The integration of Wiz Code into Wiz’s FedRAMP authorized offering, “Wiz for Government,” marks a significant advancement in unifying application and cloud security for government and regulatory-focused customers. This strategic move ensures comprehensive security coverage across applications, infrastructure, and configurations at every stage of development. By allowing organizations to shift security to the left, Wiz Code aligns with modern security practices, addressing vulnerabilities proactively rather than reactively. As technology and governmental needs evolve, this integration exemplifies how advanced security measures can be seamlessly incorporated into cloud-native environments for optimal protection and efficiency.
Securing the Supply Chain: Lifecycle of Code
Wiz Code secures the cloud-native development lifecycle from code to cloud to runtime, empowering security teams to extend existing cloud policies into their development workflows and pipelines. This extension allows for native scanning of vulnerabilities in third-party code libraries, ensuring that potential threats are identified and addressed early. Identifying license compliance issues, detecting insecure base images, and uncovering infrastructure as code (IaC) misconfigurations and exposed secrets are key functionalities that enhance the overall security posture.
Further enhancing Wiz Cloud’s capabilities, Wiz Code creates a bridge by connecting code repositories and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This connection enables the seamless correlation of critical cloud risks back to their source code repository and development owner. Such a mapping approach significantly reduces remediation time by providing both security and development teams with a unified understanding of critical risks, from cloud to code. The clarity in responsibility for specific issues fosters efficient collaboration, breaking down silos that often hinder timely and effective security response.
A History of Siloed Development
The evolution of modern DevOps practices, including containerization and infrastructure as code, has reshaped the boundaries between applications and cloud infrastructure. Despite this convergence, application and cloud security is often managed as separate entities, leading to siloed tools and business functions. This disconnect not only results in duplicated efforts but also creates security coverage gaps, inefficiencies from multiple point solutions, and an increased total cost of ownership. Critical issues often remain unaddressed, and teams face an overwhelming volume of alert noise, complicating the security landscape.
The use of siloed scanning tools between code and production exacerbates this problem by limiting unified visibility and context. Understanding how code configurations impact the broader production environment becomes challenging, and misconfigurations identified in production are difficult to trace back to their origin in the code repository. This challenge is particularly pressing in highly regulated and government environments, where new code deployments and production operating environments must adhere to stringent authorization to operate (ATO) requirements, as outlined in the NIST Special Publication (SP) documentation family.
Reducing Application Risk While Accelerating Time to Deployment
The increased adoption of agile development practices and AI code-completion assistants has significantly accelerated the speed of development. However, this rapid pace often renders multiple, siloed legacy solutions insufficient, as they struggle to keep up with the new demands. Developers frequently face a high volume of alerts, which can decrease productivity and lead to frustration. Wiz Code addresses this challenge by providing real-time security feedback and fix suggestions directly within developer workflows. By integrating into various steps of the development lifecycle, such as Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), pull requests, and Command Line Interface (CLI) workflows, Wiz Code helps remediate existing risks and prevents new ones from emerging.
Through continuous code scanning against the same cloud, host, and vulnerability rules, organizations can embed security directly into the development lifecycle, significantly reducing the time to deployment. This seamless integration also scales modernized security for the cloud, ensuring that security measures keep pace with development advancements. Wiz Code effectively breaks down traditional silos by reducing the number of scanning tools required, thus minimizing the security debt that would otherwise accumulate in subsequent development sprint cycles.
To further expedite the remediation of risks identified in cloud environments, organizations can augment their Wiz Security Graph with Wiz Code to establish an inventory of code repositories and developer identities. This comprehensive approach allows for the precise correlation of findings in code, such as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) or Known Exploitable Vulnerabilities (KEVs), secrets, and IaC misconfigurations, with misconfigurations in version control and CI/CD systems. This method provides a thorough risk assessment and swiftly traces critical issues back to their code components for efficient remediation.
Addressing New Use Cases Through Wiz Code
Wiz Code expands the Wiz unified policy engine, enabling the consistent enforcement of security controls across the entire development lifecycle. This comprehensive approach includes software composition analysis (SCA), software bill of materials (SBOM), and the scanning of open-source Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), malware, exposed secrets, and infrastructure as code (IaC) misconfigurations. By correlating findings across code, cloud, and runtime, Wiz Code merges them into a single view, helping teams identify root causes and address issues more effectively.
Wiz Code seamlessly integrates into workflows by adding code-to-cloud and cloud-to-code mapping capabilities via the Wiz Security Graph. This integration empowers security teams to prioritize critical issues efficiently, mapping them across the entire stack and highlighting ownership context for faster remediation. Additionally, Wiz Code offers one-click fix suggestions embedded within developer workflows, allowing developers to apply these fixes without leaving their tools. This streamlined approach not only simplifies the remediation process but also ensures that security measures are effectively integrated into the development environment.
The provision of real-time security feedback enriched with cloud insights directly in Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and pull requests plays a crucial role in anticipating the impact of vulnerabilities or exposed secrets before code deployment. By doing so, developers can avoid the accumulation of security debt, ensuring that sprint cycles remain focused on value delivery while maintaining high security levels. This proactive approach to security fosters a culture of continuous improvement and vigilance, crucial in meeting the dynamic challenges of today’s cybersecurity landscape.
Scaling the Cloud Through Unified Visibility
The integration of Wiz Code into Wiz for Gov follows the addition of the Wiz Runtime Sensor, representing a significant step towards achieving feature parity between development teams using Wiz Commercial and Wiz for Government offerings. This standardization unlocks previously unavailable toolsets and capabilities for regulated environments, providing teams with advanced security tools and a unified approach to cloud-native development. The addition of Wiz Code to the Wiz for Gov FedRAMP offering promotes collaborative efforts among cloud builders and defenders, aiming to reduce risk and accelerate cloud development.
The guardrails provided by Wiz Code within the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines serve as essential anchors for organizations migrating to secure software supply chains. When combined with Wiz’s continuous monitoring Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) solution, organizations can secure their entire cloud-native application lifecycle, from code to runtime. This unified approach helps prevent misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, setting the foundation for a robust software supply chain.
This strategy not only enhances security posture but also strengthens collaboration across various teams, including Security Operations Centers (SOC), Application Security (AppSec), DevOps, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), and others. By promoting a culture of shared responsibility and close cooperation, organizations can move towards a continuous Authorization to Operate (cATO) framework. This approach facilitates ongoing compliance with stringent regulatory standards and fosters an environment of continuous enhancement.
Conclusion
The integration of Wiz Code into Wiz’s FedRAMP authorized offering, “Wiz for Government,” represents a significant step forward in combining application and cloud security for government and regulatory-focused clients. This strategic enhancement ensures that security is comprehensively managed across applications, infrastructure, and configurations throughout the development lifecycle. By enabling organizations to shift security considerations to the left, Wiz Code aligns with contemporary security practices, addressing potential vulnerabilities proactively rather than dealing with them after they arise. As technology and government requirements continue to evolve, this integration demonstrates how advanced security protocols can be seamlessly woven into cloud-native environments, thereby optimizing protection and efficiency. This move underscores Wiz’s commitment to providing robust security solutions that meet the increasingly complex demands of modern governmental operations, ensuring that security measures keep pace with technological advancements and regulatory changes.
