What is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?

Managing application risk is challenging. Application complexity is increasing. Attack surfaces are expanding. The pace of development is accelerating. And regulatory requirements are intensifying. Overtaxed developers and security professionals struggle to juggle a multitude of development, testing, and reporting tools to deliver and maintain secure software at speed and scale.

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) helps manage risk by creating clarity out of complexity.

ASPM brings together AppSec and infrastructure vulnerability management in a powerful way, making it easier to manage security risks across your entire organization's portfolio of applications and infrastructure. It acts like a central command center, collecting information from all your security scanners and presenting a unified view of your application portfolio's risk. ASPM sorts through these findings, prioritizing them based on real-world threats and your business needs. It even automates triaging and remediation workflows, freeing developers to focus on more productive tasks. It also simplifies reporting and keeps everyone on the same page about security.

Where does ASPM fit in cybersecurity?

ASPM fits into the cybersecurity ecosystem as a comprehensive solution that helps bridge the gaps left by traditional security tools.

ASPM plays a critical role within software security programs by providing a comprehensive framework for managing application security posture and risk-based vulnerability management. It acts as a holistic governance layer that centralizes findings, prioritizes risks based on potential impact, and automates workflows for efficient remediation.

Unlike solutions focused solely on cloud, infrastructure, or network security, ASPM takes a comprehensive view of your entire application ecosystem. This includes the application itself, the underlying infrastructure it interacts with, and any dependencies such as third-party components and open-source libraries it relies on.

Application Security Posture Management integrates seamlessly with DevSecOps practices, ensuring security is embedded throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). ASPM allows organizations to stay ahead of potential threats and safeguard their critical assets, thus making it a crucial component of modern cybersecurity strategies.

Why is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) important?

ASPM emerged to address the evolving complexities of modern application development, emerging regulatory demands, and the silos between disparate testing and development tools that create friction and risk.

Application security testing is rooted in the past when applications were monoliths composed mostly of proprietary code and release cadences were monthly. Software development has changed significantly since then. As applications expand to encompass open-source dependencies, APIs, microservices, containers, infrastructure as code, and more, organizations need to employ a myriad of testing methodologies. Often these tools are siloed, and coordinating scans, rationalizing findings, and remediating issues quickly becomes unmanageable.

This is even more challenging as release cadences accelerate from monthly to weekly to daily and many times multiple releases a day. Layer on the challenges of rationalizing findings to generate reports, satisfy audits, and meet regulatory compliance, thus the need for ASPM is evident.

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) offers a systematic and efficient approach to managing these complexities and ensuring security is an integral part of the development and operational processes. ASPM solves the complexity of secure software development by delivering value across five critical areas:

Five key value outcomes of Application Security Posture Management

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Ultimately, these five areas help organizations understand, manage, and improve security posture by reducing risk, accelerating time to compliance and reporting, and elevating developer productivity with prioritization and streamlined remediation.

ASPM Best Practices

ASPM is becoming essential, with Gartner predicting significant adoption growth by 2026 as organizations face overwhelming volumes of security findings from various tools.

ASPM is more than an enabling technology; it forms the foundation of a new security model for the digital enterprise. Successful ASPM programs must complement existing technologies, people, and processes, positioning organizations to adapt and mature across these fronts.

7 best practices that can help you with your ASPM journey:

• Separate Governance from Scanning: Distinguish between vulnerability detection tools and centralized risk management platforms to enable best-of-breed tooling and future proof your security program.
• Unify the Software Security Ecosystem: Integrate security measures across all stages of the software development lifecycle and secure the entire application for consistent protection.
• Prioritize Based on Risk: Focus on high-risk vulnerabilities by deduplicating, normalizing, and correlating findings for clearer risk assessment. Also, calculate risk with adaptive risk scoring.
• Optimize Remediation Efforts: Concentrate on high-risk true positives and use automation and integrations to streamline the remediation process.
• Manage Exceptions: Implement workflows and maintain a risk registry for vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed.
• Conform Data to Organizational Structures: Align security data with organizational hierarchies for meaningful insights and effective reporting.
• Ensure Future Fit: Design ASPM solutions that are easy to adopt, adaptable, and capable of securing emerging technologies.

