Managing the complexity of an application’s environment has become one of the greatest challenges for organizations, especially from a security perspective. The attack surface just keeps expanding with every microservice, plug-in, or open-source code component. Every third-party vulnerability becomes a liability for your organization.
The point is, application security is an increasingly convoluted area and you need a holistic yet agile system in place. That is where Application Security Posture Management or ASPM comes into play. In this article, we’ll talk about ASPM in some detail – its importance, capabilities, benefits, and use cases.
What Is Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)?
Application Security Posture Management or ASPM refers to a holistic approach to protecting applications throughout their life cycle from conception to retirement. This involves continuous risk assessment and mitigation, identification, and remediation of security vulnerabilities, and creation and maintenance of strict security policies and access controls.
Code analysis with static and dynamic security testing in the development phase, infrastructure security and configuration management in the deployment phase, and continuous vulnerability management and compliance management in the operational phase, all come under the umbrella of ASPM – Application Security Posture Management.
Key features of ASPM
ASPM combines a long list of security functions that are necessary for the healthy development and operation of an application. Tying these functions together on a platform creates granular visibility, a robust alert management framework, and ensures rapid incident response. On top of that, Application Security Posture Management makes compliance audits much easier for organizations. Here are some features that ASPM ties together.
1. Vulnerability Assessment
ASPM ensures continuous monitoring of the CI/CD pipeline as well as the application in operation to ensure
- Vulnerable code doesn’t go to production
- Runtime vulnerabilities are detected, prioritized, and remediated quickly.
2. Risk Assessment
Evaluate the potential impact of security vulnerabilities, scores and prioritize them based on criticality.
3. Compliance Management
Identifies security gaps that might meddle with specific regulations and helps companies maintain compliance with all relevant regulations like GDPR, HIPAA< PCI DSS, and SOC2.
4. Real-time unified view
It’s important to have vigilance over the different components that make up an application. Through visibility and alert management ensures not a single component is risky.
5. Remediation and incident response
ASPM identifies and responds to attacks quickly and effectively, creating and maintaining a strong incident response strategy. This includes making remediation guidelines available to security professionals.
6. DevSecOps integration
Enables and expedites the integration security with development and operations throughout the software life cycle. Overall, ASPM works as a perfect partner for the security team giving them a centralized platform to control and automate security functions across an application’s journey.
How Does ASPM work?
The workflow of Application Security Posture Management can be broken down into six broad phases. It is important to note that these phases are not essentially linear. More than one of these steps can be active concurrently.
1. Discovery and Inventory
The first phase of ASPM involves the identification of an organization’s application landscape. The goal is to inventory all applications – under development and in production – and identify their components, configurations and dependencies. This phase, which slightly resembles the information gathering and reconnaissance phase of any security testing activity, creates a solid foundation for the subsequent phases of ASPM.
2. Risk Assessment and Prioritization
With a detailed inventory at hand, ASPM conducts a thorough risk assessment. It identifies vulnerabilities in different areas of the application portfolio using a combination of static, dynamic, and interactive testing. Risk scores are assigned to each vulnerability to ensure the prioritization of mission-critical issues. It takes factors such as severity, exploitability, and potential impact into account for effective risk evaluation.
3. Compliance Assessment
By comparing the application environment with the relevant compliance framework, the ASPM system ensures the organization is compliant with industry standards. Compliance gaps found in this phase need immediate remediation.
4. Remediation
After the identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities and compliance issues, ASPM focuses on remediation. For common vulnerabilities, automated vulnerability scanners can offer remediation guidance for developers to follow. They might need to install patches, modify configurations, and refine code to fix the issues. For more complex problems such as business logic errors, a more human-led discovery and remediation might be necessary.
5. Continuous Monitoring
ASPM replaces point-in-time security assessment with continuous vigilance. This includes real-time threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks. This proactive approach to threat management makes a big difference in the overall security posture of an application and an organization.
6. Reporting and Analytics
The final phase of ASPM involves drawing data-driven insights into the application security posture. It’s important for organizations to have access to detailed security reports to have a bird’s eye view of the security stature. This allows the leadership to make informed decisions in terms of resource allocation and security investments. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of existing security measures.
ASPM vs. CSPM
ASPM or Application Security Posture Management, just as the name suggests, focuses primarily on the security of applications. The security and integrity of code, dependencies, and configurations fall under ASPM’s jurisdiction. It is also in charge of analyzing runtime behavior to identify vulnerabilities and risks.
ASPM ensures application security from the conception of an application till the time of its decommissioning.
In contrast, CSPM, or Cloud Security Posture Management focuses on the security of the cloud infrastructure. The security of the underlying platform, virtual networks, storage, and compute resources, CSPM is responsible for them all. Identity and access management is a significant part of CSPM as it aims to prevent unauthorized access and other cloud-specific threats.
As disciplines, ASPM and CSPM are deeply connected despite a difference in focus. If you deploy a secure application on a vulnerable cloud infrastructure, the application itself will become vulnerable. Similarly, hosting a vulnerable application can potentially compromise a secure cloud environment hosting. A comprehensive security posture is a result of the successful combination of ASPM and CSPM. This is something SentinelOne specializes in.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Capabilities
One of the main goals of Application Security Posture Management is to break silos in security management. It aims to unify the findings of vulnerability and risk assessment conducted across the board and ensure swift and targeted remediation. The following critical capabilities are central to this.
