The complexities of scaling AppSec teams and how to address them in 2025

Your organization’s application portfolio is growing and so are the risks. With every new web app, API, or microservice, attackers find new vulnerabilities to exploit. Meanwhile, your AppSec teams are under constant pressure to do more, faster, with fewer resources.

Scaling your AppSec teams in 2025 isn’t just about keeping up; it’s about staying ahead. From managing sprawling portfolios to meeting rising compliance demands, the challenges can feel overwhelming. To help, we’ve broken down the challenges into four critical areas that you need to address:

• AppSec outpaced by portfolio growth.
• Regain control of expanding portfolios and attack surfaces.
• Solving the resource crisis in AppSec.
• How big is the resource challenge?.
• DAST: the solution to resource constraints?.
• Breaking barriers: the modern security practice challenge.
• How Burp Suite Enterprise Edition empowers DevSecOps.
• The high stakes of compliance reporting at scale.
• DAST: Solving compliance challenges for AppSec teams.

PortSwigger will help you understand the complexities and challenges of scaling AppSec teams, and how Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) can help you build a more efficient, agile, and mature security program.

Let’s discuss the obstacles holding back your AppSec teams, and how you can confidently overcome your organization’s application security challenges.

AppSec outpaced by portfolio growth

As an AppSec leader, you're tasked with securing an ever-growing portfolio of applications, APIs, and microservices, all while staying ahead of attackers who only need one opening to exploit your organization.

Growing portfolios of applications and APIs create an interconnected web of vulnerabilities that are increasingly difficult to manage through manual pentesting alone.

Imagine managing 10,000 websites across internal and external assets. In a discovery call, One Security Engineer from a leading asset trading platform describes the challenge:

With such a large application portfolio and limited visibility, critical vulnerabilities can go undetected, leaving your organization exposed to potential damage.

The scale is daunting, but not unique.

So, how do you improve your organization’s security posture amidst expanding portfolios and attack surfaces?

Regain control of expanding portfolios and attack surfaces

To address the challenge of scaling amidst growing portfolios and new vulnerabilities, you need to feel confident that your teams are using a scalable solution that covers entire attack surfaces.

With Burp Suite Enterprise Edition, PortSwigger’s DAST solution, you can make scaling your security efforts achievable.

Whether you’re managing 10 or 10,000 web applications, Burp Suite Enterprise Edition allows teams to automate scanning, delivering actionable insights, quickly.

However, embedding a DAST solution across large portfolios should not become another challenge. PortSwigger’s onboarding teams have helped AppSec teams quickly address large portfolios and attack surfaces.

With Burp Suite Enterprise Edition, your AppSec teams have access to a centralized, automated vulnerability management system that can be adapted to your needs.

Solving the resource crisis in AppSec

As portfolios grow, your AppSec teams face another challenge: the widening gap between resources and responsibilities. With developer-to-security unbalanced, the strain on lean teams is unsustainable.

You know that challenges like hiring talent, training, and cost make scaling AppSec teams difficult. Whilst there is no substitute for the accuracy provided by comprehensive, manual assessment by an experienced pentester, relying exclusively on manual testing is impractical at scale.

How big is the resource challenge?

There is an imbalance in most organizations between developers and security professionals. An overwhelming number of our customers suggest that they lack the resources to meet their testing requirements.

One organization reported a developer to security professional ratio of 33:1:

With limited resources and increasing demands, AppSec teams need to implement solutions and strategies that enable them to scale effectively without adding headcount. These approaches must consistently deliver accurate, actionable results while avoiding duplicated efforts and preventing bottlenecks.

DAST: the solution to resource constraints?

For lean AppSec teams responsible for securing vast web application portfolios, DAST tools like Burp Suite Enterprise Edition offer streamlined deployment options that eliminate complexity, accelerating time-to-value.

By automating repetitive testing tasks, AppSec teams do not need to add headcount, and can focus on high-value activities like analyzing complex vulnerabilities and improving security strategies.

Automation of scanning isn’t just a way to address resource constraints, it’s also a critical step toward evolving your security practices, keeping you ahead of the game and ensuring that your teams aren’t working in silos, creating modern, agile workflows.

