Transcript
My name is Maria Joseph, Technical Product Marketing Manager for Cortex Cloud at Palo Alto Networks. And today, we're going to talk about application security and why securing applications early in the software development lifecycle is more important than ever. Every application starts with a developer working in an IDE. From there, code moves into version control systems like GitHub, through build and CICD pipelines, and ultimately deployed into production. At every one of these stages, new risks can be introduced. Let's walk through a few examples. It all starts with the developer. Whether code is written manually or generated with AI, vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, and insecure code can all be introduced here. As code moves into version control systems, those vulnerabilities don't just stay with one developer. They become part of the shared code base and can quickly propagate across the development process if they aren't caught early. During the build stage, organizations also need to consider software supply chain security. Vulnerable packages, insecure dependencies, and build pipeline misconfigurations can all introduce additional risk. And if these issues aren't caught early before deployment, they become production risks that attackers may exploit. This leads to one of the biggest challenges in application security. The later a security issue is discovered, the more expensive and disruptive it becomes to fix. So how do organizations prevent these issues from reaching production in the first place? That's where Cortex Cloud comes in. Cortex Cloud application security continuously secures applications across the entire software development lifecycle. It starts with code scanning. Helping developers identify vulnerabilities, expose secrets, and misconfigurations as early as possible when they're the fastest and least expensive to fix. Next, PR checks. PR checks help to validate code changes before they're merged, allowing organizations to enforce security guardrails directly within developer workflows. One of the biggest advantages of Cortex Cloud is flexibility. Security isn't one size fits all. For example, a developer may simply receive a warning while writing code in their IDE. A secret can be blocked before it's committed into GitHub. And before deployment, organizations may choose to block only high-risk vulnerabilities or software packages, allowing lower-risk findings to continue through development. Finding a vulnerability is only part of the story. What makes Cortex Cloud different is context. With context, Cortex Cloud helps you understand whether it actually matters. Rather than simply reporting that something exists with the thousands of issues you're seeing, Cortex Cloud combines application, runtime, and security context from across the platform. Organizations can answer questions like, is the application interfacing? Is it already deployed? Who has access? Is it actually exploitable? Once Cortex Cloud has the context, it can prioritize what needs attention first. Instead of overwhelming teams with thousands of raw findings, Cortex Cloud helps group them into actionable issues and uses AI, environmental context, organizational policies to determine their urgency. This helps developers and security teams focus on the issues that matter most, reduce alert fatigue, and spend more time fixing risk instead of sorting through it. The goal of application security isn't simply to identify more vulnerabilities. It's to help you identify the ones that matter most. The goal of application security isn't simply to identify more vulnerabilities. It's to help developers prevent risk before it reaches production. By embedding security throughout the software development lifecycle and providing the context and prioritization needed to take action, Cortex Cloud helps organizations build secure applications without sacrificing development speed. That's application security with Cortex Cloud.
