Application security posture management (ASPM) is a holistic approach to application security (AppSec) that provides a single source of truth to identify, correlate, and prioritize security vulnerabilities across the software development life cycle, from development to deployment. ASPM solutions correlate and analyze data from a variety of sources to simplify issue interpretation, triage, and remediation. They also administer and orchestrate security tools to implement security policies. With ASPM, security teams can centrally manage application security findings by leveraging a consolidated view of security and risk status across the entire software development environment.
As applications become more sophisticated, organizations are struggling with the complexity and operational costs of the AppSec programs that have been built to secure them. This complexity makes it difficult to implement consistent AppSec practices, understand the risk posture of applications, and measure the effectiveness of their program as a whole. ASPM tools address these challenges by giving teams a single place to manage their entire AppSec program, better aligning security and development teams and giving them a consolidated view of what’s been tested, what’s been found, and what’s being fixed.
There are several key capabilities in an effective ASPM solution.
Integration with third-party tools: For an ASPM solution to provide value, it must be able to pull in data from diverse sources including development, deployment, and operations. The ability to work within an existing development environment is core to how ASPM solutions elevate the efficacy of an AppSec program. This requires the ability to integrate with both manual and automated AppSec testing tools, developer tools, and issue trackers. Connectivity to key data sources that map software assets, security data, and ticketing is central to how an ASPM solution ensures visibility across heterogenous development environments.
Centralized policy: Enabling scalable AppSec workflows is vital to how ASPM solutions standardize security practices across teams, projects, and tools. This requires ASPM solutions to centrally define, enforce, and monitor the security policies that orchestrate testing and prioritization. Additionally, defining these security policies as code enables security and development teams to seamlessly integrate issue assessment, controls, remediation, and validation within pipelines and maintain continuous compliance.
Prioritization and triage: Having the means to consolidate relevant data points and standardize workflows is the first hurdle in AppSec management, but security teams must also be able to leverage these ASPM capabilities to maintain developer productivity. An ASPM solution should deduplicate redundant results across tools and help prioritize the issues that teams should tackle first, based on centrally defined policies for risk criteria. This risk criteria can include issue severity, software criticality, and defined SLAs for remediation. With these capabilities, developers can eliminate unnecessary escalations and focus on the security work that matters most.
Risk management: An ASPM solution must be able to provide an overall view of risk posture across an organization’s software footprint. It should include a detailed breakdown of where vulnerable software components and applications are, the status of issue resolution, and any policy and compliance violations. Effectively, security leaders need to be able to leverage an ASPM solution to audit their applications, understand their organizational risk from a software perspective, and generate key KPIs on AppSec program effectiveness.
The key difference between cloud security posture management (CSPM) and ASPM is that the former pertains to mapping the security footprint of cloud-based services such as IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. CSPM solutions are primarily used to analyze cloud configuration and compliance issues. This provides context to the security posture of ecosystems and services used to develop or host apps, but it does not provide the full context of specific security issues within app development. CSPM solutions cannot, for example, show whether an app deployed in the cloud has vulnerable components. This is where an ASPM solution is critical.
ASPM solutions enable security and development teams to view security issues at each stage of the SDLC, because they aggregate results from all testing conducted, from build to production. They also leverage this insight to map out an organization’s software inventory and project structure. This level of granularity provides the necessary context and guidance to understand risks at the source code level.
Software Risk Manager by Black Duck is a comprehensive ASPM solution that enables teams to
- This glossary was verified by Natasha Gupta.