Breaking barriers: the modern security practice challenge

As your organization accelerates software delivery, traditional security practices often become bottlenecks. Many AppSec teams face frustrating, repetitive feedback loops between developers and security professionals:

To overcome these delays, teams are embedding security earlier in the SDLC. ‘Shifting left’, while promising in theory, these efforts face persistent challenges:

• Integration hurdles: Security tools are often difficult to configure in CI/CD pipelines, requiring specialized expertise.
• Unreliable results: Many DAST tools generate false positives or miss critical vulnerabilities, eroding trust and wasting time.
• Team silos: Poor integrations with tools like SIEMs or Jira create fragmented workflows, making it harder for teams to align.

Scaling modern security practices requires tools that are easy to integrate, foster collaboration, and deliver results you can trust, without slowing down your SDLC.

How Burp Suite Enterprise Edition empowers DevSecOps

Burp Suite Enterprise Edition helps AppSec teams like yours overcome these obstacles and scale security without compromise. Here’s how it delivers:

• Seamless integration: Whether in CI/CD pipelines or existing workflows, Burp Suite Enterprise Edition can offer SaaS-like deployment, eliminating complexity, accelerating time-to-value.
• Trustworthy results: Powered by Burp Scanner, Burp Suite Enterprise Edition minimizes false positives, detects evolving threats, and ensures vulnerabilities are identified accurately the first time.
• Faster testing, faster fixes: Continuous and scheduled scans automate tedious tasks, giving your teams the time to focus on complex vulnerabilities instead of chasing false alarms.
• Unified collaboration: Built-in integrations with tools like Splunk and Jira ensure seamless communication between AppSec and development teams, breaking down silos and fostering alignment.

With Burp Suite Enterprise Edition, your teams can scale security efforts without adding complexity, delivering the protection your applications need while keeping pace with modern development.

Scaling your organization’s security efforts and mitigating risk isn’t just about detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, it’s also about meeting growing compliance demands.

The high stakes of compliance reporting at scale

Failing to meet compliance requirements like PCI DSS, ISO:27001, HIPAA, or FedRAMP isn't just a checkbox issue, it’s a business risk.

Compliance isn’t just about avoiding fines, it’s about safeguarding your customers’ trust and protecting your brand’s reputation. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

According to new research from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, which analyzed the experiences of 604 organizations and insights from 3,556 cybersecurity and business leaders, the true cost of a breach often depends on preparation and response.

Source: Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, IBM.

With the risks and potential savings being quite staggering, can your organization afford not to have the comprehensive coverage, and audit-ready reporting necessary to stay ahead?

Delivering frequent, accurate, audit-ready reports across vast portfolios is challenging; however, especially for teams with limited resources, without creating bottlenecks.

The need for visibility into standards like the OWASP Top Ten further complicates efforts, as manual testing struggles to meet the speed and scale required for audits and risk mitigation.

DAST: Solving compliance challenges for AppSec teams

Solutions like DAST can be utilized to provide traceable and actionable insights, and integrate seamlessly into existing processes. By doing so, AppSec teams can achieve the efficiency, visibility, and scalability required to satisfy compliance needs while mitigating risk across growing portfolios.

Whether managing a handful of applications or hundreds, teams can ensure consistency in their compliance and reporting without additional overhead.

With enterprise-grade reporting and integrations with SIEM tools like Splunk, managing compliance becomes significantly more efficient, ensuring security insights align seamlessly with existing workflows.

Why Burp Suite Enterprise Edition?

To ensure complete coverage across your attack surfaces, Burp Suite Enterprise Edition utilizes the same technology found in your pentesters’ toolkit, Burp Suite Professional, the market leading pentesting toolkit relied upon by over 80,000 security professionals worldwide.

Burp Scanner is a proprietary tool, scaled for DAST and built on decades of cutting-edge research and innovation from the team at PortSwigger Research, ensuring that the latest vulnerabilities across your applications, APIs and microservices are covered.

Burp Scanner's advanced capabilities help bridge the gap for lean AppSec teams, enabling them to scale security efforts efficiently without increasing headcount, compromising on accuracy, or playing catch up on compliance requirements.

Future improvements for scaling organizations

PortSwigger remains committed to innovation, with new features arriving in 2025 to further enhance efficiency, visibility, and collaboration for scaling AppSec teams. Upcoming enhancements include:

• Enhanced tooling for efficient scan setup and management.
• Advanced Jira integration for seamless automation.
• Expanding, scalable API scanning capabilities.
• Faster time-to-value for scanning.
• Improved authentication experience.

Ready to tackle the growing challenges of scaling your AppSec team?

Schedule a discovery session today and discover how PortSwigger’s innovative solutions can empower your organization to stay secure, scalable, and ahead of the curve.

Schedule a Discovery Session.

Tom Ryder