Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is an innovative approach that empowers organizations to comprehensively manage risk across all facets of an application, including code, infrastructure, cloud environments, containers, APIs and third-party software and throughout the software delivery lifecycle. In this blog, we will explore the driving forces behind ASPM, its core components and the key benefits it offers.

Need for ASPM

While many organizations aim to implement DevSecOps, they often encounter obstacles in operationalizing it efficiently. Despite its maturity and widespread adoption, integrating DevSecOps into daily operations can be complex. ASPM is emerging as a solution to these challenges by offering capabilities to prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk and continuously streamline their remediation. Beyond DevSecOps, organizations are also struggling with the surge of vulnerabilities across applications, cloud environments and infrastructure. Tracking and timely remediation of these security risks is becoming increasingly complex, leading to missed SLAs and elevating the risk levels of applications and networks, particularly concerning critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.

Therefore, while DevSecOps is a significant driver for adopting ASPM, the escalating number of vulnerabilities across diverse platforms underscores the necessity for this comprehensive security posture management approach.

"By 2026, 40% of development organizations will use the AI-based autoremediation of insecure code from application security testing vendors as a default, up from less than 5% in 2023. ." -Gartner®1.

Shortcomings of traditional application security

In modern application environments, traditional application security (AppSec) encounters several challenges:

• Fragmented security posture: Numerous noisy and siloed products provide only partial insights into an application's security, making it difficult to assess the overall risk profile comprehensively.
• Lack of team coordination: Insufficient collaboration between different teams complicates remediation efforts.
• Contextless noise and duplications: The abundance of redundant alerts and lack of context create significant challenges in identifying the root cause and responsible party for security issues. It also makes it difficult to prioritize which vulnerabilities to address first.
• Limited visibility and governance: Inadequate oversight results in failing to apply necessary security controls across all application components.

Key insights and benefits of ASPM

• Holistic security view: ASPM provides a comprehensive view of your application's security landscape, including services, libraries, APIs, attack surfaces and data flows.
• Continuous monitoring: ASPM continuously monitors application security across development environments and cloud infrastructures.
• Automated vulnerability management: Vulnerability detection, correlation and prioritization are automated based on risk and business impact.
• Centralized policy enforcement: ASPM centralizes policy management to ensure consistent security across teams and projects.
• Risk-based prioritization: Contextual insights and risk-based scoring help focus on the most critical security issues.

Actionable strategies

• Accelerate security testing: Integrate ASPM into development pipelines for faster security testing and reviews.
• Shift left security: Implement security measures early in the development process.
• Vulnerability remediation program: Address identified issues promptly with a robust remediation program. Leverage risk scoring to determine the best set of remediation actions that can address the most significant security vulnerabilities.
• Workflow integration: Integrate ASPM into workflows to streamline remediation and collaboration between security and development teams.
• Scalability: Use ASPM to scale application security efforts effectively with growing application complexity.

Implementing these strategies can significantly improve your application security posture and better manage vulnerabilities.

What are the components of ASPM?

ASPM does not refer to a single process or tool. Instead, it encompasses various best practices aimed at improving an application's overall security posture. Gartner has created a graphic to illustrate ASPM's core capabilities.

ASPM aims to deliver unified and consistent governance for every aspect of an application, from the code to the infrastructure it runs on. This involves:

• Orchestration: Applying automated security measures across various environments and technologies.
• Correlation: Integrating data from multiple security tools to compile a comprehensive security overview.
• Prioritization: Utilizing risk-based scoring to address the most critical security issues first.
• Risk management: Effectively managing security risks, irrespective of the underlying technologies or scanners used by development teams.

ASPM enables leadership and the business to have a holistic view of risk, facilitating informed decision-making and ensuring consistent security governance across all application components.

HCLTech's strategy for ASPM

• Discover: Assess the customer ecosystem by discovering applications, understanding application security maturity, identifying security tools and determining compliance requirements. This involves tagging ecosystem partners, itemizing applications, gauging security maturity using tools like Wiz.io and Tenable and reviewing key compliance documents.
• Establish: Application security best practices by integrating security tools like Wiz.io and Tenable, configuring security policies, creating a CIO vulnerability dashboard, recommending security processes and tools and retiring outdated tools. These steps ensure a robust and streamlined security framework.
• Run by phases: Conduct security assessments, aggregate findings from SAST, DAST, penetration testing, infrastructure and cloud assessments, perform application-level risk analysis; provide remediation guidance and automation and implement vulnerability governance to track remediation progress. This approach ensures comprehensive identification, prioritization and resolution of security vulnerabilities.
• Improve: Enhance security orchestration, integrate with DevSecOps, rationalize tools, track metrics and SLAs, ensure audit-proof reporting, rationalize cyber insurance and fine-tune security tools. These steps improve security processes, streamline operations and maintain compliance.
• Continuous transformation: Sustain continuous transformation by onboarding new tools and applications, improving processes, creating training assets and modernizing applications. These steps support ongoing enhancement, streamlined operations and up-to-date security practices.

HCLTech and ArmorCode

HCLTech and ArmorCode deliver an end-to-end ASPM offering, from deployment and implementation to ongoing risk reduction. ArmorCode helps enterprises stop chasing vulnerabilities and start reducing risk. ArmorCode's AI-powered ASPM Platform integrates with any scanner, creating a unified understanding of risk across applications and infrastructure, leverages intelligent risk scoring to prioritize the most critical risks and orchestrates security workflows with developers to remediate issues efficiently at scale.

"CISOs today must deal with competing priorities, evolving threats, dynamic market conditions, complex technology ecosystems and data coming in from many sources. To manage this and make the best decisions for the organization, we need to think about cyber risk holistically. I believe ASPM is the answer to this challenge, delivering a holistic platform that provides a single independent governance layer across application and technology asset portfolios; risk-based prioritization; and intelligence leveraging data to assist, accelerate and automate security at enterprise scale." 

Karthik Swarnam, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Armor Code

¹Gartner, Hype Cycle for Application Security, 2024, By Dionisio Zumerle, 29 July 2024.

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