Application security posture management

What is ASPM?

ASPM is a cybersecurity approach that provides a holistic, real-time view of an organization's application security posture. Think of it as a central nervous system for your application security (AppSec) program. It connects to and collects data from a wide variety of security, development, and operational tools across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). Instead of simply giving you a long, fragmented list of security findings, ASPM aggregates, correlates, and analyzes this data to provide a contextualized understanding of your application security risks.

The goal of ASPM is to move beyond the traditional "find and fix" model of vulnerability management. It helps security and development teams manage the overwhelming number of security alerts by focusing on what truly matters: business risk. By prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their exploitability and potential impact on business-critical assets, among other variables, ASPM enables teams to allocate their limited resources more effectively and make a greater impact on the organization's overall security.

This approach allows companies to scale their AppSec efforts and ensure that security keeps pace with the rapid speed of modern development. Gartner estimates that by 2026, more than 40% of organizations developing proprietary applications will adopt ASPM to identify and address application security issues more swiftly.

The evolution of AppSec: from siloed tools to unified management

For many years, application security relied heavily on a siloed approach using various application security testing (AST) tools. AST is an umbrella term for solutions like static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA). These tools are invaluable; they are designed to scan for specific types of vulnerabilities at different stages of the SDLC.

However, relying on these tools in a non-integrated way has created some significant challenges:

• Tool sprawl and data overload: Organizations often use multiple AST tools, sometimes with the same techniques, each generating its own set of findings. This results in fragmented data and long lists of alerts that are often filled with duplicates, false positives, or low-priority issues. Security teams can easily become overwhelmed trying to manage and make sense of this data.

• Lack of context: AST tools within traditional security approaches provide a "point-in-time" snapshot of a security issue. They are great at telling you what a vulnerability is, but often fail to provide the crucial context of why it matters. For example, a SAST scan might find a flaw in the code, but it doesn't consider whether that code is internet-facing or connected to sensitive data. Without this context, prioritizing remediation is difficult.

• Siloed workflows: With different teams and tools operating independently, communication and collaboration can break down. This often leads to friction between security and development teams; developers are faced with a huge backlog of issues to fix without adequate context or guidance.

ASPM directly addresses these limitations. It doesn't replace AST tools; instead, it acts as a unifying layer that sits on top of them. By ingesting and analyzing data from all your scanners, ASPM distills the noise into a clear, prioritized list of the most critical issues, enabling a more efficient and effective security program.

What are the differences between ASPM and ASOC?

While ASPM may seem similar to application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC), it's more accurate to view ASPM as the evolution of ASOC. ASOC solutions were the first centralizing tools to bring vulnerabilities from various AST tools together into a single pane of glass. They focused primarily on orchestrating security testing processes and consolidating scan results to streamline vulnerability management.

However, ASOC has a few key limitations that ASPM was designed to overcome:

• Pre-production focus: ASOC tools are primarily concerned with managing application vulnerabilities before they enter production. They lack visibility into the runtime environment, meaning they can't provide insights into misconfigurations, active threats, or how vulnerabilities might manifest in a live system.

• Lack of business context: While ASOC can correlate findings from different scanners, it often struggles with understanding an application's business logic, sensitive data flows, and overall architecture. This makes it difficult to provide useful, risk-based scoring.

• Limited scalability: ASOC works well for simple or monolithic applications, but its effectiveness can diminish in today's large, complex, and distributed cloud-native environments.

ASPM builds on the foundation of ASOC by providing a more integrated and holistic approach. It extends beyond pre-production to offer continuous, real-time monitoring across the entire application lifecycle, including production. By incorporating DevSecOps practices and providing a deeper understanding of business context, ASPM shifts the focus from just managing vulnerabilities to proactively managing and scaling an entire AppSec program based on risk.

How does ASPM work?

ASPM solutions are based on a continuous process that can be divided into four general steps and provides a comprehensive and practical overview of an organization's application security posture.

1. Ingestion and asset discovery

The first step for any ASPM solution is to gather data. This involves ingesting information from every corner of your software ecosystem. This includes:

• Security tools: Data from your SAST, SCA, DAST, and container security scanners.

• Development tools: Information from your version control systems (like GitLab and GitHub), CI/CD pipelines, and project management/ticketing systems.

• Cloud and infrastructure: Data from your cloud environments, including cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanners.

As this data is ingested, ASPM platforms automatically catalog and maintain a comprehensive inventory of your applications, APIs and microservices, databases, and dependencies. This dynamic asset-first approach allows teams to prioritize security efforts on their most critical assets, regardless of the security tooling data.

