ROI of Application Risk Management: Measuring Impact

Until a decade or so ago, it was sufficient for security teams to use firewalls, antivirus, and intrusion detection to secure their business network. Today’s application environments have expanded beyond traditional perimeters to include APIs, open-source software, third-party modules, and AI-generated code. This greatly increases the attack surface and need for application risk management that’s holistic and automated.

Bad actors are increasingly targeting apps because they contain confidential and sensitive business data. So, organizations invest in application risk management platforms with quality application security posture management (ASPM) abilities to thwart attacks and comply with industry regulations.

Application risk management goes beyond enabling compliance and securing business assets. It also acts as a business enabler that enhances operational efficiency, reduces costs, and accelerates secure software delivery.

The following insights are from Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) commissioned study, which quantified the business impact and ROI of Veracode’s application risk management platform. The results were aggregated and combined to form a single composite organization representative of interviewed customers.

1. Reduced Risks of Software-Based Attacks By 75%

Veracode consolidates vulnerabilities across all your internal apps, third-party components, external APIs, OSS frameworks, and plugins. It improves unified visibility and centralizes risk management by categorizing vulnerabilities based on severity. In addition to intelligent risk prioritization, the platform uses AI to generate efficient remediation paths.

Our 2025 State of Software Security report reveals that 70% of critical severity flaws arise from third-party software components, and nearly half of the organizations suffer from critical security debt from high-severity flaws that they have not remediated for over 12 months.

Using Veracode’s automated workflows, organizations reduce security debt by 75% on average. They also increase the number of apps that pass internal security policies and expand their AppSec program to further embed security into the design, build, and deploy phases of their software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Forrester quantifies the impact of reduced risks from software-based attacks to be worth $1.5 million.

2. Unlocked 70,000 Hours of Developer Productivity

Veracode offers developers clear, fix-ready guidance that integrates seamlessly into their IDE and CI/ CD workflows. This reduces manual effort, enables faster remediation, and improves collaboration between development and security teams.

Forrester also reports that Veracode improved the visibility of security flaws across the app environment and enables developers to fix flaws much earlier in development. As a result, security teams got better alerts and contextual information that tracks every flaw back to its origin, empowering developers to identify weaknesses and remediate them quickly.

Organizations that leverage Veracode to get automatic AI-powered remediation suggestions and perform static (SAST) and dynamic (DAST) testing achieve better operational efficiency from quicker security and penetration testing processes. They also improved cost avoidance by eliminating the need to hire costly pentesting services from external experts.

Cumulatively, these unlocked 80% of manual AppSec efforts, which can now be used for customer-centered product innovation, which is worth $3.4 million over three years.

3. Automated $1.3 Million Worth of Manual Security Efforts

Veracode reduced the overhead of manual triage, flaw prioritization, and context switching across tools, thus helping security teams scale AppSec efforts without adding to headcount.

Veracode provides effective tooling that enables developers to automate manual workflows. The platform also reduced the preparation time required to run scans and pentests in the app environment. Advanced AI capabilities allow security teams to train ML models based on custom organization data and security fixes to reduce false-positive rates over time significantly.

Improved operational efficiency enables the reallocation of 25,000 hours of manual AppSec resource labor. The average organization incurs an estimated $1.3 million in manual labor costs while scaling AppSec efforts.

4. Grew Revenue By 20% From Reallocated Productivity

Veracode helps organizations shift security left earlier into the software development lifecycle while also enabling high developer productivity.

Forrester reports that Veracode’s “augmented scanning capacity permits the composite organization to accelerate the software development lifecycle,” thus improving the time to market new features and products. As a byproduct, developers now have more time and resources to address customer feedback and iteratively improve product development.

The platform also enabled security teams to keep tight security standards, thus opening opportunities to serve new markets with stricter regulations and attract better revenue margins.

Accelerated development throughput and a more secure, customer-centered product offering led to 20% revenue growth, which totals up to $940,000 in additional profits.

Centralized Risk Visibility Embeds Application Risk Management Into Your SDLC

Centralized risk visibility and reporting help your organization make informed strategic decisions about application security, compliance readiness, and future investment areas. Furthermore, the Veracode platform advances security maturity and improves your organization’s security culture by integrating security into every stage of your SDLC.

Equip your developers with actionable findings and integrated testing tools to minimize time spent on repetitive patching tasks. This will enable developers to focus more on creative decisions and product innovation. You will also minimize friction from manual security processes, thus embedding AppSec into the organizational DNA.

Book your personalized demo to understand how much application risk management time and cost your team could save by adopting Veracode, and download the full case study here.