By following these ASPM best practices, organizations can enhance the effectiveness of their security tools and processes, improving their overall security posture.

What are the critical capabilities of an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solution?

ASPM encompasses features and functionalities to break through technology and organizational silos, unify security findings in a single risk-based view, and facilitate collaboration across development, security, and operations (DevSecOps). Critical capacities include:

• ‍Aggregate Security Testing Findings: ASPM platforms aggregate findings identified by security scans such as software flaws, vulnerable dependencies, and misconfigurations. While some scanning vendors provide ASPM capabilities to fill gaps in native scan offerings and improve accuracy through correlation, a true ASPM solution should sit at a higher level and be scan agnostic to unify findings from any tool, even as vendors change and new technologies emerge.
• ‍Risk-Based Analysis: ASPM solutions analyze aggregated vulnerabilities to correlate findings, assess their potential impact on the organization's security posture, and prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk. Risk factors include severity, potential exploitability, and business impact. ASPM can also integrate threat intelligence feeds to help organizations stay informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities that may affect their applications.
• ‍Remediation and Automation: ASPM tools help security teams improve MTTR through more efficient remediation workflows, automating and orchestrating tasks like ticket creation and escalation, and Slack notifications.
• Integration with DevSecOps Pipeline: ASPM allows security checks to be automated and integrated into the software development lifecycle. This helps organizations identify and remediate vulnerabilities early in the development process when they are most cost-effective to fix and prevent critical issues from reaching production. It also involves continuous monitoring of applications to detect new vulnerabilities that may emerge over time and to ensure that security controls remain effective.
• Reporting: ASPM platforms generate reports and dashboards that provide visibility into an organization's application security posture. These reports provide executive awareness and help security teams and stakeholders understand the risks associated with products, applications, and assets to make informed decisions about remediation efforts. Reporting should be real-time and customizable to specific roles and business needs.
• Developer Experience and Collaboration: ASPM improves developers' experience by keeping them in established workflows and tooling through bi-directional integrations with ticketing and messaging systems and leveling up security knowledge through targeted training and knowledge bases.
• Compliance Monitoring and Reporting: ASPM helps organizations provide security assurance and prove compliance with relevant security standards, regulations, and best practices. This includes providing auditable paper trails to prove compliance with frameworks like OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and industry-specific standards like PCI and HIPAA.
• ‍Tool Rationalization: ASPM helps organizations see the level of tooling adoption, coverage, and overlap across the software development ecosystem to identify gaps, eliminate redundancies, and optimize tooling usage.

How does Application Security Posture Management compare with other security categories?

ASPM vs. SOAR

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) and ASPM are both cybersecurity tools but address different stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). SOAR excels at security response after applications are deployed. It automates incident response workflows and integrates with various security tools, enhancing collaboration among security operations teams, incident responders, and threat analysts.

ASPM, on the other hand, focuses on application security throughout the SDLC. It helps development teams proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities early in the development process, and lets AppSec and vulnerability management teams handle governance and guardrails across the SDLC. This "shift left" approach in security reduces the burden on security teams later and fosters collaboration between development, security, and operations teams (DevSecOps).

ASPM vs. AST

Unlike Application Security Testing (AST) tools that scan applications to identify security issues, ASPM does not scan code to find vulnerabilities. Application Security Testing encompasses many scanning techniques like Static Analysis (SAST), Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Dynamic Analysis (DAST), Container Scanning, Infrastructure as Code scanning, and more.

Often these various scan results are disconnected and produce large quantities of findings including false positives, duplicates, and findings that do not pose real risk.

ASPM addresses the limitations of AppSec testing by aggregating findings across scanning methodologies and holistically analyzing findings to distill the massive quantity of findings into the most critical. This makes it possible for developers to focus their remediation time on true positives with the biggest impact on risk and provides security teams visibility and controls to enforce security policies.

ASPM vs. CSPM

The differences between Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) go beyond the obvious of managing risk at the application versus cloud infrastructure level. One way to think about the difference is to think of ASPM as providing visibility by aggregating findings and CSPM as providing observability to natively detect issues. ASPM creates visibility across findings identified by AST tools to provide risk-based prioritization and manage the security posture of applications from design to development and production. CSPM observes the cloud infrastructure to natively detect and mitigate misconfigurations and risks in the cloud infrastructure.

