Key Components of an ASPM Program
An effective ASPM program is built on several foundational components. These components ensure that security is not an afterthought, rather a key focus area for teams throughout the SDLC. These also establish the structure necessary for managing risks and ensuring compliance.
Robust AST Framework
New vulnerabilities are reported almost daily, expanding the cybersecurity threat landscape. Enterprises must ensure these threats or CVEs do not infiltrate their codebase or impact the software supply chain. ASPM provides proactive visibility and defense, helping organizations stay ahead of emerging threats and continuously secure their applications.
Risk Triage & Prioritization
Not all threats are critical to an application deployed to prod. Hence a risk triage system that evaluates vulnerabilities based on severity and potential impact reduces chaos and provides clarity. ASPM helps prioritize risks, allowing teams to focus on the most critical issues first, thus ensuring resources are allocated efficiently to address high-risk vulnerabilities.
Incident Response Plan
A comprehensive Incident Response Plan (IRP) helps address security breaches, vulnerabilities, or any other kind of system downtime. This component of an ASPM program ensures that there are defined processes in place to investigate, remediate, and learn from security incidents. This will also help teams minimize damage from security breaches and recover more quickly.
Continuous Security Monitoring
Continuous security monitoring is an essential aspect of ASPM because security threats can emerge at any time. Applications need to be constantly monitored for vulnerabilities, threats, and compliance issues throughout the SDLC. With continuous monitoring, teams can thus detect threats in real-time, mitigate risks and maintain a strong security posture.
Team Collaboration
Breaking down silos between DevOps and Security teams is a key component of ASPM. Collaboration ensures that security is integrated into the SDLC from the very beginning. Such a collaborative approach to application development fosters better communication, faster response times, and a shared responsibility for maintaining the security posture of applications.
Governance & Auditability
Establishing security guardrails helps engineering teams develop and deploy software in a secure and timely manner. This is especially critical for large enterprises running critical business functions. Audits ensure that every security action, from testing to remediation, is documented and traceable which makes demonstrating regulatory compliance (HIPPA, GDPR, PCI-DSS) easier.
Key Components of an ASPM Program
When evaluating an ASPM tool for your organization, you must ensure that the components discussed in the previous section translate into product capabilities. These capabilities will help you automate security workflows, stay compliant with policies, and manage the AppSec posture holistically, from vulnerability detection to remediation. The capabilities to look out for are:
Centralized DevSecOps Dashboard
The solution must comprise a centralized DevSecOps dashboard, i.e., a unified interface that brings together all security-related data from across the organization. It should be able to provide real-time visibility into security activities, allowing DevOps and security teams to monitor vulnerabilities, threats, exceptions, and compliance statuses at a glance. More like a command center for managing the application security posture, ensuring that no security issues go unnoticed.
Aggregate AST Findings
This is a non-negotiable. The product must either natively have the ability to perform AST or aggregate results from all tools used for application security – SAST, DAST, SCA, Secrets Scanning & Management, IaC & Environment Security, Binary/ Image Scanning, Artefact Management, Vulnerability Management, and Compliance-as-Code. This unified view eliminates the risk of fragmented data, helps teams correlate findings and detect vulnerabilities more efficiently across the SDLC.
Software Inventory / Delivery-BOM
Having the know-how of the components that make up your application is a key feature of any ASPM solution. The solution must have a software inventory of sorts – a Delivery Bill of Materials (D-BOM) which tracks all the software packages used including third-party libraries and dependencies. The BOM provides full transparency, enabling quick identification of affected components during vulnerability assessments – critical to securing the entire software supply chain.
Integration with CI/CD Pipeline
Seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines can help you aggregate data easily from the DevOps ecosystem as well as automate security checks without hindering release velocity. This capability helps with continuous monitoring and enforcement of security policies as and when the code is built, tested, and deployed. By automating security with DevOps workflows, you can ensure that security is always in sync with development velocity.
Remediation and Automation
An ideal ASPM solution will assist dev teams with security fixes and recommend remediation techniques/ steps in order to quickly address vulnerabilities in code. This accelerates the process of addressing security risks, reducing the time it takes to resolve issues. Thus, automated remediation helps improve MTTR and reduce the burden on security teams.
Automated Policy Enforcement
Automated policy enforcement ensures that security standards and policies are consistently applied throughout the SDLC. This includes automatically checking code for compliance and preventing non-compliant deployments from reaching production. This technique of setting up governance without manual intervention buys into the ideology of ASPM.
Integration with CI/CD Pipeline
Seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines can help you aggregate data easily from the DevOps ecosystem as well as automate security checks without hindering release velocity. This capability helps with continuous monitoring and enforcement of security policies as and when the code is built, tested, and deployed. By automating security with DevOps workflows, you can ensure that security is always in sync with development velocity.
