What is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?
ASPM is the phenomenon transforming DeSecOps workflows and helping enterprises make secure software delivery a reality. In today’s advanced threat landscape, it’s hard to maintain a healthy application security posture without a robust ASPM program.
In short, ASPM is an integrated and comprehensive approach to application security. But this is an over-simplified statement. Hence, we’ve put together this article debunks what ASPM is, and how organizations can use it to improve their security posture.
Introduction to Application Security Posture Management
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.
How is Application Security Posture Management Different From Traditional Approaches?
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.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Platform Diagram
Why is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) important?
ASPM brings orderliness to existing DevSecOps workflows thanks to its comprehensive approach to application security. Without it, DevSecOps teams are prone to facing clutter and chaos pertaining to their security posture. Here are a few reasons why ASPM is important for enterprises:
Increasing Cybersecurity Threat Landscape
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.
Growing Complexity of Software Applications and Tech Stack
Modern applications and tech stacks are becoming significantly more complex to maintain thanks to microservices, containers, and third-party integrations. This complexity combined with accelerated release cycles, introduces significant security challenges. ASPM addresses this by offering a holistic view of an application’s security posture.
Siloed Security and DevOps Data Due to Tool Sprawl
With siloed distributed teams often relying on their own tooling for DevOps and Security, there is a risk of security information becoming fragmented and difficult to manage. ASPM breaks down this silos by centralizing security data from across all tools and processes in the SDLC, fostering collaboration between security and DevOps teams.
Emerging Regulatory Demands
Regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, etc., are placing increasing demands on organizations to maintain robust security postures. Non-compliance can result in severe penalties and reputational damage. ASPM helps organizations enforce security standards, providing a clear audit trail for compliance, and ensuring integrity with each software release.
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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
A robust Application Security Testing (AST) framework is the starting point to effective ASPM. AST refers to test types such as SAST, DAST, SCA, IaC & Environment Security, Container & Build Security, etc., which identify vulnerabilities in different stages of SDLC. This ensures proactive testing and reduced production vulnerabilities.
Risk Triage & Prioritization
Not all vulnerabilities impact a prod environment. A risk triage system that evaluates threats based on criticality, severity and impact reduces chaos and provides clarity. With ASPM, teams can prioritize risks, and focus on the most critical issues first, 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 system downtime. With this, ASPM ensures there are processes in place to investigate, remediate, and learn from security incidents. This will help teams minimize damage and recover more quickly.
Continuous Security Monitoring
Continuous security monitoring is essential because 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 detect threats in real-time, mitigate risks and maintain a strong security posture.
Team Collaboration
Breaking down silos between DevOps and Security teams improves collaboration, and ensures that security is prioritized from the very beginning of SDLC. This fosters better communication, improves response times, and promotes joint ownership for maintaining a healthy security posture of applications.
Governance & Auditability
Security guardrails enable dev teams to develop software in a secure and timely manner, which is crucial at large enterprises running critical business functions. Audits ensure that every security action, from testing to remediation, is documented and traceable making it easier to demonstrate compliance.
What are the critical capabilities of an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solution?
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, unifying all security-related data from across the organization. This should provide real-time visibility into security activities, allowing Security teams to monitor vulnerabilities, threats, exceptions, and compliance statuses at a glance.
Aggregate AST Findings
This is a non-negotiable. The solution must natively perform AppSec tests or at least aggregate results from other security tools – SAST, DAST, SCA, Secrets Scanning, Vulnerability Management, etc. Unifying test results eliminates the risk of siloed data, helping teams correlate findings and manage risks better.
Software Inventory / Delivery-BOM
The solution must have a software inventory of sorts – a Software Delivery Bill of Materials (D-BOM) to track all open source packages, including third-party libraries and dependencies. This provides greater transparency, helping teams quickly identify compromised components during vulnerability assessments.
Integration with CI/CD Pipeline
Integrating with other DevOps and security tools in CI/CD pipeline can help aggregate data as well as automate security checks without slowing release velocity. This also helps with continuous monitoring and enforcement of security policies as and when the code is checked-in, thus improving release velocity.
Real Time Threat Detection
Real-time threat detection helps respond to security threats and zero day exploits as and when reported. Ensuring vulnerabilities/ breaches are detected immediately, reduces the window of exposure and minimizes damage. This highlights why analyzing security signals is a key component of ASPM.
Risk Assessment & Management
The solution must be able to evaluate vulnerabilities and threats based on factors like exploitability, impact, and business criticality. This is a critical ASPM feature which will help organizations prioritize the most serious risks and focus remediation efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
Remediation and Automation
An ideal ASPM solution is one which can assist dev teams with security fixes and recommend techniques to quickly address vulnerabilities. This accelerates remediation, and reduces the time it takes to resolve issues. This way, automated remediation improves MTTR and reduces 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 checking code for compliance and automatically blocking non-compliant deployments. Thus, establishing governance reduces manual intervention, playing a key role in ASPM.
