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Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tools collect and analyze security-related data from various third-party tools, resources, and code repositories in order to identify and prioritize potential vulnerabilities in the security and operational development of deployable applications. 

Using ASPMs in their day-to-day workflow activities, organizations can refocus their attention on addressing the most critical issues within the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC), giving them more time and opportunity to put the safeguards in place that will ultimately avoid an imminent attack, should new threats or vulnerabilities ever arise.

Based on their perceived level of severity and potential impact on the application build, including all aspects of code, infrastructure, APIs, and cloud computing, ASPMs will work in the background to provide:

• Application security (AppSec) enhancements
• Comprehensive risk management
• Improved developer productivity
• Strong security integration and compliance
• Rapid innovation and delivery of high-quality, secure software products
• Trust, reliability and end-user loyalty
  

The Need For ASPM: Why is ASPM Important Today?

When it comes to application security (AppSec), Gartner defines Application Security Posture Management tools, or ASPM for short, with the ability to “continuously manage application risk through collection, analysis and prioritization of security issues from across the software life cycle (SDLC).”

In doing so, Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tools can: 

• Identify new threats and security vulnerabilities
• Collect, analyze, and prioritize security issues for immediate mitigation
• Reduce deployment and time to market with faster SDLCs and new feature updates
• Minimize development delays and technical debt caused by security reviews or bug fixes
• Improves remediation while reducing any and all vulnerability triage
• Create a central dashboard for all AppSec findings and discoveries
• Allow organizations to minimize risks, protect sensitive data, and prevent against breach
• Ensure regulatory compliance in governance with new laws and SLAs
• Shield all applications from new and impending cyber attacks
• Strengthen developer productivity while minimizing the burnout of development teams
• Administer and automate security tools for the implementation of new security policies
• Improve the application security posture while reducing the risk of everbeing hacked
• Minimize bottlenecks in the SDLC and eliminate redundancies across tools and functions

By proactively identifying, organizing, and mitigating vulnerabilities during early software development, development and engineering teams can significantly reduce the technical debt, or backlog, as it relates to potential security issues in real time. And by calling attention to the critical nature of each metric, ASPMs provide development teams with a priority queue of items that need to be addressed before true threats and vulnerabilities actually arise.

What are the looming threats inside the digital landscape nowadays?

According to ArmorCode, “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.”

Most organizations aim to develop a strong, transparent ecosystem, void of breach, compliance violation, and exploitation. And as long as there’s an ongoing need to create dynamic, responsive and ultra secure platforms and applications, development teams often feel the pressure of compromising quality software lifecycles (SDLC) for quicker turnaround times and the claim  of “first to market.” 

Technology is working smarter. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used as a tool to either improve — or attack — our business communities. And with all the bad actors out in the world, we need to do our best to keep our vulnerabilities under wraps by eliminating bugs and avoiding rework in the process. 

There’s an app for everything, and all kinds of applications are being developed at unprecedented rates. They’re becoming more complex, and securing our blindspots is essential to the development pipeline. 

We need to safeguard our applications and secure all sensitive data. But bad actors are finding new ways to orchestrate ransomware and cyberattacks. We need to secure all protocol. This means starting at surface level, we need to build a fortress against deep penetration. And with regulatory requirements mounting, overwhelmed developers are losing productivity — especially when it comes to the manual development, testing, and reporting of high-level software solutions. 

Thankfully, ASPM tools allow us to audit, mitigate, and deliver our software much more quickly and efficiently.

The limitations of traditional security measures

Traditionally, large organizations have always relied on manual processes between and even larger cybersecurity teams to manage their application security posture. Often time-consuming, inefficient, and highly ineffective, we’d see development teams fall further and further behind trying to get ahead. 

As one stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) would near finish, the cybersecurity team would point out vulnerabilities that were created at the beginning of the SDLC, and the development team would have to rework the entire project. As more vulnerabilities would stack up, the more technical debt the development team would have to endure. 

With a rapidly evolving threat landscape and the demands of more complex technologies, we’re seeing the need for collaboration at an unprecedented rate. Disconnected tools make it challenging to manage vulnerabilities efficiently.

