Is a self-serve trial right for you?
This article helps you plan a self-serve trial of GitHub Advanced Security. A self-serve trial is right for you if both of the following are true:
- You want to conduct your trial independently, without the help of an expert or partner. Typically, this works best for small or medium-sized organizations.
- You're an existing GitHub Enterprise Cloud customer who pays by credit card or PayPal.
If a self-serve trial isn't right for you:
- For expert help, contact our team.
- If you pay by invoice, contact your sales representative.
1. Define your company goals
Before you start a trial, define its purpose and identify the key questions you need to answer. Keep these goals in focus as you plan so that you gather the information you need to decide whether to upgrade.
If your company already uses GitHub, consider what needs are currently unmet that Secret Protection or Code Security might address. You should also consider your current application security posture and longer term aims. For inspiration, see Design Principles for Application security in the GitHub well-architected documentation.
| Example need | Features to explore during the trial |
|---|---|
| Enforce use of security features | Security configurations and policies. See Enabling security features at scale and Enterprise policies. |
| Protect custom access tokens | Custom patterns for secret scanning, delegated bypass for push protection, and validity checks. See Exploring your enterprise trial of GitHub Secret Protection. |
| Define and enforce a development process | Dependency review, auto-triage rules, and rulesets, with enterprise policies where needed. See Dependency review, Dependabot auto-triage rules, and About rulesets, and Enterprise policies. |
| Reduce technical debt at scale | Security campaigns. See About security campaigns in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation. |
| Monitor and track trends in security risks | Security overview. See Viewing security insights. |
If your company doesn't use GitHub yet, you are likely to have additional questions including how the platform handles data residency, secure account management, and repository migration. For more information, see Getting started with GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
2. Identify the members of your trial team
GitHub Advanced Security enables you to integrate security measures throughout the software development life cycle. Include representatives from all areas of your development cycle so that you have the data you need to make a decision.
You may also find it helpful to identify a champion for each company need that you want to investigate.
3. Determine whether preliminary research is needed
Decide whether your team would benefit from hands-on experience with our free security features before you begin your trial. Testing code scanning and secret scanning on public repositories can help new users become familiar with the core features of GitHub Advanced Security. This lets you focus your trial period on private repositories and the advanced features and controls available in Secret Protection and Code Security.
For more information, see:
- Enabling secret scanning for your repository
- Configuring default setup for code scanning
- Enabling the dependency graph
Organizations on GitHub Team and GitHub Enterprise can run a free report to scan their code for leaked secrets. This helps you assess your repositories' current exposure to leaked secrets and shows how many existing secret leaks could have been prevented by Secret Protection. See Secret security with GitHub.
4. Decide which repositories to test
It is generally best to use an existing organization and repositories. This ensures that you can experience the features in code you know well and within a familiar development environment.
If you want, add test code later. However, deliberately insecure applications, such as WebGoat, are not the best test. They may contain coding patterns that appear to be insecure but which code scanning determines cannot be exploited. As a result, code scanning may report fewer issues in these artificial codebases than other security scanners.
5. Define the assessment criteria for the trial
For each company need or goal you set for the trial, decide how you will measure success. For example, if you want to enforce the use of security features, create test cases for security configurations and policies to confirm they work as expected.
6. Start your trial
If you already use GitHub Enterprise Cloud (as a paying customer or as part of a free trial), see Setting up a trial of GitHub Advanced Security.
Otherwise, you can trial GitHub Advanced Security as part of a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud. See Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
Note
GitHub Advanced Security is free of charge during trials, but usage-based billing applies for features that consume GitHub Actions minutes or AI credits.