Elevating views of risk: Holistic application risk management with Snyk

As apps become more complex and development speeds up with DevOps, cloud-native tech, and AI, having a comprehensive approach to managing application risk is more important than ever. Traditional methods just aren’t cutting it anymore. Security teams are overwhelmed by vulnerabilities, and developers aren’t getting the guidance they need on what to focus on first.

This gap between security and development is leaving apps more vulnerable. Teams stuck in silos, using outdated, vulnerability-focused approaches, waste time on low-risk issues while missing the real threats. As a result, both development and security slow down, creating frustration and mistrust between the teams.

Snyk offers a holistic, application-centered approach to managing risk. By weaving a broad understanding of application risk into both development and security workflows, Snyk fosters better collaboration across teams, smarter prioritization, and, in the end, faster and more secure software development.

Unpacking “application risk” 

Traditionally, "application risk" has been all about vulnerabilities in software that could cause security breaches, data loss, or system failures. These risks come from both your own code and third-party components like open-source libraries or containers, impacting how secure and reliable your app is. 

Traditional approaches to managing these risks tend to look at vulnerabilities in isolation. They don’t consider the bigger picture, such as how the app is built, how important it is to the business, or how it is configured and deployed in runtime. This inevitably leads to teams focusing on the wrong things, leaving the most dangerous vulnerabilities unchecked. 

Sticking to this narrow, vulnerability-centric view, also overlooks other big risks in today's fast-moving app environments. One of the most overlooked risks are unknown or unscanned software components, or “assets.” Most security tools today only scan known apps. What about assets built or deployed without the security team’s knowledge? Or known assets that haven't been scanned at all? 

App Security: Why the bigger picture matters

These blind spots mean we need to move beyond just sorting through endless lists of vulnerabilities. It's about gaining a broader understanding of the entire application to spot the real risks.

Consider the following example of two vulnerabilities that show why understanding the application within a wider context matters. 

Vulnerability A: Snyk Open Source finds the critical log4j vulnerability (CVSS score of 9.8) in an internal app’s dormant repository. But since the app is only used in a sandboxed environment, away from production, and the repository hasn’t been touched in months, it’s actually low priority. Even though the vulnerability is rated high, the context—its dormancy and isolation—means you can focus your energy on more pressing, actively used applications.

Vulnerability B: Snyk Code spots an IDOR vulnerability in an e-commerce app. Although it’s marked as Medium severity, it affects code that handles sensitive customer data, like addresses and payment info. Since this app is in a live, publicly accessible environment, the risk shoots up, making it a high priority for immediate fixing to prevent data breaches, regulatory trouble, or harm to your reputation.

A broader, app-focused approach that includes how the app is built, deployed, and run is crucial. With this context, you get a clearer, real-time picture of actual risk, allowing you to prioritize based on what truly matters to the business and improve productivity in development.

Building a 360° model of application risk 

The examples above highlight how traditional risk management falls short and why we need a more comprehensive approach. This is at the heart of Snyk’s vision for secure, high-performance software development. By fostering a shared understanding of application risk, Snyk helps developers prevent and fix issues faster while giving security teams the insight they need to guide development without slowing things down.

Snyk integrates security data from our Application Security Testing (AST) tools—Snyk Open Source, Snyk Code, Snyk Container, and Snyk IaC—with context from a growing ecosystem of partners to create a comprehensive view of the application and its associated risks. This approach provides multi-faceted details on identified vulnerabilities, combined with insights into the app’s architecture, development process, business significance, and runtime state.

Key Snyk integrations now include:

• Source Code Management (SCM) Systems: GitHub, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, GitLab

• Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Service Catalogs: Backstage, ServiceNow CMDB, Atlassian Compass, Harness, OpsLevel

• Observability Tools: Dynatrace, Datadog

• Cloud and Runtime Security: Sysdig, Orca, SentinelOne, Crowdstrike

By combining all this rich context, Snyk provides a complete, 360° model of your application, empowering teams to manage security risks more effectively. Now, let’s take a closer look at how you can integrate this enhanced visibility into your application risk management workflows.

