Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): A Complete Guide

The application security (AppSec) industry is full of standalone tools, and many organizations rely on a combination of these tools to address security challenges. 

However, the issue with standalone tools is that they often operate in silos. Combining disparate security tools can create gaps in security coverage, hinder performance, and increase complexity for teams managing them.

ASPM takes a holistic approach to application security by consolidating multiple security functions into one cohesive system. It provides a unified view of risk throughout the organization, automated remediation strategies, and real-time feedback loops that prevent minor issues from snowballing into major problems.

Here’s everything you need to know about ASPM, its benefits, and how teams can implement this measure using an AppSec solution like Codacy.

What is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?

ASPM, or Application Security Posture Management, is an end-to-end security approach that protects applications in cloud and IT environments. It equips enterprises with the tools to manage and improve their security posture from development to deployment. 

ASPM covers essential security tools like SAST, DAST, SCA, API Security, and IaC Security. It also consolidates and correlates AppSec security findings into a single dashboard, offering a central source of truth for building and maintaining secure applications. 

This holistic approach to AppSec allows enterprises to prevent security threats and vulnerabilities, meet compliance requirements, and increase visibility into the organization's security posture, all within a single platform.

The Importance of ASPM in Modern Security

When handling multiple applications, it's crucial to evaluate their performance both individually and as a whole. This is even more important and difficult in the present software development landscape, where applications are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected. 

ASPM helps overcome various challenges teams face while ensuring seamless collaboration between security and development teams. It performs three core functions: continuously monitoring the security posture of your enterprise applications, assessing its security stance, and improving it when the need arises. 

Nowadays, even the smallest overlooked code flaw can lead to devastating breaches, and hackers are always on the lookout for these vulnerabilities. Have you ever considered how any change in your application security could impact your organization’s security posture?

Imagine having a clear roadmap that uncovers every hidden vulnerability in your application. Consider the time and cost savings that could be achieved if your development and security teams worked together seamlessly. This is why ASPM is essential to DevSecOps systems.

How Does ASPM Work?

ASPM can be provided by a standalone tool or, as is often the case, by a general application security solution (e.g., Codacy). Here’s a brief rundown of what ASPM entails:

• Software composition analysis: IT systems often comprise various applications and app components (APIs, third-party libraries, etc.). Your ASPM tool will create a detailed software composition analysis (SCA) and software bill of material (SBOM) reports that provide insights into the components integrated into your application, their sources, security risks, and recommended fixes.
  
  
• Continuous scanning/monitoring: ASPM tools continuously scan your application and app components for threats, misconfigurations, and non-compliance violations. Most tools integrate with the popular git providers, enabling teams to perform automated checks on every new code change. These tools often combine proprietary scanning with static application security testing. 
  
  
• Remediation: If the tool discovers a security risk, it will provide actionable guidance on addressing it. This could involve patching your software, changing configurations, or updating code. 
  
  
• Triage: Not all risks are equal. For this reason, ASPM tools typically assign risk scores to each vulnerability and rank them based on business impact, exploitability, and severity level.
  
  
• Pattern analysis: Your ASPM tool will analyze data within your applications and their associated systems to identify recurring trends or behaviors. In doing so, the tool can recognize patterns that might indicate vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, or potential security risks.
  
  
• Unified view: An ASPM tool's primary function is to aggregate data from all security scans and provide a comprehensive view of your security posture. This centralized hub streamlines triaging and accelerates remediation, enabling your team to prioritize critical tasks and respond more efficiently to potential threats.

Benefits of Implementing ASPM

Apps consist of intricate moving parts, such as APIs, form/input fields, and third-party libraries. Many of these components are front-facing, created externally, or act as gatekeepers to backend information, making them attractive attack vectors. 

ASPM plays a crucial role in eliminating these attack vectors and strengthening the security, availability, and reliability of applications. Here are some of the benefits of implementing ASPM in your organization:

• Integrates security into the development process, enabling seamless collaboration between AppSec and development teams.
  
  
• Automates the remediation process and provides actionable guidance into application security.
  
  
• Centralizes the management of an organization's application security by providing a unified view of security risks, vulnerabilities, and configurations across all applications
• Keeps sensitive data safe and forestalls breaches that could expose personal, financial, or proprietary information.
  
  
• Ensures compliance with essential regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.
  
  
• Minimize application vulnerabilities, thereby lowering the risk of exploitation by cybercriminals.
  
  
• Offer continuous threat detection and swift response to address potential risks.
  
  
• Enhance operational efficiency by cutting down on false alerts.

Key Features of ASPM Solutions

The core features of ASPM solutions revolve around continuously monitoring and improving the security standing of organizations.

ASPM combines multiple traditional security tools into one platform, giving software teams the tools they need to improve visibility, identify risks, and streamline the management of their application security posture. Below are the key features of ASPM.

Complete Visibility  

ASPM solutions provide a birds-eye view of an organization's security posture, including security gaps, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations across the system.

This consolidated view enables software teams to quickly identify issues in any system component, whether in the code or infrastructure. Visibility ensures that no security risks are overlooked and that threats can be resolved promptly.

Continuous Monitoring and Risk Assessment

ASPM solutions provide real-time application monitoring and periodic assessments of the organization's security posture. Many ASPM tools integrate with popular Git providers, IDEs, and other tools, enabling developers to spot issues early and act quickly to resolve them before they cause damage.