ASPM vs. ASOC

ASPM and application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC) are complementary solutions with ASPM being inclusive of ASOC. ASOC solutions coordinate – or orchestrate – application security testing processes and consolidate scan results to correlate findings and prioritize remediation. ASPM takes the orchestration and correlation elements of ASOC and layers on DevSecOps practices, emphasizing visibility to facilitate a risk-based approach to application security. In many ways, ASPM can be seen as the evolution of ASOC.

ASPM vs. CNAPP

ASPM and Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) are both key solutions to secure cloud-native applications - especially as infrastructure as code (IaC) and containers expand the scope of coverage under the application layer. However, where ASPM focuses on visibility across the application layer (including container and IaC configuration files), CNAPP focuses on runtime observability and protection of the cloud ecosystem in which those applications run.

CNAPP integrates CSPM, cloud workload protection (CWPP), and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) to provide runtime protection and vulnerability scanning of containers, enforce Kubernetes and network policies, secure serverless functions, and integrate with cloud deployment and orchestration tools. Where CNAPP provides runtime protection of cloud-native applications in production, ASPM prevents risk introduction and improves security posture throughout the software development lifecycle. ASPM also brings a much heavier focus on application security, unifying it with the cloud security CNAPP covers, as well as bringing on-premises infrastructure security into view.

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Application Security Posture Management Tools

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tools come in various categories, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Here is the breakdown of ASPM tools into distinct categories:

AST Scanning Platforms/Suites

These tools focus on providing robust Application Security Testing (AST) capabilities through their proprietary scanning technologies. They are particularly beneficial for organizations that have standardized on a single platform, allowing for a streamlined security process. However, their limited extensibility and integration options often pose challenges for complex enterprises that require a more flexible and comprehensive security solution. In reality, most large organizations encounter difficulties in fully leveraging these tools due to the intricate nature of their IT environments.

Open-Source ASPM Tools

Open-source ASPM tools are ideal for smaller teams and organizations that are just beginning to develop their application security programs. These tools offer essential security features and are cost-effective, making them accessible for startups and smaller teams. However, they generally lack the advanced functionalities required to manage the complexities of large-scale enterprises and to optimize remediation efforts. As organizations grow, they often find the need to transition to more sophisticated solutions that can handle their increasing security demands.

ASPM as an Evolution of Software Supply Chain Vendors

These tools represent an evolution in ASPM by focusing on the integrity and security of the software supply chain. They emphasize CI/CD pipeline security and the shift-left approach, which integrates security earlier in the development process. While these solutions are excellent for maintaining the integrity of the continuous integration and delivery processes, they often have notable gaps when it comes to addressing runtime security. Organizations using these tools must supplement them with additional solutions to cover the full spectrum of application security needs.

Full Spectrum Specialized ASPM

These comprehensive ASPM tools are designed to unify and manage the entire software security ecosystem, providing end-to-end security across the application lifecycle. They are best suited for mature organizations with existing security tools and complex application portfolios. These solutions aim to reduce risk by offering advanced capabilities for in-house development security, vulnerability management, and more. They provide a cohesive approach to securing applications from development through to deployment and runtime, making them an excellent choice for organizations needing to secure their entire application landscape comprehensively.

Organizations can assess their security needs and choose the right solutions to enhance their application security posture effectively.

What should you consider when evaluating an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solution?

Here are some key questions to consider when evaluating an ASPM solution:

1. Does it integrate with the tools I use today? Does it integrate with the tools I will need tomorrow? Does it cover applications brought into my portfolio through mergers and acquisitions?

As a unifying layer, it is critical that your ASPM solution integrates with a breadth of scanners, ticketing systems, and CI/CD tools and is tool agnostic. This is important both for comprehensive visibility into security posture today and for ensuring flexibility as your security program matures and evolves. Some legacy AppSec scanning vendors acquire ASPM solutions to fill gaps and provide visibility across the disjointed tools within their ecosystem. Suppose you want to switch vendors or use a competing best-in-class testing solution (especially as new technologies emerge with new scanning needs). In that case, non-native tools are often not supported or at best deprioritized. Likewise, if you acquire applications or have business units that use different scanning tools, you would need to migrate to the vendor’s scanning solution first. A dedicated ASPM solution that is tool agnostic allows you to select best-in-class solutions, optimize your tooling, and reduce costs while managing risk across an evolving tool and application ecosystem.

