Engineering Leaders are stretched thinner than ever, racing to deliver innovative products and scale operations while securing a complex digital ecosystem across the increasing perimeter of code, DevOps, compliance, and more.
Remember the infamous MOVEit attacks that compromised nearly 2,000 organizations, from BBC and Harvard to local government agencies. Over 67 million individuals were affected, underscoring the devastating consequences of such breaches.
Simply put, your cybersecurity strategy (and reputation) is only as good as its weakest link. Amid growing attacks, budget constraints and alert fatigue often corner CTOs into a reactive defense. Thus, with cybersecurity as a core engineering responsibility now, how can you take a more proactive stance?
Recognizing the criticality of continuous security management, industry analysts predict that businesses prioritizing security investments based on constant monitoring will be 3x less likely to suffer a breach.
While industry leaders like Gartner, Cisco, and Microsoft continue to advocate for continuous monitoring, traditional tools anchored in sporadic annual security assessments fail to keep pace with a cloud-native world. This leaves you with limited visibility into your security health, forcing you into a cycle of reactive defense.
Consequently, security blind spots and compliance headaches become inevitable, leading to loss of customer data, reputational damage, financial losses, and eroded customer trust.
The Future of Security
To truly empower CTOs, the security landscape demands a fundamental shift to futuristic solutions foundationally architectured to promote AI-augmented round-the-clock visibility across multiple assets with granular insights and scalability:
- Firstly, a 360° view of an organization’s security posture is non-negotiable for effective decision-making. Regardless of size, from startups with a few applications to enterprises with complex IT infrastructures, siloed data and disparate tools breed misunderstandings and hinder risk management and mitigation. Simply put, you need a platform that scales as you scale.
- Next, continuous proactive insights and a new-age PTaaS platform must replace traditional one-off pentests to maintain a robust security posture. This shift-left approach embeds security into the development lifecycle, enabling organizations to identify and address vulnerabilities before they escalate into breaches.
- Lastly, the escalating sophistication of artificial intelligence-driven attacks necessitates a corresponding evolution in AI-first defensive strategies. We need tools that can detect and consistently analyze CVEs, leveling the playing field against these advanced ranges of AI-powered bots and malware.
Thus, designed to tackle these challenges head-on, Astra’s OrbitX gives CTOs the superpower they deserve to shift left at scale with continuous Pentests
1. Enable Continuous Security at Scale
The Challenge:
In a complex application landscape with numerous targets, traditional pentesting methods often result in a deluge of individual reports that are difficult to manage and analyze.
Moreover, given the scaling needs of SMEs, startups, and enterprises, accompanied by the growing list of digital assets and compliance, this fragmented approach makes it even more challenging for you, as a CXO, to gain a comprehensive and actionable view of your security posture.
The Solution:
Astra’s updated continuous tracking enables you to manage penetration testing at scale with a unified view of your security posture across targets and workspaces, enabling seamless navigation across functionalities, regardless of the number of assets.
Moreover, it lets you easily track vulnerabilities, penetration testing status, certifications, and security grades. Additionally, you can efficiently scan multiple targets simultaneously with one active scan per target.
The Impact:
- Centralize your security data: Astra’s platform aggregates security information from multiple pentests across targets, providing a central hub for analysis.
- Track vulnerabilities and misconfigurations: Monitor changes in your security posture over time to identify emerging threats and prioritize remediation efforts.
- Scale pentesting with your business needs: Simplify adding new targets while benchmarking different applications and systems to identify areas of weakness and allocate resources accordingly.
- Focus on what matters: Leverage detailed risk scores to help you prioritize and remediate critical vulnerabilities effectively.
2. Leverage Astra’s OrbitX
The Challenge:
Managing multiple workspaces and targets within complex application infrastructures can be overwhelming, especially without a centralized view. This often leads to confusion, inefficiencies, and difficulty making informed security decisions.
The Solution:
Astra’s OrbitX provides a comprehensive yet intuitive overview of workspaces and targets. The dedicated menus with custom filters for various pentests, vulnerabilities, and critical security metrics help simplify navigation to just a simple click and facilitate efficient analysis.
Moreover, powered by new upgrades that deliver insightful graphs, vulnerability status, and scan progress updates, it enables you to make swift, data-driven decisions and prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities according to your priorities. Some additional features include:
- Get anywhere in fewer clicks. We have re-imagined the navigation so that you can get to key screens in fewer clicks.
- Leverage the Command Menu for navigation. Use Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+K on Windows to navigate between pages with keyboard shortcuts.
- Simplify filtering with Target Selector. View and filter data for specific targets. Choose to see data for all targets at once or just a few.
- Streamline Scan Management. Keep your scans organized with dedicated pentesting and scanning pages. Manage all scheduled scans effortlessly from the centralized “Automations” page.
