirements: Identify common controls across standards like SOC 2, NIST, PCI DSS, and others to streamline your security efforts and cover multiple compliance frameworks simultaneously.
  2. Assess Your Current Security Program: Understand where your security posture stands today, using compliance as a benchmark to identify gaps and vulnerabilities.
  3. Build a Continuous Monitoring Process: Shift from periodic audits to year-round monitoring. Ensure that key security areas like vulnerability management, governance, and continuous threat detection are continuously assessed.
  4. Security Performance Scoring: Implement scoring across teams and products to tie technology, business, and compliance together. This will help create a risk-based program and provide critical data to executives and product teams for better decision-making.
  5. Feed the Prioritization Engine: Leverage reachability analysis, EPSS scores, data sensitivity, KEV, and other factors to prioritize vulnerabilities based on real-world risk, ensuring your teams focus on what matters most.
  6. Executive Awareness & Team Guidance: Use performance scores to keep leadership informed while coaching product teams on how to best allocate their time and efforts toward security, compliance, and business objectives.


Conclusion


By using compliance as a strategic AppSec driver, organizations can turn security from a burden into a competitive advantage. Through a combination of overlapping compliance requirements, continuous monitoring, and security performance scoring, businesses can adopt a proactive, risk-based approach to security. Prioritization engines and actionable insights guide both leadership and product teams, aligning security with business objectives and fostering a security-first culture.


In the end, compliance becomes more than just a requirement—it becomes a tool for empowering teams, mitigating risks, and building secure, resilient software that meets the demands of both regulators and customers. With the right approach, compliance can be a stepping stone to creating a more robust and forward-thinking AppSec program.


Ready to take the next step? Contact Start Left® to see how we can help you build a compliance-driven AppSec program that scales with your business.

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