2. Correlation and contextualization

This is the core of ASPM's power. The platform takes the raw findings from all the different tools and correlates them using a graph-based model. It maps the relationships between vulnerabilities, code, services, and infrastructure to build a complete picture of an application's architecture and potential attack paths.

By connecting these data points, ASPM can answer critical questions that individual tools cannot. For example, it can determine if a vulnerability found by a SAST tool is part of an active, internet-exposed attack path, or if a finding in a third-party library is actually being used by a critical part of the application. This process of adding runtime, network, and business context to raw findings is what transforms scattered alerts into actionable intelligence.

3. Analysis and prioritization

Once findings are contextualized, ASPM applies advanced risk-based scoring to them. Instead of simply relying on a generic severity rating (like "high" or "critical"), ASPM prioritizes vulnerabilities based on their true risk to the business. This includes factors such as the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited (exploitability), how accessible a vulnerability is to attackers (reachability), the proximity of the vulnerable system to confidential data stores, and potential impacts on data integrity and privacy.

This intelligent prioritization ensures that teams are working on the issues that pose the greatest risk to the business, making their remediation efforts significantly more efficient.

4. Action and remediation

Finally, ASPM facilitates the remediation process by providing clear, actionable guidance. It automates workflows by creating and assigning tickets to the right development teams, with all the necessary context already included. Developers receive a single source of truth that details the vulnerability, its true risk, and its location in the code, all without having to leave their existing workflows. This streamlined process minimizes delays, reduces rework, and accelerates the release of secure software.

What are the key capabilities of an ASPM solution?

An effective ASPM solution provides a range of capabilities designed to address the complexities of modern application security. These include:

• Comprehensive visibility: ASPM aggregates security findings from every stage of the SDLC and consolidates them into a single, unified dashboard. This gives teams a code-to-cloud view of their entire application portfolio, from the infrastructure to the application layer.

• Policy enforcement: ASPM enables organizations to define and enforce security policies across the entire SDLC. By automating policy checks and providing visibility into compliance status, ASPM ensures consistent security practices across all teams and projects.

• Security orchestration: ASPM orchestrates security testing by integrating with and automating various AppSec tools. This ensures that security checks are consistently performed throughout the CI/CD pipeline, and that the results from all tools are correlated to provide a complete picture of an application's security posture.

• Automated remediation: ASPM can offer automated remediation suggestions and trigger workflows to resolve vulnerabilities quickly. This reduces the mean time to remediate and minimizes manual effort. The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning further enhances these capabilities, enabling intelligent pattern analysis and even automated code fixes.

• SBOM generation: Modern applications rely heavily on open-source components. ASPM automatically catalogs and provides a comprehensive software bill of materials (SBOM), offering clear visibility into all third-party dependencies and their associated security risks. This helps organizations implement stronger software supply chain security.

• Scalability and ease of use: An ideal ASPM solution is easy to deploy, configure, and scale across multiple teams and environments. It should have a user-friendly interface that encourages adoption among both security and development teams.

What are the benefits of ASPM?

Implementing an ASPM solution provides a number of strategic benefits that help organizations stay ahead of evolving threats and operational complexities.

Risk reduction and proactive security

By providing contextualized insights and a risk-based approach, ASPM enables organizations to focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat to their business. This proactive stance helps prevent security breaches that could lead to data loss, financial damage, and reputational harm. The ability to identify and address issues early in the development lifecycle reduces the risk of vulnerabilities making it into production.

Improved operational efficiency

ASPM automates many of the manual tasks associated with security management, such as data ingestion, vulnerability scanning, and reporting. This reduces manual effort, frees up security and development teams to focus on more critical tasks, and accelerates the entire development process. The "shift left" approach, which integrates security checks early in the development workflow, significantly reduces the time and cost of remediation.

Enhanced collaboration

ASPM breaks down the traditional silos between security and development teams. By integrating security checks directly into the developer's workflow and providing a single source of truth for security issues, it fosters better communication and shared accountability. Developers get timely, actionable feedback without leaving their integrated development environment (IDE), which helps them learn and adopt secure coding practices.

Business alignment and compliance

ASPM provides a clear, data-driven view of security risks that can be communicated to business leaders and stakeholders. By quantifying and enabling visualization of security risks in business terms, this solution helps justify security expenditures and demonstrate the return on investment. Additionally, ASPM helps organizations maintain compliance with a variety of industry regulations and standards (such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS) by providing continuous monitoring and detailed audit trails.

What are the differences between ASPM and CSPM?

