Remember when a scanner felt revolutionary? The first static and dynamic scanners were game changers: they made invisible code risk suddenly visible, creating the cultural shift that put "secure by design" on every engineering VP's slide deck. But the industry didn't stop at one scanner, it piled on SCA, secrets detection, IAC analysis, API fuzzers, SBOM generators, cloud posture monitors, ASM, ASPM, WAAP... you get the idea. Each solved a slice of the problem, yet together they created a new one: overwhelming complexity.
Enterprise AppSec teams now juggle roughly 50 separate security tools on average. Keeping that many dashboards wired into dozens of pipelines is hard enough; keeping every alert meaningful is nearly impossible. With so many tools shouting at once, signal-to-noise plummets, and this causes developers to ignore critical issues. When the humans who actually ship fixes stop listening, risk quietly piles up.
Legacy scanners incorrectly flag safe code so often that security teams spend 25% of their working hours chasing ghosts. That's an entire day each week lost to non-issues, while real vulnerabilities wait in the backlog.
Worse still, developers are burning 3.5 hours a week manually triaging scan results, costing companies upwards of $28k per developer per year in lost productivity. Nearly one-fifth of their work week is now security busy-work instead of shipping features.
Broken doesn't mean unfixable. AppSec isn't broken because the challenge is hopeless; it's broken because the tool strategy hasn't kept pace with the way we build software. The rise of AI and LLM-powered developer workflows will only exacerbate the problem. At Cysmiq, we believe the challenge is solvable, an evolutionary response to the challenges plaguing companies.