What is ASPM?

Summary

“ASPM correlates and unifies AppSec security findings in a unified dashboard and provides a single-source-of-truth for developing and maintaining secure applications.”

ASPM (Application Security Posture Management) is an end-to-end approach for managing and improving the security posture of applications throughout their lifecycle, from development to deployment and from code to cloud. ASPM correlates and unifies AppSec security findings in a unified dashboard and provides a single-source-of-truth for developing and maintaining secure applications.

ASPM covers:

• SAST
• DAST
• API security
• SCA
• SBOM
• SSCS
• Container security
• IaC security
• AI-driven security
• And more

With ASPM, enterprises can mitigate security threats and vulnerabilities, meet compliance requirements, streamline and automate application security workflows and increase visibility into the security posture of applications.

Why is ASPM Security Important?

Enterprises are largely dependent on corporate applications for business operations. But these applications are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected, making them harder to secure. In addition, low-code and no-code platforms allow employees to develop their own shadow IT applications, creating new types of risk for the enterprise.

Finally, AI is disrupting workflows, and developers and security are not excluded.

Modern ASPM solutions ensure protection against AI-related risks, with AI.

ASPM helps protect the enterprise while allowing business continuity and productivity.

ASPM solutions:

• Protect against data breaches that could compromise sensitive data, such as personal information, financial details and proprietary business data.
• Ensure organizations comply with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA and CCPA.
• Minimize vulnerabilities in applications, reducing the attack surface that cybercriminals can exploit.
• Proactively detect and mitigate threats with continuous monitoring and vulnerability management.
• Reduce false positives to ensure fast time-to-value.
• Allow business continuity by ensuring applications run smoothly and securely.
• Leverage AI to protect against all risks, including AI-generated ones, and create a seamless developer experience.
• Creates a future-proof solution for application security.

From an organizational and DevSec perspective, ASPM:

• Integrates security into the development cycle, allowing organizations to remain agile and building trust between AppSec teams and developers.
• Provides detailed insights into the security posture of applications, enabling informed decision-making and risk-based prioritization.
• Allows for simplified, centralized management of security policies and controls across all applications, reducing TCO.
• Streamlines the remediation process and makes it more efficient and automated.
• Helps incorporate AI into the developer and security workflows.

How Does ASPM Work?

An ASPM process covers the ASPM tools and processes for protecting applications against vulnerabilities. Main capabilities include:

• Continuous Monitoring of the network, systems, and user activities and providing unified reports and dashboards of the findings.
• DevSecOps Integrations – Making ASPM part of the developer ecosystem and workflows to streamlining the process, enhance security and build DevSec trust.
• Dynamic Risk Assessment of the potential impact of threats. This involves using ML and AI for analyzing data, identifying anomalies and predicting potential security incidents before they occur.
• Automated Remediation Mechanisms to mitigate identified risks. This can include adjusting firewall rules, modifying access controls, isolating compromised systems, or deploying patches and updates.
• Policy Adaptation based on the ongoing assessment of risks and operational needs. Policies are automatically updated to address new vulnerabilities, emerging threats and changes in the operational environment.
• Feedback Loop Mechanism – The outcomes of security actions are continuously analyzed to refine and improve the security posture. This involves learning from past incidents, updating threat models and enhancing detection and response capabilities.
• AI-powered Application Security that helps democratize AppSec and provides developer and security with advanced tools to enhance the application security posure.

ASPM vs. CSPM

ASPM is often confused with CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), even though the two are different security categories. ASPM meaning is different from the CSPM meaning. 

CSPM continuously monitors cloud environments to detect and mitigate security risks. It identifies misconfigurations, unauthorized access and other vulnerabilities within cloud infrastructures to ensure compliance with industry standards and organizational policies.

Here’s how the two compare, ASPM definition vs. CSPM definition: 

ASPM in the SDLC and Supply Chain Security

A key component of ASPM is the ability to integrate it into the SDLC and the supply chain. This helps build trust between developers and AppSec teams.

Here’s how ASPM practices fit into various SDLC phases:

• Applying secure coding standards and guidelines.
• Performing regular code reviews using SAST and SCA tools and with AI.
• Performing API reviews and practicing API security principles.
• Continuous security training for developers.
• Incorporating security testing into the testing phase, including SAST and DAST, penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.
• Ensuring secure configuration management, IaC security, environment hardening and regular security updates.
• Generating and maintaining an accessible SBOM.
• Implementing continuous monitoring to detect and respond to security incidents promptly.
• Updating and patching regularly.
• Developing and maintaining an incident response plan to address security breaches effectively.

In addition, to ensure ASPM supply chain security,  it’s recommended to perform security audits of third-parties. This will help ensure they comply with your security standards and practices and mitigate risks.

Best Practices for ASPM Security

Effective ASPM will identify, mitigate, and monitor security risks throughout the application lifecycle. Here are some of the best practices for ASPM:

1. Consolidate all application security tools and workflows into a single, cloud-native platform to streamline operations and reduce complexity.

2. Integrate security early in the SDLC, from the first line of code, to identify and fix vulnerabilities sooner.

3. Use AI-driven tools for faster, more accurate vulnerability detection and remediation.

4. Implement a full suite of AppSec tools, including SAST, DAST, API security, SCA, container security, and IaC security. It’s ok to start with one type and gradually build on it. This will also help you future-proof your security stack and strategy. Read more here.

5. Ensure the AppSec platform integrates smoothly with existing CI/CD pipelines, development frameworks and developer tools to minimize disruption and enhance productivity.

6. Regularly assess and monitor application security posture to identify and address risks in real-time.

7. Provide secure coding training and resources to empower developers to write secure code from the start.

8. Proactively manage and secure the software supply chain to prevent malicious packages and other supply chain attacks.

9. Use risk-based prioritization to focus on fixing the most critical vulnerabilities first.

10. Ensure the platform can scale with the organization’s needs, supporting both legacy and cloud-native applications.

Checkmarx ASPM Identify and Reduce Risks Faster!

Checkmarx One is a unified cloud-based application security platform for enterprises that consolidates security tools, simplifies management across the SDLC and builds AppSec and dev trust. Checkmarx One is a single pane of glass for AppSec, together with correlations and prioritization to ensure the reduction of security risk.

We provide everything you need for ASPM, to secure your applications from code to cloud:

• SAST and DAST Security Testing
• API Security, SCA and SBOM
• Container and IaC security scanning
• Secure code training
• AI-powered security enhancements
• DevSecOps pipeline integration
• Premium support and services, including maturity assessments
• And more

Learn more by requesting a demo.