When we talk to security professionals about ASPM, many immediately start thinking of finding risks in pre-production development environments. While any ASPM solution should be able to unify risks from SCA, SAST, and other scanners used to find risks pre-production, leading ASPM solutions will also provide rich cloud telemetry to give a more comprehensive picture into application security risk. Here’s how:

1. They deliver complete visibility

When we talk to security professionals about ASPM, they value solutions that connect directly to cloud infrastructure and provide a comprehensive inventory of your cloud applications, including microservices, databases, APIs, and dependencies. This detailed view helps you understand your application architecture and gives you full context into how your applications are deployed.

These ASPM solutions also correlate data and continuously monitor the configuration of your cloud applications to detect misconfigurations that could lead to security risks. This includes identifying the root cause of misconfigurations — whether they were introduced through infrastructure-as-code (IaC) or through manual action within management consoles.

2. ASPM solutions enhance actionability when combined with CNAPP solutions

Combining ASPM solutions with CNAPP solutions gives security and development team correlate issues from CNAPP solutions alongside AppSec testing solutions such as SCA, SAST, and DAST.

By correlating data from numerous sources, you get a more confident and complete view into any finding, as well as where it is introduced within the CI/s more actionable data to prioritize and fix cloud application security issues. ASPM solutions can CD pipeline. With this combined view your application security, cloud security, and DevOps teams can all see the complete view into any security issue, plus who is best to fix it, and reference actionable remediation guidance or implement direct fixes suggested by the ASPM platform.

3. ASPM strengthens DevSecOps and informs cloud architecture

ASPM facilitates strong DevSecOps practices by providing continuous security visibility and automation throughout the development lifecycle, ultimately leading to more secure cloud applications. By identifying root causes, ASPM solutions will identify systemic issues that affect your cloud security posture. Some examples include:

• Container base images that introduce CVEs or CWEs into deployed containers
• IaC modules that introduce misconfigured and vulnerable cloud resources
• Virtual machines configured with vulnerable OS and packages

By identifying the root cause of these issues, Security, DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure teams cannot only fix them more easily they can apply the learnings to harden development and cloud management practices.

Additional considerations:

• Not all ASPM solutions provide the same level of cloud visibility: some ASPM solutions advertise integrations with cloud infrastructure providers, but may only pull a few services from select IaaS platforms. Evaluate vendors that have comprehensive integrations with IaaS platforms including container registries, native security tools, and more.
• Not all ASPM solutions excel at correlating cloud data with pre-production applications: It’s one thing to pull in data, but it’s another to correlate it with relevant artifacts to provide the full view into any pipeline and application. Leading ASPM solutions will have advanced correlation that ties cloud resources to their related artifacts.
• ASPM can happen before or after CNAPP: Many security professionals ask themselves: “should I implement ASPM solutions before or after a CNAPP?” The answer is yes! For organizations that haven’t yet invested in CNAPP technology, ASPM solutions that pull in security telemetry from cloud providers directly provide a complete picture of cloud app security. For organizations that have already invested in CNAPP, this data will become an additional layer of value by the ASPM solution, which will correlate data across the entire software development lifecycle.