Continuous risk assessment also helps teams stay informed about new attack vectors and vulnerabilities introduced through code changes or updates.

Integration With CI/CD Pipelines

Most ASPM solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

By integrating ASPM into their pipelines, software teams can embed automated security checks, especially early in development. This is crucial for ensuring risks are sniffed out before reaching production. 

Automated Threat Detection and Remediation

Most organizations work with multiple applications, some comprising large volumes of code. In this case, automating the detection of security threats is necessary and efficient.

ASPM automates real-time vulnerability detection and triggers automated remediation processes to mitigate risks before they escalate, thus reducing the need for manual intervention. This allows teams to act swiftly and ensure security remains a priority without delay.

Remediation Guidance

When your ASPM solution detects vulnerabilities, it offers comprehensive remediation guidance, such as step-by-step instructions for fixing the issue, best practices, and other noteworthy information.

The insights ASPM provides are also dependent on your environment and security policies. This ensures that the fixes are effective and aligned with your overall objectives.

Compliance Reports

ASPM generates comprehensive compliance reports that help organizations track their adherence to regulatory standards and industry best practices.

These reports simplify audits and ensure that applications maintain the required security posture to meet legal and organizational requirements. Detailed compliance tracking also supports accountability and helps demonstrate security efforts to stakeholders.

How Does ASPM Differ From CSPM?

ASPM is often confused with CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), and some assume they’re related. While ASPM and CSPM are both cybersecurity practices that help organizations identify and manage security risks, they focus on different areas of the IT ecosystem. 

In short, ASPM focuses on securing applications, and CSPM focuses on securing the applications' underlying cloud infrastructure. 

ASPM identifies vulnerabilities in software code and ensures that applications are built securely. It helps organizations assess security risks that could arise from the applications they develop or use, such as poor coding practices, outdated libraries, or improper configurations that can lead to data breaches.

On the other hand, CSPM focuses on securing cloud environments by monitoring and managing configurations within cloud infrastructure. It helps ensure that cloud services like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud are set up and maintained with security best practices in mind.

CSPM tools detect potential misconfigurations, unprotected cloud resources, or insufficient access controls that could leave cloud systems exposed to attacks. 

While ASPM deals with vulnerabilities in the code and the application itself, CSPM is more concerned with the security of the infrastructure and how it’s set up in the cloud. Both, however, are critical for a comprehensive DevSecOps strategy.

Best Practices for ASPM Security

Adhering to ASPM best practices is key to mitigating security risks throughout 

the application lifecycle. Here are some of the best practices to follow when implementing ASPM:

• Opt for scalability: Ensure the ASPM platform can scale with your organization’s needs without requiring major or disruptive changes.
  
  
• Automate remediation: Set up automated workflows to resolve security issues swiftly, reducing manual intervention and the risk of human error.
  
  
• Integrate ASPM sooner: Integrate ASPM early in the DevOps pipeline (right from the first line of code) to detect and mitigate security risks early in the development cycle.

• Perform regular risk assessments: Periodically assess all applications and app components to identify evolving threats and ensure that security measures are up to date.
  
  
• Prioritize vulnerabilities: Use risk-based prioritization to address the most critical vulnerabilities first. This ensures that precious resources can be allocated to the highest-impact issues.
  
  
• Enhance visibility across all applications: To spot security gaps and vulnerabilities, ensure full-stack visibility of your entire application environment, including third-party dependencies.
  
  
• Prioritize in-team communication: Invest in tools that streamline communication between security, development, and operations teams to ensure that security is a shared responsibility and integrated into every aspect of the application lifecycle.
  
  
• Enforce policies and coding guidelines: Define and enforce security policies to ensure that applications are built and maintained according to best security practices.
  
  
• Incorporate threat intelligence: Leverage external threat intelligence feeds to stay informed about the latest attack vectors and vulnerabilities that may affect your applications.
  
  
• Embrace continuous improvement: To continuously strengthen the application security posture, security practices should be regularly reviewed and updated based on new findings, emerging threats, and feedback from security teams.

ASPM With Codacy

Codacy offers a unified set of security tools to mitigate risks from all angles. It has tools for addressing code quality, coverage, and security concerns: SAST, SCA, IaC, hard-coded secrets detection, DAST, ASPM, CSPM, code coverage, pen testing, and intuitive risk management dashboards (Codacy is essentially DevSecOps in a box). These tools all form the basis for the ASPM platform. 

Start your free trial today and manage your organization’s security posture through secure code reviews with Codacy.

ASPM FAQs 

1. What is the difference between vulnerability management and ASPM?

Vulnerability management focuses on identifying and remediating security flaws, while ASPM provides a broader, continuous view of an application's security posture, integrating risk assessment, compliance, and security controls across the software lifecycle.

2. What are the benefits of ASPM?

ASPM improves visibility into application security, helps prioritize risks, automates security workflows, enhances compliance, and integrates security into DevSecOps processes.

3. What is the difference between DSPM and ASPM?

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) focuses on securing sensitive data across cloud and on-prem environments, while ASPM manages an application's overall security posture, covering code, dependencies, configurations, and vulnerabilities.

4. What is ASPM mode in BIOS?

ASPM (Active State Power Management) mode in BIOS is unrelated to security; it controls PCI Express power-saving settings to reduce power consumption when devices are idle.

5. What is the difference between ASPM and CWPP?

ASPM secures application security posture across development and production, while Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) focus on securing cloud-based workloads, including VMs, containers, and serverless applications.