Predictions for Application Security in 2025

Where Context, Not Findings, Will Define Success

The future of application security lies in actionable context, runtime context, and orchestrated workflows. Discover the four key trends reshaping how organizations build, deploy, and secure software in 2025.

December 23, 2024

As we step into 2025, the landscape of application security is evolving at an unprecedented pace. At Heeler, we've had the privilege of collaborating with forward-thinking organizations and observing trends that are reshaping how teams build, deploy, and secure applications. Here are four key predictions we believe will define the year ahead:

‍

Runtime Threat Modeling Emerges

Modern applications are too complex for design- or code-only threat modeling to keep pace. Many risks manifest only in runtime, offering attackers new opportunities. In 2025, runtime threat modeling will take center stage by analyzing live applications, tracking changes, and comparing intended states with production realities. This real-time approach will allow teams to uncover and mitigate critical risks as they emerge, ensuring proactive defenses against sophisticated threats.

Shift-Left Moves Beyond Vulnerabilities

The shift-left movement will continue, but the focus will pivot from vulnerability scanning to identifying risky changes. Teams will increasingly adopt approaches that embed secure-by-design principles earlier in the development lifecycle while dynamically adapting to real-world deployment environments. Success in 2025 will hinge on providing actionable context, not overwhelming teams with findings. Guardrails that enable progress without blocking workflows will become the norm.

Focus on Deployment Risk
‍

Static analysis has traditionally generated an avalanche of theoretical risks, overwhelming both security and engineering teams. In 2025, understanding the risk of what’s actually deployed versus theoretical findings will become a critical focus. Runtime context will lead the charge, offering a more precise, actionable understanding of the current state of applications and their vulnerabilities.

From Findings to Orchestration

The days of siloed findings and teams are numbered. Teams are seeking end-to-end solutions that manage the lifecycle of security issues—from code commits to production environments—in real time. Nearly half of remediation time in application security is wasted figuring out who owns a problem and providing the necessary context. Automated routing will address this bottleneck in 2025, assigning issues to the right engineers with full context, streamlining workflows, and accelerating resolutions.

2025 promises to be a transformative year for application security. By embracing these trends, organizations can stay ahead of evolving threats and maintain a strong security posture in an increasingly dynamic environment. At Heeler, we’re excited to continue innovating alongside our partners to help drive this evolution.

Related resources

See All Resources

December 5, 2025

AI-Assisted Coding Is Driving a Vulnerability Surge – Here’s How to Stay Ahead

AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are driving faster software development, but also introducing new vulnerabilities and security challenges. The rapid rise in AI-generated code is leading to a significant increase in reported vulnerabilities, overwhelming traditional security frameworks that struggle to keep up. To thrive in this new environment, security teams must move beyond simply finding issues to a contextual prioritization approach—assessing vulnerabilities based on business impact, environmental exposure, and threat likelihood. This strategy helps focus efforts on what's truly critical, enabling faster, smarter remediation and supporting development velocity without compromising security.

December 3, 2024

Why Assigning Remediation Ownership Takes Longer Than Fixing Issues—and How to Fix It

According to our research, for many organizations, determining who will fix a security issue takes as much time as actually fixing it. This means that half of the time allocated to meeting security SLAs is spent simply routing issues to the correct team. This lack of clarity creates friction at every stage of the remediation process, leading to inefficiencies, delays, and strained relationships between security and development teams.

September 12, 2024

The Need for Continuous and Agile Threat Modeling

In today’s agile development landscape, where cloud-based software is constantly evolving and deployed at unprecedented speed, traditional, manual threat modeling is no longer enough. As development teams iterate quickly and deploy in real-time, requirements and architecture changes rapidly, creating potential gaps in security that static threat models simply cannot keep up with. This has paved the way for continuous and agile threat modeling—a real-time approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks early in the software lifecycle.

September 10, 2024

Revolutionizing Application Security: The Heeler Story

At Heeler, we’re not just building a product; we’re reshaping the future of application security. In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the traditional approach to security has reached its limits. As applications grow more complex and threats become more sophisticated, the need for a unified security approach that integrates code, runtime, and business context is more critical than ever.

September 3, 2024

The Challenges of Decomposing Cloud-Based Applications (and How to Implement Agile and Continuous Threat Modeling)

In the fast-paced world of software development, the adoption of agile methodologies and continuous delivery practices has revolutionized how applications are built, deployed, and maintained. In an agile environment, where code and cloud are constantly changing and new features are continuously being integrated, threat modeling needs to be just as agile and continuous. The idea is to ensure that security is built into the development process rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

August 27, 2024

Solving Prioritization for Application Security

Security prioritization has become an overwhelming challenge for organizations, as they try to manage an ever-expanding application footprint alongside an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. In 2024 alone, we've seen a 30% year-over-year increase in reported CVEs through July, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit. The rise of AI-assisted coding—often trained on the same vulnerable code we're trying to defend against—likely exacerbates this issue even further.

August 21, 2024

Unifying Threat Modeling, Lifecycle Management, and Response Orchestration: How Heeler Redefines Application Security

In today’s complex digital landscape, application security can no longer be handled with a siloed approach. Modern applications require a comprehensive strategy that integrates multiple security disciplines into a seamless process. At Heeler, we understand that to effectively manage and mitigate risks, security needs to be woven into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This is why we've built a platform that unifies threat modeling, lifecycle management, and response orchestration into a cohesive system.

August 20, 2024

How Customer Feedback Shapes What We Build at Heeler

At Heeler, we believe that the best products are built in collaboration with those who will use them. From day one, our mission has been to create a transformative application security platform, and we knew that achieving this would require more than just innovative ideas and advanced technology. It would require deep, ongoing engagement with the very people who face the challenges we aim to solve: our customers.

Black Hat USA 2024 Recap: What We Heard from AppSec Leaders

At Heeler, we had the privilege of connecting with many AppSec leaders at Black Hat USA 2024. It was clear that despite advancements, significant pain points remain.

Announcing the Launch of Heeler's Advisory Board

These industry veterans bring diverse perspectives and deep insights into application security, and we're excited to collaborate with them as we continue to innovate and transform the field. Their guidance will be invaluable as we strive to maximize the impact of application security teams and developers with unified code, runtime, business, and security context.

See All Resources