The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
$5,000
per year
Veracode
Score 9.2 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.
For automating the configuration of a multi-node, multi-domain (Storage, VM, Container) cluster, Ansible is still the best choice; however, it is not an easy task to achieve. Creating the infrastructure layer, i.e., creating network nodes, VMs, and K8s clusters, still can't be achieved via Ansible. Additionally, error handling remains complex to resolve.
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.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
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.
I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
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.
It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts
- 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.
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
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.
AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
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.
POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)
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.