Cyber security professionals must join forces with developers to identify and fix the issues as early in the process as it may be possible to reduce the risk of an unnecessary data breach or other security incidents that could happen when no one is looking, including:

• Identifying and fixing any and all security flaws that could be exploited
• Implementing security controls against critical attacks
• Setting best practice strategies for the development and deployment of code
• Testing applications and systems for security vulnerabilities

By working together, cybersecurity professionals can help developers create some of the most secure software applications and systems resistant to attack.

By bridging the gaps left by manual security processes, for example, startups are able to make more informed decisions with a much smaller team. And they can learn how to allocate their resources to best protect their applications against vulnerabilities and threats. By pulling data from traditional security tools and automating their processes, they can now map out dependencies and data flow, further allowing the system to map out and strengthen the functionality of the final application build. 

In addition to vulnerability management, ASPM tools strengthen ongoing risk assessment and compliance monitoring efforts by automating the many tasks associated with vulnerability management and security posture assessments. This allows the organization to act more strategically when catering to more pressing matters.

Although the operational costs of AppSec programs can be somewhat pricey, traditional security measures can’t keep up with the demands of today’s development, making them quite the investment and obviously well worth it. 

How ASPM fixes the common shortcomings of traditional security protocols.

By using Application Security Posture Management tools, businesses are becoming more scalable at a much faster rate. And through scalability, there’s less need for manual oversight by dedicated cybersecurity teams at the frontline of an attack. 

ASPMs conveniently integrate into existing security infrastructure, providing both development and engineering teams with  a more unified view of security protocols. This allows them to identify issues much sooner in the SDLC and prioritize the vulnerabilities that pose as risks. It also allows them to streamline the development process, automate certain cybersecurity protocols, and access security posture reporting at any given moment in time.

We can program ASPM tools to automate tasks associated with security monitoring and incident response, resulting in faster detection and response times to security incidents and ultimately reducing the risk of a breach across systems. In fact, smaller organizations can now be more proactive when identifying vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across their applications and infrastructure — even with smaller teams. 

Startups often rely heavily on open-source components and pre-built solutions to accelerate development.  And ASPM tools can be particularly valuable to them when identifying vulnerabilities as they relate to open-source software and third-party libraries. Many of these assets can introduce vulnerabilities that may not be immediately apparent. And in order to proactively scan for the latest malware and harmful SQL injections, they need to stay diligent and on top of their security posture.

ASPM tools can help both startups and smaller organizations to improve their security posture by providing visibility into the security configurations of their applications and infrastructure, further ensuring that their systems are configured securely and in accordance with today’s best practices, while allowing them to focus on other areas of the business.

This developer-first approach to vulnerability and application security posture management promotes collaboration and allows teams to integrate security protocol into the very first stages of the development pipeline, giving both developers and engineers the tools they need to identify security-related issues on their own and fix them during the development process. 

The 12 Core Functionalities of ASPM Tools:

1. Aggregate Application Security Testing Findings
2. Risk-Based Analysis
3. Remediation and Automation
4. Integration with DevSecOps Pipeline
5. Reporting
6. Developer Experience and Collaboration
7. Compliance Monitoring and Reporting
8. Tool Rationalization
9. Up-to-date inventory
10. Contextual insights
11. Data Awareness
12. Drift Awareness

1. Aggregate application security testing findings

The ASPM simplifies reporting on behalf of the organization, consolidating incoming threat intelligence from multiple sources into this single dashboard — and allowing decision-makers to make more thorough decisions during rapid software delivery. 

With a unique set of scanning tools and metrics in place, ASPMs are a means of centralizing those security findings and continually scanning for new data from multiple tools and resources. By testing and aggregating the results in an easy-to-digest format and triggering cybersecurity tools, developers can then protect the organization against a full-fledged attack. 

Because the ASPM is continuously running in the background, testing can be conducted at all levels of granularity from build to production and developers are more aware of the risks at the source code. But by proactively addressing vulnerabilities early, organizations can significantly improve their overall application security posture and reduce the attack surface for potential threats. 

