It might seem obvious that regularly upgrading software and dependencies means your software is inherently more secure, but in practice, this is hard to achieve. We recently hosted a webinar with Jason Simpson, Vice President, Engineering at Choice Hotels, and Stephen Cihak, Sr. Director, Cloud Platform at Choice Hotels, to learn about their challenges maintaining their codebase and journey to automated code remediation.
During the webinar, we start with a brief overview of Choice Hotels and Moderne. And then get into the really exciting part: a great conversation with Jason and Stephen. We talk about the role platform engineering plays in keeping code current, their challenges with application security, the selection and adoption of Moderne, and their goals for auto-remediation in their organization.
Stephen told us that he has never seen a good strategy for staying on top of dependency updates: “Now, 400-500 apps that are all using different dependencies, different versions all over the place…. It’s really difficult to maintain that and ensure compliance. In my experience, I haven’t seen a good currency strategy. We were looking for some way to manage that better. With Moderne, we realized immediately that it could really help do that for us.”
When talking about the impact of Log4j in their organization, Jason shared “That was the December to remember. Everyone was all hands on deck….It killed business productivity for almost a month.” They then remark on the irony that they had seen Moderne about a month before, but had not brought it on board yet. Stephen goes on to say that what “took a week of time in the initial push could have been done in an afternoon.” The conversation also gets into future goals for Choice Hotels, such as getting software updated so that they can get onto Java 17 and leverage new capabilities.
During the webinar, Stephen also shares a demonstration of the Moderne platform and some of his favorite transformation recipes that Choice Hotels is putting to use, such as the common static analysis issues recipe.
Tune into the full webinar to learn about:
- Choice Hotels' challenges and solutions on the path to continuous modernization
- How automating code remediation can dramatically change the security posture and productivity balance within an organization
- What it takes to automatically remediate vulnerabilities with high accuracy at enterprise scale
- How Moderne’s next-generation alternative to current SAST tooling is dramatically improving developer velocity