Remediation and Automation
An ideal ASPM solution will assist dev teams with security fixes and recommend remediation techniques/ steps in order to quickly address vulnerabilities in code. This accelerates the process of addressing security risks, reducing the time it takes to resolve issues. Thus, automated remediation helps improve MTTR and reduce the burden on security teams.
Core Business Benefits of ASPM
Business benefits of ASPM connect security improvements to tangible business outcomes, making it appealing to both business and technical audiences.
Proactive Risk Mitigation
ASPM recommends continuous application monitoring, urging teams to proactively identify and resolve vulnerabilities before they become critical. This minimizes security gaps and prevents incidents.
Enhanced Application Security Visibility
ASPM offers a centralized view of security signals, compliance statuses and vulnerabilities across the SDLC, helping organizations get comprehensive insights on the security posture of applications.
Enhanced Developer Productivity
By enforcing guardrails and automating security workflows, ASPM reduces the burden on developers. Its recommendation to prioritize Shift Left allows developers to focus on innovation rather than security.
Increased Compliance and Audit Readiness
ASPM provides automated policy enforcement, continuous monitoring, and comprehensive reporting that make compliance an ongoing process rather than a one-time effort. This also ensures audit-readiness.
Faster Time-to-Market
Automated security workflows along with proactive vulnerability detection and remediation reduces delays arising due to security risks. This helps organizations be agile in a competitive and fast-moving market.
Strengthened Customer Trust and Brand Reputation
A strong security posture not only protects sensitive customer data but also helps build and maintain trust. ASPM’s ability to safeguard applications strengthens brand reputation and fosters positivity.
ASPM Best Practices
As cited earlier in this guide, ASPM is becoming increasingly important for enterprises, especially the large ones. Gartner predicts that by 2026, over 40% of organizations will adopt ASPM, compared to just 5% in 2023. ASPM is proving to be the foundational security model for software companies. Here are the ASPM best practices that you must ensure is implemented correctly.
Shift Left Security in SDLC
Early integration of security workflows to detect and fix vulnerabilities before they reach production.
DevSecOps integration within
CI/CD Pipelines
Secure CI/CD pipelines with DevSecOps practices by automating and enforcing security policies.
Policy Enforcement & Compliance Monitoring
Automate policy enforcement and compliance monitoring in order to adhere to industry regulations.
Risk-Based Prioritization
Focus on high-impact vulnerabilities to remediate threats that pose the greatest threat to the business.
Team Collaboration
Improve harmony by fostering collaboration, and eliminating silos between DevOps and Security teams.
Active SBOM & DBOM
Maintain an up-to-date inventory of all software packages, dependencies, and open source libraries used.
Risk Prioritization and Risk Management in
ASPM Platform
Risk Prioritization and Risk Management are among the most indispensable features of any Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solution. Why? Because not all vulnerabilities carry the same level of risk. And with new vulnerabilities reported each day, security teams must approach vulnerability management in a strategic way that allocates resources to first address risks posing the greatest threat to the business.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
The sheer volume of vulnerabilities, (like zero-day exploits), can overwhelm security teams if they are not equipped with tools that can highlight issues that require immediate attention. Risk Prioritization helps teams prioritize vulnerabilities by assigning a risk score based on factors such as severity, exploitability, potential impact, and business criticality. This can help them prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities over low-risk ones, optimizing for both time and resources.
Note: OpsMx Delivery Shield leverages NVD (National Vulnerability Database), KEV Catalog (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) and CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) to assign a risk-score to vulnerabilities.
Risk-Based Prioritization
Focus on high-impact vulnerabilities to remediate threats that pose the greatest threat to the business.
Team Collaboration
Improve harmony by fostering collaboration, and eliminating silos between DevOps and Security teams.
Active SBOM & DBOM
Maintain an up-to-date inventory of all software packages, dependencies, and open source libraries used.
What is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a modern approach to improving an organization’s security posture by providing a holistic view from across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). While the concept of ‘Application Security’ has been around for a while, ASPM has been gaining traction because it brings Continuous Posture Management to application security.
ASPM is a consolidation of various application security test results, policy checks, and a threat remediation program to get a single source of truth for identifying, correlating, and prioritizing security risks. Ultimately, with an ASPM program, organizations can get visibility into their security posture across every stage of SDLC, improve developer productivity, and stay compliant with industry regulations.
Why Risk Management Matters
While earlier approaches like Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC) focussed on addressing security risks in pre-production code with the use of AppSec testing techniques (like SAST and SCA), ASPM encompasses a wider spectrum of activities including incident management, continuous security monitoring, compliance and policy enforcement.
Gartner defined ASPM as “a solution that analyzes security signals across software development, deployment and operation to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities and enforce controls”.
Gartner also predicted in a recent report that by 2026, over 40% of organizations developing their own applications will adopt ASPM to swiftly detect and remediate security issues, a significant rise from just 5% in 2023.