2. Risk-based analysis

Using a single dashboard for analyzing critical data, the ASPM provides engineers and developers with a simplified view of the potential risks encountered in the development of new tools and applications. 

By breaking down its findings in real time, the ASPM will use a risk-based analysis to prioritize threats and vulnerabilities based on impact, the level of severity, urgency, and the individual needs of the business and its clients. It will also provide a detailed breakdown of  where vulnerable software components and applications are, the status of issue resolution for each, and any policy and compliance violations therein.

This ensures that the most critical threats are addressed first, allowing organizations to allocate resources effectively and respond swiftly to each potential breach. 

3. Remediation and automation

Security teams can only mitigate threats and vulnerabilities that they know to exist. ASPM automation reduces the manual workload for developers and engineers across the SDLC, running in the background to identify, assess and fix certain vulnerabilities while allowing developers to advance the software pipeline for deployment and delivery. 

 ASPM tools help security teams improve the Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) through more efficient remediation workflows, automating and orchestrating tasks like ticket creation, escalating those tickets, and pushing Slack notifications when updating the team. 

4. Integration with DevSecOps Pipeline

ASPM (Application Security Posture Management) tools provide a framework that encourage collaboration between engineering, development, and security teams. And security is integrated at every stage of not just the software development lifecycle but also the DevSecOps pipeline. 

In this situation, ASPM tools help organizations understand, manage, and improve their security posture by automating security checks throughout  a CI/CD-based workflow to reduce unnecessary risk, speed up both compliance and reporting, and boost developer productivity for the overall health and well-being of the organization. 

Dependency mapping can be invaluable for designing security policies or optimizing an organization’s application architecture. Right in line with the concept of DevOps, ASPM tools establish mechanisms for ongoing feedback from stakeholders, use data on emerging security threats and evolving compliance requirements to continuously improve, monitor, and evaluate the security posture at every stage of the development. 

As a result, developers can reduce costs for rework and future-proof the SDLC by catching vulnerabilities as they occur and making code adjustments earlier in the pipeline — rather than building up technical debt that must be mitigated before an application can be deployed to market. 

5. Reporting

ASPMs provide developers, stakeholders, and engineers with detailed reporting on the security postures and compliances currently in place across the organization.  By gathering relevant data points and standard workflow patterns, ASPMs are great at actively scanning the progress of complex processes currently underway, while mirroring the findings of testing and remediation into a consolidated view of the application scope. In this fashion, reporting is dynamic, unrelient solely on the static, transactional data that has already been completed. 

6. Developer experience and collaboration

Developer happiness is often overlooked when optimizing the SDLC of any startup or larger organization. And unfortunately, happy developers tend to be more productive, more innovative, and perform much better under strict deadlines.

Application Security Posture Management is a game-changer for developers and organizations. By combining application security and infrastructure vulnerability management into a single platform, ASPMs streamline workflows, reduce the burden on developers, and enhance the overall security of each project they work on. Ultimately, ASPMs have the power to create

• Happier, more productive developers who can focus on innovation rather than administrative tasks
• Stronger, more resilient businesses and security frameworks
• Faster development cycles, higher-quality software, and improved security posture 
• Cost savings due to reduced rework, fines, and the liability of fewer security breaches

7. Compliance monitoring and reporting

ASPMs are a great way to ensure that your development team is meeting the latest regulatory requirements in the development of their new application. ASPMs also allow cybersecurity project managers and other key stakeholders to both implement and standardize new security practices across multiple teams, projects, and tools within the organization. Cybersecurity teams can, then, focus more on bringing the business and applications into compliance, as it relates to ongoing changes to laws, policies, and regulations. 

8. Tool rationalization

A large number of disparate security tools can create a complex and fragmented security environment, making it more difficult to detect and respond to threats, especially when using manual processes. But by streamlining data and consolidating these security tools, organizations can simplify their security architecture and reduce the attack surface to improve the health of their overall security posture. Consolidating multiple security tools into a single platform will change the way development teams now analyze their security data.

