Insight AppSec - Web Application Security

My main use case for Rapid7 is onboarding all new applications both built in house and third party acquired, where I run them through a sandbox environment and allow Rapid7 to conduct an initial scan looking for vulnerabilities that might not otherwise be publicly announced. On an ongoing basis, while applications live and survive within the McKesson environment, I use Rapid7 to aggregate data about new vulnerabilities to determine if I have to do any kind of hardening or shelf the application.

A specific example of how I used Rapid7 during the onboarding process involves a recent scenario with Change Healthcare. I had just purchased or acquired a new practice in the United States that was still using Change Healthcare software, and during the onboarding process of all the applications they have in their environment, I used Rapid7 in the sandbox to figure out if those were still vulnerable to the breach that occurred in twenty twenty four. Almost all of the applications that practice was using were in fact filled with the vulnerabilities that caused the twenty twenty four breach.

Rapid7 InsightAppSec offers excellent features including a cloud-based platform that allows for detailed breakdowns of information into more digestible bits. The platform is user-friendly with a broad range of tools, although it does require quite a bit of a learning curve. It allows me to aggregate data and put it into presentations to send to executives about the security status across the entire enterprise.

My favorite aspect of the user-friendly interface of Rapid7 is the primary cloud-based dashboard, which I find most useful. I love that even inside a browser, the intuitive help options are available for figuring out what things are, whether it's hovering over a particular option for insights or using right-click features that offer tools and tips on managing the vulnerabilities when found. The interface is very clean, not overly convoluted or difficult to navigate, which I do enjoy.

Rapid7 has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to discover vulnerabilities, both publicly known and zero-day, much faster and efficiently than I ever did in the past, ultimately saving the company a lot of money in compliance issues, fines, and possibly even lawsuits. The number of vulnerabilities I am discovering has improved by almost thirty seven percent in the last two years alone. Remediation especially has increased significantly because I am finding these vulnerabilities faster, and Rapid7 provides tips on how to remediate or harden against them, whether through hardening options or upgrading to better versions, which does save the company money.

While Rapid7 InsightAppSec is getting better with each update or version, it needs to enhance its zero-day detection for anomalous things without relying on third-party solutions like Vericode. Having that capability in-house would be a much better feature, and a couple of menu options might need cleaning up on the cloud platform.

Integration with ServiceNow and One Trust as a GRC platform would be beneficial and would be significantly valuable to many enterprises, especially in McKesson.

I have been using Rapid7 for application vulnerability assessments and management for about a year and a half as I was recently put on the team using it.

I consider Rapid7 to be a very stable platform. Thanks to continuous updates and the transparency from the company, I have not encountered any real issues with it.

Rapid7 InsightAppSec is very scalable and caters to both small and large enterprise solutions. I was able to deploy it globally in less than three months across fourteen different countries and over fifty thousand endpoints and employees.

Customer support for Rapid7 is superb. Whenever I have confusion or issues, a quick email or phone call resolves the issue within fifteen minutes, and I have never had a problem getting the right answers.

The transparency of Rapid7 in terms of gaining visibility into detections and investigations is wonderful, and the support I receive from the company has also been outstanding. During massive audits or when things are flagged that might become problematic in the future, I have had nothing but astounding support and transparency regarding the findings produced by Rapid7.

I was part of the team long enough to see only the end of the previous solution, which revolved around RSA's Archer platforms, but I did not use it extensively.

In my experience on the incident recovery team, though it has been less than six months, the tools provided by Rapid7 allow me to rapidly collect all necessary data, pulling everything from drives and RAM, and coalesce that into a report that helps me break down exactly what happened, when it happened, and who did it. I am taking advantage of the expanded ecosystem telemetry support, which has significantly improved my visibility and efficiency in correlation. It allows me to generate reports on the spot for executives, senior managers, and vice presidents, speeding up remediation techniques considerably.

I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to attend discussions about pricing, setup costs, or licensing for Rapid7, so I do not have enough authority to comment on that.

Speaking from an information security officer's point of view about the return on investment, Rapid7 does not necessarily reduce the number of staff as I already operate lean. However, it does reduce the issues my company faces regarding compliance, laws, and potential lawsuits, which probably saves a significant amount of money, not to mention the time I save by fixing things faster, identifying issues quicker, and remediating them even more efficiently, ultimately freeing me up to conduct other tasks like forensic investigations or rebuilding the enterprise.

I am not sure if my team evaluated other options before choosing Rapid7. I imagine they might have, but I was not part of that decision-making group.

If you are looking for a solution that will help identify vulnerabilities and provide remediation tips for hardening your infrastructure, I think Rapid7 does an excellent job. While I do not know the specifics of licensing costs, I imagine it is significantly less costly than a federal lawsuit.

I find Rapid7's AI capabilities and governance to be very malleable, which is valuable to a lot of my teams. I can also lock it down and harden it, which I find very useful. The AI integration tool has been very helpful for simulations and for identifying the dependencies that software requires to operate correctly and the vulnerabilities in those dependencies.

The accuracy and reliability of Rapid7 output are decent for an AI platform, but it does require double-checking the sources of information to ensure that the output is not misleading.

I find the risk-aware detection features in Rapid7 extremely valuable. The fact that Rapid7 includes this on all platforms, whether on-prem or cloud or hybrid, offers great insight into what to look for, especially as it pertains to software in the healthcare industry, while also allowing me to widen the scope to a global level if needed.

Currently, I am not utilizing the AI-assisted risk-aware investigation workflows as they are not enabled yet. This is pending an AI review board's approval to ensure usefulness and security. I gave this product a rating of nine out of ten.

I usually recommend this solution for financial institutions. Banks and financial institutions need this solution mostly because they have to follow stringent compliance advisory requirements, so they must have this solution.

My team is working with this product because we are a service provider and have provided this service to our customers. From that perspective, I cannot go into detail on the feature sets if you are interested in knowing that. However, as far as I know, we are providing the service, and customers are satisfied with it because we are getting renewals.

Customers use the product for scanning purposes and do not want to be restricted with respect to the number of scans they perform. The scanning can be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever the need arises. This is a good feature that customers are getting.

Customers sometimes experience issues with performance. One thing that I recall is that most customers often want to have reporting as per their customized dashboard. This needs to be improved because although we guide them and let them know what they have to learn, some customers want to have some respect to their local environment. Some customers need help, support, or improvements in that platform if we can customize the reporting.

I have been dealing with this solution for more than three to four years now.

Regarding the pricing of Rapid7 InsightAppSec, I think it is reasonable because if a product is performing well, customers are happy to go with it even if it costs a little bit more. I have not received any complaints or issues regarding high price, so I would say it is acceptable.

I would rate the technical support by Rapid7 from one to ten at about seven.

Regarding the response time, I have to check with my respective team if they have any issues regarding that, but it has not been escalated. This means they are satisfied and are getting the response when the need arises for opening tickets or requesting support. The technical team responds, and sometimes we do that on behalf of our customers, so we get the response.

I have not heard any complaints.

I do not have any recommendations because customers were initially worried about the number of scans they used to perform, and now it has been enhanced or it will sometimes go to a maximum of unlimited number of scans they can do. This supports them, and I think that is acceptable. There is no such big issue here.

I do not think we always go with Rapid7 InsightAppSec in our basket to any customer. Even if someone is not using it, we pitch the same product to them as well. This is how we work and operate.

I would rate this review seven out of ten.