StackHawk
Sign In
Get a Demo

Customer Success Story

Breathe Life Deploys StackHawk and Snyk for a Dev-Centric Application Security Program

By integrating StackHawk, Breathe Life strengthened its ability to secure sensitive personal and health data while meeting strict industry regulations like Quebec’s Bill 64, HIPAA, and the CCPA. “We’re dealing with very sensitive data,” said François Allard, Director of Engineering for Platform Teams. “We know that in order to scale, we need to put security up front in our process.” With StackHawk, security became an integral part of development—helping the team identify issues early, maintain compliance, and confidently scale their platform.

Scaled Application Security

Detected Vulnerabilities Earlier

Achieved Developer-Driven Compliance

GitHub logo

Use Case

Combing security tools for faster remediationC

Industry

Internet Software and Services

Company

Breathe Life

Location

Montreal, Quebec

Download Full Story
To scale securely and efficiently, Breathe Life sought developer-centric security tooling that could integrate directly into existing workflows. “We’re not trying to come up with a new way of working; we’re pulling on industry best practices,” said François Allard, Director of Engineering for Platform Teams. “We can see the value it provides by knowing upfront that our product is secure. Waiting until production becomes a lot more costly and also introduces the potential for a breach.” This proactive approach empowered developers to take ownership of the security of their code, embedding protection into every stage of development and reducing risk before applications reached production

The StackHawk scan with the Open API showed us that the real application was being tested and it’s not just checking the box to meet some compliance requirement that we have.

 

The Problem

Highly regulated organization with a need to prioritize finding and fixing security vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle.

The Solution

Dev-centric approach to security testing with Snyk and StackHawk giving individual developers the ability to take ownership of the code they were creating.

The Results

Security as a shared responsibility across the organization with best in class solutions to easily manage findings while eliminating noise was key to scaling the team’s application security program.

Choosing a Solution

Allard knew there was no silver bullet to solve all of the needs he had for application security. Instead, he sought to find best-in-class tools that would make his vision for a scaled application security program possible.

He first discovered Snyk, and later StackHawk, and recognized that the two had a “similar dev-centric approach.” As a result, he chose to build a program with these two partners.

While Snyk’s SCA tool helped Breathe Life secure the open source libraries they used, Allard was also looking for a Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tool, to ensure that Breathe Life’s proprietary code was also protected.

His team was building a Single Page App that relied on Javascript and backing APIs. Existing tools in the market were falling short of what Allard knew he needed.

Experience with StackHawk

“One of StackHawk’s key differentiators was the ability to leverage the Open API spec in order to better scan the application. The typical Ajax spider from other products are pretty limited in what they could find… there was no real part of our application that was tested,” said Allard, “The StackHawk scan with the Open API showed us that the real application was being tested and it’s not just checking the box to meet some compliance requirement that we have.”

But it wasn’t just the findings that impressed Allard. It was also what his team could do with them.

“Managing findings is another thing we like with StackHawk. Being able to easily manage those, and not adding noise to scans when you have the same thing over and over is super helpful,” said Allard.

Allard is early in the journey of deploying Snyk and StackHawk, but is already reaping the benefits of having greater confidence in the code that is shipped.

As we grow, we’ll have more and more ways to automate…We are putting the building blocks in place so developers can take on these types of responsibilities.

 

Explore Our Customer Stories

Public Benefit Corporation

Change.org needed a way to improve their security posture and effectively protect their platform and users at scale.

Health Tech

A healthtech company boosted security with StackHawk for API discovery and automated CI/CD security testing, to improve efficiencies while reducing risk.

Financial Services

Learn how one FinTech Leader deployed StackHawk to secure its Fortune 100 customers, prioritizing a shift-left and continuously secure model over just box checking for compliance requirements.

Interested in seeing StackHawk at work?

Schedule time with our team for a live demo.

Request a Live Demo