Support for Regulatory Compliances
With growing regulatory demands on enterprises, ASPM solutions are expected to provide built-in support for industry-specific compliance requirements (NIST, FedRAMP, OWASP, etc.). Generating compliance reports to prove audit trails further helps organizations display adherence to industry regulations.
Scalability & Flexibility
Organizations and teams must be able to evolve their ASPM program overtime. Not only will new technologies cause disruption, even teams will grow in size. Thus, scalability, flexibility to adapt to new architectures (microservices/ containers) and handle increasing workloads is critical in the long run.
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.
Top 5 Use Cases of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)
ASPM offers tangible benefits for organizations looking to reduce the attack surface, decrease MTTR, and enhance their AppSec posture. Here are 5 real-world scenarios that demonstrate ASPM’s value proposition.
Continuous Compliance Monitoring
Problem Statement:
Organizations operating in Industries like healthcare, finance, and e-commerce, must strictly adhere to regulatory requirements. As regulations evolve and grow, ensuring compliance becomes an ongoing challenge. Besides, manual checks are time-consuming and error-prone.
ASPM Role:
- ASPM solutions automatically enforce security policies to comply with regulatory requirements.
- Continuous security monitoring ensures compliance in real-time with detailed audit reports.
- Audit-trails also track all security actions and help demonstrate compliance during audits.
Business Impact:
- Automated compliance monitoring reduces the manual overhead needed to display adherence to policy regulations.
- Compliance monitoring also reduces the risk of costly fines, penalties, and reputational damage from non-compliance, providing peace of mind during regulatory audits.
DevSecOps Integration for Secure CI/CD Pipelines
Problem Statement:
In modern software development, agility is critical. However, rapid software delivery using CI/CD pipelines increases the risk of vulnerabilities in the absence of security checks. DevOps teams need to release code quickly without sacrificing security.
ASPM Role:
- ASPM solutions integrate directly into CI/CD pipelines and perform security checks at every stage of SDLC.
- ASPM automates vulnerability scans, policy enforcement, and remediation suggestions, ensuring only secure code is deployed to production.
- By shifting security to the left, ASPM addresses security issues without slowing down releases.
Business Impact:
- This integration accelerates software releases while maintaining a high level of security.
- DevSecOps teams can work more efficiently, knowing that security vulnerabilities will be caught early in the development process.
Real-Time Threat Detection and Response
Problem Statement:
Cyber threats can appear at any time and target prod or any other stage of the SDLC. Organizations may not discover vulnerabilities until it is too late without real-time visibility into security threats, which could result in expensive breaches, data loss, or operational disruption.
ASPM Role:
- Applications are continuously monitored in real-time by ASPM solutions for vulnerabilities, unusual activity, and possible threats. When a threat is identified, notifications are triggered.
- Applications in staging, production, and development environments can all be observed.
- A few ASPM solutions reduce the requirement for manual intervention by helping with automatic remediation activities.
Business Impact:
- Real-time threat detection shortens the attack window and improves the organization's capacity to react quickly to security lapses.
- This minimizes impact caused by security breaches.
Cross-Functional Collaboration Between Security and DevOps Teams
Problem Statement:
In many organizations, security teams and DevOps teams operate in silos, leading to miscommunication, delayed responses, lack of ownership, and inconsistent enforcement of security policies. This disconnect creates inefficiencies and increases the risk of vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks.
ASPM Role:
- ASPM solutions provide a centralized platform with unified security data which both teams can access in real-time.
- ASPM fosters clear communication and a unified process for managing threats and gaining AppSec visibility
- Security teams can define and enforce policies, while DevOps teams can receive alerts and remediation guidance within their workflows.
Business Impact:
- Bridging the gap between security and DevOps teams improves efficiency in addressing vulnerabilities, leading to faster and more effective responses.
- Streamlined communication reduces friction, fostering collaboration, and ensuring policies are consistently applied across the SDLC, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities going unaddressed.
Risk Prioritization and Vulnerability Management
Problem Statement:
Modern applications often contain thousands of vulnerabilities, but not all of them pose an immediate threat. Security teams need to prioritize vulnerabilities based on the level of risk they pose to the business, ensuring that the most critical issues are addressed first.
ASPM Role:
- ASPM solutions provide automated risk assessment to prioritize vulnerabilities based on severity, exploitability, and potential business impact.
- ASPM solutions correlate vulnerability data from different testing tools and environments, helping teams to focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most.
- Mature solutions provide actionable insights for remediating and prioritizing vulnerabilities.
Business Impact:
- Organizations can allocate resources more effectively to first address the high-risk vulnerabilities.
- Focusing on critical issues can save businesses precious time and resources which will otherwise be spent on low-impact / low-priority vulnerabilities.
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.
Why Risk Prioritization Matters
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.
