Armor vs. CAST Highlight

Armor gives you what you need to be successful regardless of technical ability. If you can maintain the systems yourself, you are definitely ahead of the game with their service. If you're not prepared to configure and maintain the systems, they do a pretty good job of getting it set up during the onboarding process so that you don't need to dig into the technical guts too much. If you find yourself in over your head, their support staff can handle it for you in most cases.

Incentivized

I think CAST is a great tool to give insight into your applications. The tool can be met with resistance from team members as the tool is going to expose defects that should be addressed. Out of the box, it may need some tailoring to focus on certain areas so that you are not overwhelmed with defects the first time you scan your code. But ultimately, you will want to eliminate all defects in the code and have all violations turned on.

Incentivized

• Security - we have requirements met right out of the box and the implementation of new resources is done with security in mind.
• Speed - We can scale resources easy and the infrastructure is fast and efficient.
• Responsiveness - Support tickets are handled very fast with almost immediate solutions.

Incentivized

• Identifies common coding vulnerabilities.
• Compares code to industry best practices.
• Assesses the code for data privacy compliance.

Incentivized

• Authentication and access against the secure messaging portal is overkill when the response I'm logging in to see merely says, "yes, we have your message. An agent will respond shortly". There should be an option to receive updates like this through email.
• The online portal that allows us to clone servers is very slow to respond. More than once I've spun up an additional server due to the lack of visual feedback on the initial request.
• The web application firewall does not seem to be sophisticated enough to differentiate between logged in administrators and end users. We use a CMS system which allows admins to create scripts. These often get barred by the WAF even though they are not malicious.

Incentivized

• Code scans could be faster. A large application may need to be broken down into smaller sub-applications in order to facilitate faster code scans.
• We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to best structure our code base in the application for ultimate performance.

Incentivized

Approximately 50% of all messages we receive are automated. Either that an agent will be assigned, has been assigned, or a ticket is closed. I'd like to see more 'real' interaction, and less box ticking, though I appreciate process has to be followed. That's the one point off. Everything else is very good.

Incentivized

Tech support and pro services are top-notch.

Incentivized

These other tools only do a part of what CAST does. CAST gives a comprehensive view into the code looking at all aspects, code quality, security, maintainability, vulnerability, privacy, reuse, etc. These other tools only focus on one or two dimensions.

Incentivized

• I believe once we had the tool working for our code base, we immediately saw positive ROI.
• We spent some time getting to where our code code be scanned efficiently but some of that was trying to do things ourselves instead of fully utilizing Cast Professional Services. I highly recommend to do an engagement with CAST to have them help setup the tool in your environment or to run it in the cloud for you.

Incentivized