9. Up-to-date inventory

Application Security Posture Management maintains an up-to-date inventory of all application components and their security status. This includes tracking the versions of components, their dependencies, and any known vulnerabilities. The inventory is used to identify potential security risks and to prioritize remediation efforts. It also helps to ensure that all application components are up to date with the latest security patches and fixes in place.

The inventory is maintained through a combination of automated and manual processes. Automated processes are used to collect data from various sources, such as package managers, source code repositories, and security scanners. Manual processes are used to verify the accuracy of the data and to add additional information, such as the criticality of each component.

10. Contextual insights

By offering key details and security insights to potential threats taking place in real time, the ASPM framework ensures those insights are shared across the development, operations, and security teams to provide greater visibility into the end-to-end nature of the application development lifecycles.

Provided with transparency, developers, project managers, and other key stakeholders will have the necessary details to make more informed security decisions at every step of the way. It is to further mention that this level of transparency is maintained through various layers in the ASPM, including security policy management tools and compliance automation just to name a few. 

11. Data awareness

Application Security Posture Management prevents data breaches through sensitive data management protocols that minimize compliance violations while enforcing strict data security policies. ASPM tools regularly audit the effectiveness of security measures, automating incident response plans of action in the case of breach. In fact, regular risk assessments and vulnerability scans are often strengthened by encrypting sensitive data both “at rest” and “in transit.” 

Through multi-factor authentication and access controls to ensure only authorized personnel can access sensitive data, while continuously monitoring network traffic at a granular level and analyzing system activity to detect suspicious behavior. Likewise, ASPM tools employ intrusion detection and prevention systems to block any unauthorized access attempts and provide security awareness training to employees.

12. Drift awareness

Drift awareness ensures that security configurations and policies remain consistent with established standards, identifying any unauthorized changes or misconfigurations in the ASPM that could lead to vulnerabilities throughout the SDLC. By continuously monitoring the environment, drift awareness tools can promptly alert security teams to discrepancies, allowing for swift remediation. This process helps maintain a strong security posture, reduces the risk of breach, and ensures compliance with security policies and regulations.

3 Business Benefits of ASPM Tools

1. Control Costs / Tool Consolidation

At some point, all businesses will want to optimize their bottom line and aim for improved business continuity. But when controlling costs, it’s critical to meet all regulatory compliances and guidelines, especially if you run a larger organization. Business continuity can easily be achieved by establishing a more efficient incident response process, reducing your threat profile, and ultimately consolidating your cybersecurity toolset.

By reducing technical debt and streamlining project delivery, businesses can save money while enhancing their security posture. ASPM tools help by consolidating multiple cybersecurity functions into a single platform. This, in turn, reduces the number of tools and licenses unnecessary to the process, the time and effort required to manage these tools, and the constant updates that leave your infrastructure wide open to external threats and vulnerabilities. 

By meeting all regulatory compliances, businesses are shielded from potential losses stemming from fines, lawsuits, and public data breaches.

2. Visibility & Context

Application Security Posture Management tools provide organizations with enhanced visibility and control over their security posture. By consolidating security functions into a single platform, developers now have access to a centralized view of all security events and activities taking place in the SDLC. This makes it easier for organizations to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, while choosing which steps to take to mitigate risks.

Visibility and context are given to security incidents that demand prioritization, enabling more effective response and management relative to what’s actually happening within the development environment. ASPMs can be automated for the discovery and identification of applications, helping security teams maintain full visibility into the company's software assets while supporting proactive risk management strategies and ensuring that no potential threats are ever overlooked.

3. Remediation at Scale

ASPM tools make it easy to identify and mitigate risks early in the development cycle. They help us to find a quick and efficient resolution for security issues across multiple applications. By prioritizing our vulnerabilities based on centrally defined policies for risk criteria, security teams can focus on the most critical issues first. 

What’s even better is that automated processes within ASPM tools help streamline remediation efforts, reducing unnecessary escalations and ensuring that security work is concentrated on the most significant threats. Risk criteria can include issue severity, software criticality, and defined SLAs for remediation, providing a structured approach to vulnerability management and the effective management of resources.