Discovering your application 

To manage application risk effectively, you need a clear picture of all the software being built in your organization and a way to keep track of new applications. Snyk’s discovery tools help by building an asset inventory that gives full visibility into every application component, from development to deployment. This inventory is enhanced with extra details like development context, business criticality, and whether Snyk is securing them.

Automating asset & coverage management 

Understanding the different assets under development gives you the visibility needed to ensure they're properly secured. Snyk’s asset-based policies streamline this process by letting you automatically classify assets based on their importance to your business, define what needs to be scanned, how often, and which Snyk tool to use—whether it’s Snyk Open Source, Snyk Code, Snyk Container, or Snyk IaC. You can also set up notifications or open a Jira ticket to stay informed and take action in case a security gap is identified.

Prioritizing based on risk

Once you’ve identified your business-critical assets and ensured they’re secured by Snyk, you can start focusing on the issues that matter most. Snyk’s holistic risk management approach gives you all the context you need to make smarter prioritization decisions.

A great starting point is Snyk’s asset inventory, which offers powerful sorting, filtering, and searching tools to help you identify your key application assets. Once you’ve pinpointed these assets, you’ll see a breakdown of security issues found by Snyk’s tools—whether it’s Snyk Open Source, Snyk Code, Snyk Container, or Snyk IaC.

Clicking on one of these categories takes you to the Issues page, where you’ll find an aggregated list of issues tied to that asset. From here, you can use Snyk’s Risk Score, runtime risk factors, and other contextual filters to zero in on the issues that pose the highest risk.

Risk Score

Over the last few years, several risk factors have been proposed, each promising more effective issue prioritization outcomes. While these factors enhance the understanding of the risk posed by vulnerabilities, relying on them as a "silver bullet" inevitably results in focusing on issues that may not pose real threats while overlooking actual risks. For instance, static reachability attempts to determine whether a vulnerability is called by the application. Although it's a useful indicator of risk in some cases, it falls short by not considering the full picture—the application’s architecture, business value, runtime state, and other critical factors.

Snyk’s Risk Score is one of the most thorough ways to assess risk for open-source and container vulnerabilities out there. It’s built on deep security research and smart data modeling, looking at two key factors: how likely a vulnerability is to be exploited and what the impact would be if it is. Each factor takes into account both hard data and the specific context of your application, creating sub-scores that roll up into the overall Risk Score. This balanced focus on both likelihood and impact helps Snyk users prioritize risks in a way that’s more precise and effective.

Risk Score is currently available in Preview Mode and covers Snyk Open Source and Snyk Container vulnerabilities. You can also find more info on Snyk’s Risk Score in our product documentation.  

Runtime risk factors

With Snyk AppRisk Pro, customers can get a more complete view of application risk by integrating into their runtime environments. Using Snyk’s native eBPF sensor or integrations with third-party runtime tools, you can leverage runtime context to better understand the actual risk posed by your assets and any security issues.

On the Issues page, Snyk’s risk funnel allows you to filter by key runtime factors like whether a vulnerability is deployed, loaded into memory, or publicly accessible. This helps you prioritize the issues that need your attention the most.

Looking ahead: integrating elevated views of risk within development workflows

Holistic risk management is key to our vision of secure, high-performance app development. Instead of chasing individual vulnerabilities, we want to help organizations focus on managing the real risks that could impact their business.

The true value of having a complete view of application risk comes when it’s seamlessly integrated into daily workflows. This way, security teams can cut down on the noise, help developers prioritize more accurately, and ensure they’re tackling the risks that truly matter. That’s the direction we’re heading.

Right now, we’re enhancing Snyk’s risk assessment model by adding more factors, so our Risk Score gives an even more accurate and comprehensive view. We’re also improving how we quantify risk at both the asset and application levels, so our customers get deeper insights to act faster and reduce meaningful risks. On top of that, we’re focusing on improving developer experience by better integrating these elevated views of risk into key risk management workflows — PR checks, ignores, policies, and more.

Exciting developments are on the horizon at Snyk—stay tuned for updates!