Key Concept
Understanding the importance of application security posture management, key capabilities, and common Application Security best practices that generates data.
Defining Application Security Posture Management
Application security posture management (ASPM) is a strategic approach to improving the security of software applications. It involves continuous security monitoring, security vulnerability assessment, and improvement of an application’s compliance to security standards.
The goal of application security posture management is to strengthen software development against vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks. ASPM includes various practices and tools designed to ensure that applications are developed, deployed, and maintained with strong security measures. At the core of ASPM is the use of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) reports with the ability to aggregate and share SBOM data across teams, a critical and misunderstood area of ASPM.
Today software applications are critical to every enterprise and securing these applications have never been more critical. To achieve this, Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) presents a comprehensive approach to inform how organizations protect their software assets.
Unlike conventional security measures that often focus on network perimeters or endpoint protection, ASPM zooms in on the applications themselves. It provides a holistic view of an organization’s application security landscape, offering continuous assessment and improvement rather than point-in-time evaluations.
Traditional Application Security Testing (AST) tools like SAST, DAST, and IAST focus on detecting vulnerabilities in isolation, ASPM takes a broader perspective. It not only identifies vulnerabilities but also considers the context of the application within the organization’s ecosystem, prioritizing risks based on business impact and exploitability.
With ASPM, we are bridging the gap between DevOps and Security teams, to foster a collaborative approach to organization security and help organizations stay ahead in the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape.
However, modern approaches to application architecture, development and deployment present additional challenges to fully implementing ASPM. Continuous deployment, microservices, decoupled architectures and the proliferation of internal services create an expanded attack surface and make it challenging to maintain consistent security policies and visibility across the entire system. Let’s explore ASPM and modern architectures in more detail…
In decoupled architectures where dozens of services and hundreds of components (open source, third-party and internal) make up a ‘logical’ application version, one component (or service using that component) may be consumed by dozens of applications. So each time that component is updated, the consuming applications are affected. More importantly, any time those components are compromised… all of the “logical applications” are affected as well.
“How do I manage the security of hundreds of components that make up a single version of the software I deliver to end users?” a simple Excel spreadsheet will not get this done.
By establishing (or re-establishing) the concept of a “logical application release” and instrumenting the CI/CD pipeline to consume and generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) we can continuously map the hundreds of component versions used by the application versions to achieve continuous security intelligence of the entire application portfolio. The mapping enables real time, accurate security and compliance scoring, ‘logical application release’ SBOMs, and provides for a consolidated view of all the evidence needed for responding to vulnerabilities for any application version running in production.
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ASPM includes a variety of practices and tools designed to ensure that applications are developed, deployed, and maintained with strong security measures.
Where does Application Security Posture Management data come from? By now, most companies have built DevOps pipelines that address some level of application security.
Here the top five most common Application Security best practices that generates data:
DeployHub Pro is an invaluable part of ASPM, providing continuous surveillance of your software vulnerabilities across logical applications, releases, and domains so you always know the security posture of your most critical systems.
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