IBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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Veracode
Score 8.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Veracode provides advanced application security solutions, trusted by enterprises to develop and maintain secure software. Its platform identifies exploitable risks, speeds up vulnerability remediation, and reduces security debt at scale using a proprietary AI-assisted remediation engine.
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
Veracode is well suited for development applications that can be made more secure right from the beginning. There is an excellent extension in Visual Studio that scans code from the IDE. However, it is less appropriate or incompatible with scanning SOAP or WSDL APIs. It supports only REST APIs.
Veracode performs Static Application Security Testing (SAST) very well by finding flaws in the code using entry points so that it tests for everything a user can interact with in the application. This approach is very helpful for avoiding a lot of false positives early on.
Veracode performs SCA automatically on every SAST scan, so that we don't have to manually scan the application again for SCA scans.
Veracode integrates very well with the ticketing tools, so that it becomes very easy to track every finding and its status within our ticketing tool.
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
At this time, and we just renewed a month ago, I dont see any products out there overall that can offer what Veracode does. Yes, its not cheap by any means, but for the money its the best application security scanning tool out there.
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
- Almost no setup required and easy to configure - Very easy to use, intuitive UI with integrated analytics and learning portals. - Seamless to review the results, triage them, generate reports. - Security progression of the product/application is tracked via successive scans. - Privileges/Roles nicely fine grained and tightly controlled to let teams "view" only their products.
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
Overall, Veracode support is helpful, community support is great, and documentation is available for self-service. Our Customer Success Manager is very helpful and reaches out regularly to see if we need assistance. We have not utilized many of the other resources offered by Veracode, however, in the future we would like to leverage secure coding training for our Development teams.
We use it as a SAS service, so really just getting our teams to mold the use of Veracode into their SDLC has been a process of years in the making. It comes down to what your teams are ready and willing to accept and change. Management is key in getting their groups on board with using it regularly. If it doesnt have management backing, your security teams have little to no influence in getting this process off the ground fully.
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
Veracode is slower with scan results however the flaws discovered and sites crawled are almost the same. Rapid7 InsightAppSec only does dynamic scans. Veracode did find more links on a site crawl. Rapid7 InsightAppSec has more out of the box reports than Veracode. Both integration to DevOps tools were striaghtforward.
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
Veracode's platform has had a very positive impact on our security posture, paving the path towards having coverage monitored automatically on hundreds of internal applications throughout the development lifecycle.
Veracode's platform has also had a very positive impact on improving the security knowledge of our development team, providing meaningful feedback as well as training options to reduce mitigation time and help to prevent flaws before they are created.