2. What is the developer experience and impact on productivity?

ASPM solutions should simplify the developer experience providing developers with a smaller volume of tickets that include multiple related findings with workflow automation and clear remediation guidance. Ensure the solution integrates with your ticketing system and CI/CD tools – ideally with two-way APIs or fully-built plugins to optimize workflows. It should also provide visibility at the team and individual developer levels to provide the right alerts to the right developer at the right time and in the right environment.

3. Does it cover my governance and reporting needs?

Governance and insightful reporting are crucial features of an ASPM solution. Given the various industry regulations concerning application and product security, an ASPM solution should generate customizable and role-based reports that can communicate the current state of risk, compliance, and progress over time. Here again, the breadth of integrations and the flexibility of a dedicated ASPM solution make it easy to manage security posture and provide governance across business units that may have different tooling.

4. Will it help burn down my critical security technical debt?

By proactively identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities early in development, ASPM can significantly reduce the backlog of security issues that need to be addressed later (security tech debt). This risk-based approach empowers developers with the tools and knowledge they need to fix problems themselves, while also providing data and metrics to guide decision-making. Choosing the right ASPM platform and processes can not only reduce new security risks and overall business risks but also improve developer productivity and collaboration between security and development teams.

Our comprehensive ASPM buyer's guide equips you to evaluate different options and make an informed decision based on your requirements.

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Use Cases

Application Security Posture

ASPM provides a comprehensive view of your software portfolio's security vulnerabilities. It helps you identify areas of weakness and prioritize remediation efforts based on risk. This enables the organizations to understand and improve the state of software risk across the application portfolio.

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Instead of just listing every vulnerability found, ASPM continuously assesses and mitigates risks associated with vulnerabilities across applications and infrastructure. It considers factors like the exploitability of the vulnerability, the value of the targeted assets, business context, and the likelihood of an attack to determine risk. This helps in the effective prioritization and remediation of vulnerabilities.

Software Supply Chain Monitoring

With the increasing use of open-source and third-party components in modern software, it's crucial to understand the security risks they may introduce. ASPM helps with automated SBOM monitoring and CI/CD Posture Management. This enables organizations to ensure that they are on top of their software supply chain, quickly identifying new vulnerabilities and gating releases according to their set processes.

DevSecOps

ASPM integrates seamlessly with DevSecOps pipelines, allowing security checks to be automated throughout the development lifecycle. This "shift left" approach enables developers to identify and fix vulnerabilities early in the coding process before they become bigger problems later. ASPM empowers developers with the automation and orchestration of DevSecOps workflows along with the knowledge they need to address security concerns independently. This eliminates manual processes and cumbersome cross-team handoffs, fostering friction-free collaboration between development, security, and operations teams.

Compliance Management

ASPM helps organizations ensure their applications comply with various security regulations and industry standards. It does this by providing continuous monitoring of security posture, generating reports that demonstrate compliance, and proven SLA adherence. This streamlines the auditing process and reduces the risk of non-compliance penalties.

Gain visibility and manage your application risk with a dedicated ASPM solution from ArmorCode

ArmorCode delivers holistic visibility into your application security posture with industry-leading integrations and a tool-agnostic dedicated AI-powered ASPM  solution.

ArmorCode’s solution is singularly focused on helping you manage, measure, and mature a secure software development lifecycle no matter where your applications run or what tools you use. ArmorCode has processed billions of findings, helping enterprises of all sizes, from small security teams to Fortune 500 leaders, scale their security effectiveness by more than 10x and maximize their ROI on existing security investments

• Unify application security findings and create visibility across applications, infrastructure, cloud, and containers with 250+ integrations
• Prioritize findings based on correlation and adaptive risk scoring to focus on the issues that matter
• Automate security testing and remediation workflows to increase agility and collaboration between developers and security

ArmorCode’s AI-powered Application Security Posture Management gives you 360-degree visibility into your application security posture to help you shift from chasing vulnerabilities to reducing risk.