Applications are becoming more integral to business operations. Microservices, containerized apps, and serverless architectures allow greater agility. Applications like business intelligence tools, CRM platforms, and ERP systems often serve as the backbone of digital transformation efforts. Of course, cloud-based and mobile apps like Slack and Zoom make remote and hybrid work possible. However, securing apps is no easy feat. The practice of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is evolving to fill the gap.
As is often the case, security innovation lags a step behind operational innovation. Common ASPM tools like static and dynamic application security testing, software composition analysis, and others lack a unified context and struggle to integrate with DevSecOps workflows. Like other security solutions the SOC uses, the usual APSM tools often are too sensitive, flagging everything as critical, leaving analysts to discern the highest priority alerts. Generally, these tools can’t keep up with the quickly complexifying architectures that constitute modern applications. They have a place in APSM — they just don’t do the entire job themselves.
It’s important to note also, that security posture management for the cloud is not the same as that for the application.
So what is it? And how can you fold it into the greater SecOps function?
What is Application Security Posture Management?
Application security posture management is a comprehensive approach to managing and hardening the security of an organization’s applications throughout their lifecycles. By combining continuous assessment, automated vulnerability management, and centralized policy enforcement, ASPM provides a holistic view into an application’s security landscape, including its servers, APIs, data flows, and so on.
Well-tuned APSM processes help teams prioritize risks, streamline remediation, and create resilience across a diverse ecosystem of development environments and cloud infrastructures. It does so through three core functions:
- Aggregation
Application security testing (AST) tools scan applications to pinpoint vulnerabilities at different stages of the software development lifecycle. The problem is that these tools produce a high rate of false positives and duplicates, obscuring the real picture of application security for the teams managing them.
APSM aggregates and analyzes findings from several application security testing tools, filtering out false positives and redundancies to give teams an accurate assessment of the application’s security posture.
- Prioritization
With a clear picture of the application’s security posture, ASPM tools rank vulnerabilities according to their severity. They consider how exploitable the vulnerability is, whether it’s internet-facing, the sensitivity of the data it handles, and other factors to create a risk score.
This capability is the real gamechanger that ASPM tools provide. As with other facets of security, it’s impossible to remediate every single vulnerability and misconfiguration. The prioritization phase helps teams cover the most risk for their effort.
- Contextualization
Nothing in cybersecurity exists in a vacuum. It’s all a big ecosystem. ASPM tools provide context around a vulnerability to give teams even more insight. Rather than saying “this is a CVSS 9.8,” an ASPM tool tells whether the app was in production or development, if it’s actively being exploited by threat groups, what business need the app serves, and more.
The best ASPM tools integrate with issue trackers like Jira and GitHub/GitLab version controlling to identify which developer introduced the vulnerability and recommend auto-generated fixes. They also link vulnerabilities from source code, open-source packages, and CI/CD pipelines all the way to runtime assets in the cloud.
As you can see, the usual roster of ASPM processes and tools serve a purpose. However, they are imperfect and don’t talk to each other. ASPM provides the connective tissue and holistic view that makes application security data actionable for security teams.
How ASPM Fits Into Security Operations
ASPM bridges the gap between Security Operations and application-specific practices like AppSec and development. Often, the security of the cloud and the assets therein are left out of the broader security function. There are several reasons for this:
- Cloud security is somewhat of a mirror of traditional network security, yet it often gets a fraction of the staffing.
- SecOps teams are so overwhelmed with data that they can’t ingest or operationalize an equally large volume of cloud and application data.
- Traditional security tools are incapable of smoothly integrating with cloud-native assets and architectures.
- The values of development disciplines (i.e., speed and innovation) often pull against the values of security (i.e., caution).
ASPM solves many of these problems. As a discipline, ASPM is emerging specifically because the traditional security model wasn’t built to handle the complexity and speed of modern, cloud-native development.
- ASPM consolidates many tools into a unified platform. That, in addition to the prioritization capabilities of ASPM tools, allows organizations to do more with their existing headcount because teams spend far less time switching between tools, hunting for contextual information, and deciding which issues are most critical.
- ASPM allows SecOps teams to ingest meaningful and actionable data, without the bloat of redundancies and false positives. By incorporating cloud and app security data into the SecOps ecosystem, teams can apply automated remediations to further decrease operational overhead.
- ASPM is simply built for cloud-native assets, processes, and architecture. They can track artifacts from code to containers to deployed workloads, while also understanding least privilege, IAM misconfigurations, and service-to-service communications.
- ASPM allows dev teams to shift security left without having to become full-blown security practitioners — a popular but impractical ask. ASPM tools play well with dev tools. Instead of pointing out flaws, ASPM platforms typically suggest remediations, patches, and upgrades. They also enable the implementation of policy-as-code, shift-left scans, and other controls without blocking delivery.
ASPM makes it easier for security teams to respond to incidents in the cloud. ASPM tools integrate with CSPM and CNAPP platforms to draw information about cloud misconfigurations, exposed services, and insecure storage buckets. Together, app risks are enriched with runtime and infrastructure context. When integrated with SIEM and SOAR platforms, teams can connect app risk posture with broader detection and response workflows — including automated triage and remediation playbooks.
When security teams have the full picture of cloud and application incidents, they can quicken mean times to detection and response (MTTD and MTTR) and stop threats with precision.
Implementing ASPM In Your Organization
Standing up an ASPM practice can massively reduce risk and boost collaboration across security and engineering teams. Before you get started, take stock of a few key factors.
Your app landscape
Take an inventory of your app ecosystem: your public and private apps; the languages, frameworks, and cloud services you use; how apps are deployed, e.g., Kubernetes, serverless, etc.
Key integrations
The more inputs your ASPM has, the better its visibility and prioritization. Consider your source code management, CI/CD and cloud providers, app testing tools, and ticketing tools. Your ASPM tools will need to integrate with these systems.
The software development lifecycle
The goal here is to make security a helpful part of the development process. Determine when you’ll scan code (at commit, PR, or build), who owns remediation (developers or AppSec?), and how you’ll route findings into engineering workflows.
Define success metrics
Ideally, ASPM will help you increase security without sacrificing speed or efficiency. On the security side, track median time to detect and median time to remediate, as well as the number of critical vulnerabilities reduced. On the development side, track the percentage of apps onboarded, the recurrence rate of vulnerabilities, and developer compliance with SLAs.
Who you need buy-in from
It’s best to do ASPM with your team, rather than to them. Get stakeholders from cybersecurity, DevOps, application owners, cloud infrastructure teams, and risk/compliance on-board with your ASPM plans.
Making the Shift
Application security posture management is a vital piece of modern SecOps. Business happens in the cloud, and operations happen through applications. An outage or attack can bring the business to a screeching halt.
As with everything cybersecurity, prevention is the best medicine. A proper ASPM practice can shift your application security approach from reactive to proactive. Once you’ve gone through the steps above, you’re ready to explore ASPM solutions.
