In today's digital age, applications drive the business, and it's essential to ensure their security. That's where Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) comes into play.
Application Security Posture Management— What it is and what it does
At its core, Application Security Posture Management is a way to address application security more comprehensively, unifying security visibility by utilizing data from your wide range of security tools. The right ASPM solution will give security teams the ability to automatically drill down to root causes—specifying exact lines of code responsible for security issues, triaging those issues to prioritize the most critical fixes first, and assigning and suggesting fixes to the correct owner.
According to Gartner, ASPM analyzes security signals across software development, deployment, and operation to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities, and enforce security controls. As a result, security leaders can improve application security efficacy and better manage risk.
Early vendors in this category built solutions to help security teams address risks primarily from existing AppSec tools. However, the explosion of cloud computing in recent years has accelerated a complicated and volatile attack surface for applications that now spans on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud infrastructures.
ASPM solutions improve visibility and help teams manage vulnerabilities easily while enforcing security controls. Namely, ASPM:
- Improves coverage: An area where Application Security Orchestration and Correlation (ASOC—ASPM’s predecessor) isn’t able to keep up with ASPM is better telemetry with cloud infrastructure. ASPM offers the ability to unify security efforts across code, applications, cloud, and on-premise infrastructure. A single, cohesive view is essential, tailored to a company’s particular way of doing things, no matter how the development process is managed or where the application is deployed.
- Correlates findings: Correlation solves problems with incomplete data (knowing what application is running on a certain virtual machine where security risk has been detected), conflicting data (getting context from multiple sources), and bringing together alerts into one single alert to simplify remediation processes.
- Gets to root causes: A single, correlated view quickly gets teams to the point of origin to understand how a security issue was introduced, what development pipelines look like, how applications are built, and how those applications are deployed. The best ASPM solutions highlight root causes automatically, down to the code and code owner level.
- Triages and prioritizes: ASPM allows you to look at multiple data points, apply triage logic, and prioritize fixes accordingly. The best part is ASPM can do this automatically, cutting through potentially massive backlogs of issues and denoting exactly where to begin.
- Remediates vulnerabilities: An ASPM solution with machine learning and large language models incorporated can suggest code fixes to the right users. If the fix seems workable, all the root cause owner needs to do is confirm the fix and add it to the next pull request.
The Use of AI in ASPM
Next-generation ASPM solutions have grown up in the cloud computing era, are more dynamic, and are built to help security teams deal with this highly complex, ever-changing environment where development is as widely distributed as your clouds.
They use Generative AI, LLM, and automation technologies to ingest and graph data from security controls, cloud infrastructure, and development environments. All of this intelligence allows security teams to get rid of manual, time-intensive processes for issue interpretation, triage, and remediation. Solutions like Dazz do this all in a dev-friendly workflow, giving both security and engineering teams unprecedented levels of speed and efficiency to close risk windows lightning fast — in days versus weeks.
Traditional vs. Modern Application Security Posture Management Solutions
ASPM solutions integrate security activities into the entire cloud application development lifecycle. Automated data analysis and data correlation help discover and prioritize critical issues in real time, while built-in root cause analysis ensures that developers fix issues at their source causes. With Dazz’s ASPM solution, security teams can be confident knowing the true risk level across their code-to-cloud environment and rest easy knowing that applications are safe against threats in the ever-changing digital landscape.
How to choose an ASPM solution
What should you consider and what should your process be when determining what ASPM solution will be the best fit for your organization’s needs?
- Identify your biggest pain points: Detecting security issues more effectively? Remediating them quickly? Tracking down root causes? Sifting through alerts to find the sharpest needles in the haystack?
- Assess what needs to be covered: What applications need to be covered, and how are they built?
- Consider integrations: What best-of-breed tools can integrate into your ASPM solution?
- Account for business context: Can the ASPM solution weight resources based on risk to your organization and the type of data being processed?
- Determine width and breadth of capabilities and your comfort with them: Can your ASPM solution offer up ideas for fixes? Will the developer use information surfaced up to make the fix, or will the process be fully automated?
- Get to know the reporting capabilities: Can you provide the right type of reports to different audiences (security teams, developer teams, executive stakeholders, etc.)? Can the solution customize reporting for each of these audiences?
- Determine true ease of use: Does the solution make its API accessible and easy to use? Does the solution seamlessly tap into technology like GraphQL for comprehensive reporting?
Additional Resources:
- eBook: Application Security Posture Management for Dummies
- VIDEO: The Road to Autonomous Cloud Security
- RemediationeBook: Cloud Security Remediation for Dummies
- Analyst report: IDC: The Business Value of the Dazz Remediation Cloud