Why Risk Management Matters
Risk Management is more than just identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities; it’s about developing a comprehensive approach to efficiently mitigate security risks. Risk management includes:
- Automated Remediation Assistance: ASPM platforms offer actionable insights and recommendations to quickly address risks
- Continuous Risk Assessment: ASPM platforms perform real-time monitoring and reassessment of risks as threats are constantly evolving.
Optimized resource allocation, faster remediation, and reduced business disruption are among the obvious benefits of Risk Management.
Common Gaps in ASPM Tools
While most ASPM solutions in the market today are mature in terms of functionality, there may be gaps stopping from being a wholesome ASPM solution. Below are some of the most critical features that we find lacking in various solutions. While evaluating different tools, ensure these functionalities are not missing as they may prove critical to get a comprehensive security posture of the application.
01
Some ASPM solutions might require you to replace your existing tools with their own tool set. This is a major red flag. A good ASPM solution must give you the flexibility to use any open source tool or ingest data from your existing tools.
02
Some tools might send you alerts if any policy is violated, but won’t take any further action. That makes these tools no different from a traditional alerting/ monitoring solution. A tool like OpsMx Delivery Shield will not just send you alerts, but also enforce policies in case of violations.
03
Many tools do not store a system of record of security actions taken. This is a critical functionality in today’s highly regulated industries where compliance adherence is mandatory. Having such a system of record also helps during audits to demonstrate compliance.
04
Incomplete coverage of security tools is a pain point commonly faced by numerous security engineers. An ASPM solution by definition is a platform that offers a holistic view of security posture by integrating with all security tools. A lack of this will make SecOps challenging in the long run.
05
Lack of posture visibility while in different stages of the SDLC (like testing, staging, QA, etc.) is dangerous to application security. Offering visibility exclusively of the prod environment means your team will only ever know of security issues after it’s already live and active.
Checklist: How to Evaluate an ASPM Platform?
You can evaluate an ASPM platform based on the below factors:
Centralized DevSecOps Dashboard- Does it have a centralized dashboard providing comprehensive insights on security posture, compliance statuses, alongside basic reporting capabilities?
Aggregate AST Findings- Can the platform integrate with other AppSec tools and ingest data from them? For ex: SAST, DAST, SCA, Secrets, Container security tools, etc.
Software-BOM / Delivery-BOM- Does it support you in creation of a Software or Delivery Bill of Materials? This is like an inventory of all components used in your software application.
Integration with CI/CD Pipeline- Does it have the ability to integrate with other DevOps or CI/CD pipeline tools and ingest data from them? This must be non-negotiable.
Real Time Threat Detection- Does it natively provide capabilities or atleast integrate with threat intelligence tools to detect risks in a timely manner?
Risk Assessment & Vulnerability Management- Can it assess the risk posture/ status of a vulnerability and assign each vulnerability a rating? This is crucial for developer productivity.
Remediation and Automation- Does the tool have the ability to assist your security team and developers with remediation assistance and/or suggestions? This is a bonus feature.
Automated Policy Enforcement-Can the tool help you enforce industry regulations or custom organization-specific policies?
Support for Regulatory Compliances- Does it natively support compliance frameworks such as NIST 800-53 or FedRAMP or OpenSSF ScoreCard or OWASP Top 10?
Scalability & Flexibility- Can the tool accommodate a growing number of users over the years and be flexible enough to meet your specific business needs?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) with OpsMx Delivery Shield
In today’s complex and ever-evolving threat landscape, having a solution that can manage your end-to-end security posture is not just optional, but essential. OpsMx offers a comprehensive suite of solutions designed to help enterprises manage their application security posture.
OpsMx Delivery Shield stands out as a powerful Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, designed to deliver comprehensive security, proactive risk mitigation, continuous compliance, and full visibility into your risk posture – all while seamlessly integrating into your existing tech stack.
How OpsMx Delivery Shield is Unique
Risk Prioritization and Vulnerability Management
OpsMx Delivery Shield makes sure security teams focus on the most serious threats first by continuously assessing vulnerabilities based on severity, exploitability, and business impact. Risk scores are calculated by combining data from many sources, including NVD and KEV Catalog, SAST, DAST, and IAST tools.
Shift Left Application Security Testing
OpsMx Delivery Shield supports automated Application Security Testing by integrating with other DevOps and Security tools. Instead of waiting till the end of the software development lifecycle, developers can detect and fix flaws as they write code, reducing the complexity of costly fixes and saving time.
Operational Visibility with DevSecOps Control Plane
OpsMx Delivery Shield offers unparalleled operational visibility through its centralized DevSecOps dashboard, offering a holistic view of security posture across the application lifecycle. This helps manage risks, investigate policy violations, monitor compliance statuses, and track all open vulnerabilities and exceptions.
Compliance Automation and Policy Enforcement
OpsMx Delivery Shield automates compliance monitoring and policy enforcement with built-in support for regulatory frameworks such as NIST 800-53, MITRE ATT&CK, FedRAMP, OpenSSF ScoreCard, OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities, CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes, and NSA CISA Top 10, as well as support for custom policies.
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