Two Innovative Teams, One Shared Mission: Secure the Future of Application Development
Securing modern applications with disconnected tools is like trying to navigate a city with three different maps — one for highways, one for roads, and one for bridges. Each tells part of the story, but none shows the complete route. Traditional static analysis, dependency scanning and cloud security operate the same way. Each offers a piece of visibility but not the complete picture needed to understand what’s immediately at risk.
Cloud-native architectures, microservices and AI-generated code have all multiplied the pace and complexity of software delivery and hence risk. Organizations must rethink their approach to AppSec to accommodate. Instead of traditional legacy tools that stall releases and flood teams with false positives, modern AppSec demands something automated, agile, more precise, and built to accelerate development.
This is why Cortex® CloudTM is teaming up with Semgrep®. Together, we help security and development teams build prevention into every commit, reduce friction, and focus on business-critical risks. Development and security teams can now move forward as partners, rather than adversaries.
The Limitations of Shift Left
A rallying cry over the last decade was to shift security left by embedding security scans earlier in the development lifecycle. The intent to catch vulnerabilities before they reach production was right but introduced new challenges.
Security scans generated overwhelming volumes of alerts, many of them false positives or low priority, without real context creating developer fatigue. Each AppSec scanner provided its own siloed view of risk leaving teams stitching together incomplete pictures of risk. And because there was no reliable or shared way to prioritize based on real-world context, developers wasted valuable time fixing issues that were unlikely to be exploitable in production.
This limited the ability for organizations to actually prevent risk from reaching production and the outcome was predictable. Security debt grew, real threats slipped through the cracks, and neither developers nor security teams were satisfied. It became clear that shifting left alone wasn’t enough. AppSec needed to evolve.
Integrating Cortex Cloud and Semgrep Code
Solutions like Semgrep have become essential for identifying vulnerabilities early in the development cycle. But even when issues are found, it’s often difficult to know which ones matter. A SQL injection in a repository isn’t significant on its own. It only matters if that repository connects to a privileged service account, runs in a public-facing container or powers a production workload. Without that context, AppSec teams are overwhelmed by findings that lack real business relevance.
Cortex Cloud’s Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) was built to address these challenges. The platform unifies visibility, prioritization and policy enforcement across the entire software lifecycle. When combined with Semgrep’s fast, developer-friendly static and software composition analysis (SAST and SCA), the two provide a fundamentally better way to manage application security.
By bringing Semgrep’s high-confidence findings into Cortex Cloud, and sending cloud context back into Semgrep, teams gain a unified view across code, infrastructure and runtime. Developers identify which vulnerabilities actually matter, enriched with real exposure data. Security teams get centralized dashboards to monitor posture and coordinate remediation. The result: less noise, more action and faster collaboration between development and security.
With this integration, Semgrep findings flow directly into Cortex Cloud, where they’re enriched with runtime data, risk signals and organizational policy. Issues aren’t just surfaced, in other words. They’re contextualized. Teams can see not only what was detected in the code, but also whether it poses an actual risk in production and whether it violates established security policies.
Developers no longer receive long lists of generic warnings. Instead, they get focused, actionable feedback delivered directly into the tools they already use. Security leaders gain a single view across the application stack, from custom code to third-party dependencies to runtime environments, eliminating blind spots and reducing fragmentation.
Key Use Cases
The Cortex Cloud + Semgrep integration delivers meaningful outcomes across a variety of scenarios:
- Unified risk posture: By consolidating Semgrep’s findings with other sources, organizations gain a holistic view of their application security landscape in a single dashboard.
- Risk-aligned remediation: Context from Cortex Cloud allows teams to prioritize exploitable vulnerabilities tied to runtime, so fixes focus on issues most likely to be weaponized.
- Developer enablement: Instead of leaving developers sifting through vague reports, findings are routed directly to CI pipelines or pull requests, paired with clear remediation guidance.
- Preventing new vulnerabilities: By differentiating between new issues and existing debt, teams can block the introduction of new risks while still working through backlogs.
Join Us at OWASP AppSec for a Hands-On Workshop
See the Cortex Cloud + Semgrep integration in action and explore how to secure fast-moving, AI-assisted software without slowing development at our hands-on workshop on November 5 in Washington, DC. Reserve your spot at OWASP AppSec North America today.
Learn More
Ready to see the platform in action? Request a demo to learn more about Cortex Cloud’s Application Security.