The Impact:
- Utilize the dashboard’s 360° view: to gain a holistic understanding of your security posture by examining the high-level metrics and visualizations.
- Identify historical trends: Compare security metrics with custom toggles and filters to identify trends, anomalies, and potential risks.
- Make data-driven decisions: Use the real-time insights gained to inform your security strategy and improve resource allocation efficacy.
- Simplify navigation: Quickly switch between projects and workspaces with a single click, streamlining your workflow.
3. Enable Seamless Integrations
The Challenge:
Managing integrations with multiple pentest targets and workspaces in organizations with complex security infrastructures can be cumbersome and time-consuming. This often involves manual configurations that lack flexibility, making connecting and managing different systems efficiently difficult.
The Solution:
Our updated dashboard streamlines integration management across multiple targets and workspaces, enabling your team to consolidate CI/CD pipeline and workflow integrations. This helps streamline communication and reduce complexity without redundant manual work.
Protect your releases with a new fail-safe. Our CI/CD integration now offers the option to automatically fail deployments if critical or high-severity vulnerabilities are identified automatically.
The Impact:
- Manage integrations centrally: Use the platform’s central integration management console to add, remove, or modify integrations as needed.
- Streamline communication: Benefit from centralized communication and reporting, reducing the need for manual coordination and data sharing.
- Quicker onboarding: Streamline adding new users, targets, and workspaces. Create integrations at the workspace-level and apply them across targets.
4. Scan Smarter
The Challenge:
Most scanners today present a challenge for users, requiring manual selection of search parameters and navigation through multiple screens. This can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially when dealing with large datasets or complex scans across devices.
The Solution:
Our Quality of Life (QoL) enhancements offer advanced search feature to empower you to swiftly locate information by searching using various criteria like email ID, scope URI, or names without the need for prior parameter selection.
Furthermore, shareable links with improved deep-linking allow you to effortlessly share specific pages with colleagues, including any applied filters. Lastly, the enhanced mobile responsiveness ensure seamless access to the platform on mobiles and tablets for flexibility and convenience.
The Impact:
- Increased efficiency and collaboration: With improved search and shareable links, find information and collaborate more efficiently with your teams.
- Improved accessibility: Access the platform from various devices, providing greater flexibility and convenience on-the-go.
5. Enhance Workflow Efficiency
The Challenge:
Many penetration testing providers offer security certificates but often fail to provide a comprehensive and user-friendly experience. However, the average platform lacks a centralized view of certificates across all targets, making tracking their status and expiration dates difficult.
Additionally, within pentest details, there’s often a lack of a clear grading system that outlines specific issues and their impact on the overall security posture.
The Solution:
Simplify certificate and pentest management with a centralized view of certificates and a clear grading system. Moreover, generate up to 100 full and management reports at once to save time with simplified vetting requests for completed scans.
The Impact:
- Improved Tracking: Efficiently track certificate expiration dates across targets and workspaces.
- Pentest Clarity: Understand your pentest grade and specific issues to improve with a clear grading system.
- Intent Flexibility: Request vetting for completed scans, eliminating the need to specify it beforehand.
6. Streamline Access Management With New User Roles
The Challenge:
Managing access to pentest targets can be time-consuming and error-prone in organizations with complex access requirements. Traditional methods often involve manual configuration and lack flexibility, making assigning and revoking permissions efficiently difficult. This can lead to security risks and hinder collaboration among team members.
The Solution:
The enhanced access management feature offers a more granular and flexible approach to managing user permissions. You can now create teams of users within a workspace and assign specific roles and permissions to team members, including finance members for subscription management as ‘Billing Member’ and developers who need access to multiple targets with tailored role-based access controls.
Once a team is granted access to a target, all future team members will automatically gain access, saving you time and effort. Additionally, the expanded subscription management capabilities allow administrators to manage subscriptions alongside subscription creators.
The Impact:
- Define clear roles and responsibilities: Conduct a thorough assessment of your organization’s security needs and identify the roles and permissions required for various team members.
- Assign roles to workspace members: Create custom teams aligned with your company structure, assigning appropriate roles to individual team members or groups based on their job functions and responsibilities.
- Grant specific permissions: For each role, define the permissions team members need to access and perform their tasks. This can include permissions to restrict access to specific targets or billing-related features only.
- Manage access centrally: Use the platform’s central access management console to easily add, remove, or modify user permissions as needed. This ensures that access is always up-to-date and aligned with your organization’s security policies.
Summary
The imperative for continuous security management has never been more critical in today’s landscape. Astra’s OrbitX is designed to address such escalating challenges by helping CTOs streamline the process of continuous pentesting, enhance visibility into security posture, and facilitate efficient collaboration among team members.
With a unified view of security data, actionable insights, and a user-friendly interface, your team can make informed decisions, identify vulnerabilities early, and mitigate risks effectively.