A common point of confusion is the difference between ASPM and cloud security posture management (CSPM). While both are critical for a robust security strategy, they focus on different layers of your technology stack.

CSPM is concerned with securing the underlying cloud infrastructure. It focuses on identifying and remediating misconfigurations and risks within your cloud environment (infrastructure/platform/software as a service). It answers questions like, "Is this S3 bucket publicly exposed?" or "Are there any overly permissive IAM roles?" CSPM tools analyze cloud assets and their configurations to ensure they adhere to security best practices and compliance frameworks.

ASPM focuses on the application layer. It manages the security of the software that runs on top of the infrastructure. It answers questions like, "Does this application's code have a SQL injection vulnerability?" or "Is a component of this application's SBOM outdated and at risk?" ASPM is concerned with the security of the application itself, regardless of whether it's deployed in the cloud or on-premises.

ASPM and CSPM are complementary. ASPM ensures the application is secure, while CSPM ensures the environment it runs in is secure. Without both, an organization could have significant security gaps, as an attacker could exploit a misconfiguration in the cloud infrastructure (a CSPM issue) to compromise a perfectly secure application, or they could exploit a vulnerability in the application (an ASPM issue) that is running on a perfectly secure cloud environment.

How to choose the appropriate ASPM solution?

Selecting the right ASPM solution is a crucial decision that can significantly impact the success of your AppSec program. Here are some key factors to consider:

• Integration capabilities: An ideal solution must seamlessly integrate with your existing development, security, and cloud tools. Look for a platform with a wide range of pre-built integrations, as well as robust APIs for custom connections.

• Scalability: The solution should be able to scale alongside your organization's growth. Evaluate its ability to handle increasing data volumes, a growing number of users, and the expansion of your application portfolio without performance degradation.

• Customization and flexibility: Your organization has unique security needs. The platform should offer a high degree of customization, allowing you to tailor dashboards, reports, and risk-scoring models to align with your specific workflows and business priorities.

• User experience: A user-friendly interface with intuitive navigation is essential for promoting adoption among different teams. The solution should provide clear, actionable insights that make it easy for developers to understand and remediate issues.

• Vendor reputation and support: Search for the vendor's reputation, track record, and commitment to innovation. Look for a provider with strong customer support, comprehensive documentation, and a clear product roadmap that demonstrates a forward-thinking approach to evolving security challenges.

Fluid Attacks: a comprehensive ASPM solution and beyond

The rapid pace of modern software development has rendered traditional, siloed security approaches obsolete. ASPM provides a much-needed solution to the challenges of tool sprawl, data fragmentation, and a lack of context. By providing a single source of truth for application security, ASPM enables organizations to manage risk at scale, accelerate secure software delivery, and foster a collaborative security culture.

Fluid Attacks provides a powerful ASPM solution that acts as the central hub for our comprehensive security offerings. We are an evolution of the ASOC concept, moving beyond simple orchestration to provide contextualization, prioritization, and management of security risks across the entire SDLC.

Our solution offers you continuous application security testing and reporting from the start and throughout your SDLC. This prevents security bottlenecks when changes go into production, reduces remediation costs, and helps avoid security incidents. With Fluid Attacks, you don't have to keep track of separate AppSec operations and findings from silos. Our platform analyzes and correlates the results from our wide range of techniques—including SAST, SCA, DAST, CSPM, and penetration testing as a service (PTaaS)—so your team saves time by not reviewing duplicate findings or false positives. All findings from our tools and pentesters are consolidated on that platform, providing a unified view of your application security posture.

Vulnerability remediation should be based on proper risk prioritization. That's why our solution relies on several metrics and attends to the context, considering, for example, probabilities of exploitation, reachability, and critical assets that could be affected by attacks. From our platform, you can also manage compliance with many international security standards. You can define specific policies to be met and constantly monitor that your development and security teams ensure that your applications comply with them.

We leverage generative artificial intelligence to provide you with automated, custom fix options for specific vulnerabilities in your code, significantly easing the remediation burden. Perhaps surprisingly, our tools and scanners are open source. What truly sets Fluid Attacks apart is our holistic approach. We combine multiple testing techniques in a single, integrated solution called Continuous Hacking. Our expert pentesters are available to help your development and security teams solve questions about the most complex vulnerabilities, ensuring no issue is left unaddressed. We also actively check remediation success with reattacks and can break the build in your CI/CD pipelines to prevent unsafe deployments, solidifying your security posture.

You can contact us to start developing secure applications, as well as sign up for a 21-day free trial to experience our ASPM solution within Continuous Hacking.