1. Consolidating Assessment Results
Multiple security tools with different capabilities may be employed to assess risk and identify vulnerabilities at different stages of development and deployment. The role of ASPM is to consolidate the findings into an easily accessible and actionable dashboard. The goal is to build a correlation between different approaches of security testing and create a clear image of the application security posture. The capability to unify the results of security assessments is what allows businesses to increase remediation speed and reduce risk.
2. Risk-Based Analysis
ASPM solutions assess the potential impact of vulnerabilities on the organization’s security posture. Vulnerabilities are prioritized based on risk to the company. ASPM takes various risk factors, including severity, potential exploitability, and business impact into account to build a reliable system for scoring and prioritizing security issues.
3. Remediation and Automation
ASPM automates and orchestrates tasks related to vulnerability remediation like ticket creation and escalation, integration with regular workflow, and resource allocation. This reduces the MTTR and helps security teams fix issues faster. ASPM also creates a system of dialing into the threat intelligence feeds to keep a business up to date.
4. Integration with DevSecOps Pipeline
Automated security checks integrated with the CI/CD pipeline ensure that security weaknesses are identified and remediated early when they are most cost-effective to fix. By preventing critical issues from entering production, ASPM ensures a better security posture for the application. It also involves continuous monitoring of applications to detect new vulnerabilities.
5. Reporting
Truly actionable reports can make a huge difference in dealing with vulnerabilities. Reports and dashboards created by ASPM tools offer centralized visibility into an organization’s application security posture. These reports allow all stakeholders to become aware of the security risks associated with specific products.
6. Compliance Monitoring and Reporting
ASPM allows businesses to comply with frameworks like OWASP and industry-specific regulations PCI DSS, and HIPAA, by building a compliance-focused security strategy and by keeping auditable trails of the processes.
7. Tool Rationalization
ASPM allows the selection and use of tools for maximum efficiency. It involves identifying and eliminating overlapping tools, assessing the performance of each tool, and running cost-benefit analyses. This helps an organization spend effectively on tooling.
Key Business Advantages of ASPM
- Mitigating Financial Loss: ASPM prevents costly data breaches, ransomware attacks, and fines incurred by violations by proactively finding and eliminating security weaknesses and compliance gaps.
- Protecting Brand Reputation: With rapid incident response and effective vulnerability management, ASPM reduces business downtime and protects customers as well as the company’s image.
- Accelerating Time-to-Market: By integrating security into the development lifecycle, ASPM helps organizations avoid any costly rework at a later stage of development. This expedites the releases.
- Optimizing Resource Allocation: Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk allows for efficient allocation of security resources.
- Enabling Data-Driven Decision-Making: A centralized view of the security posture, along with actionable insights, enables informed decision-making in terms of security strategies and resource allocation.
- Improving Operational Efficiency: Automation of security tasks frees up security teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Key Challenges of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)
While Application Security Posture Management helps an organization tackle and circumnavigate many difficulties, it comes with its own set of challenges.
1. Complexity and Scale
An organization may manage a vast array of applications with diverse security requirements.
Agile development, along with low-code and no-code platforms increases the speed of development, often at the expense of security.
2. Resource Constraints
Allocating resources for ASPM tools, personnel, and processes can be difficult for some organizations, especially if they are spending separately on cloud security.
The pressure to release software quickly can often undermine the requisite security measures.
3. Prioritization and Remediation
False positives can overwhelm security teams, impeding their ability to prioritize.
Thus, unless the ASPM filters false positives efficiently, it can consume valuable resources.
4. Evolving Threat Landscape
New attack vectors can pose threats to companies even if they are secured by solid defense frameworks. The growing complexity of supply chains also increases the risk.
5. Culture of Security
Building a security-first culture where the pressure of a launch doesn’t supersede the importance of security is important but hard. There is often an internal resistance to necessary security controls. These challenges can be overcome through awareness building and security training. A security-conscious team is likely to draw more benefits from an ASPM than a team that is not security-aware.
How Can SentinelOne Support Your ASPM Needs?
.The Singularity Enterprise Security platform by SentinelOne combines the powers of data security, cloud security, and endpoint security to create a perfect security suite for businesses looking for a holistic approach to security.
With a generative AI-powered platform to integrate security into the SDLC, SentinelOne manifests the future of DevSecOps. By automating key security functions, the platform allows continuous monitoring and quick incident response. It leverages security-focused generative AI for querying threats and planning remediation, so security professionals can save time and increase accuracy.
- Intuitive searches and hypothesis-based hunting with PowerQuery language
- One API with 350+ functions for building customized automation
- Hunter’s Toolkit which offers high-performance, industry-leading historical EDR data retention for up to 3 years of visibility
- Secure remote shell for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Kubernetes
- Machine-speed malware analysis, file quarantine, and sandbox integrations for further dynamic analysis
- Vigilance Respond Pro adds digital forensics and incident response services (DFIR) for extended analysis and response
- 24×7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service to offload day-to-day operations of SOC teams and analysts
- Seamless CI/CD integrations, Snyk integration, and agentless vulnerability management
AI-driven autonomous Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) with Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Detection & Response (CDR), Secret Scanning, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning, Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Offensive Security Engine, Purple AI cyber security analyst, and Singularity Data Lake.Singularity™ Complete helps security teams achieve complete cross-surface visibility and take action in real time using one agent. It features enterprise-grade threat detection, prevention, response, and threat hunting across endpoint, cloud, and identity. With the best-in-class EPP and EDR in one agent, it reduces alert fatigue and automatically correlates telemetry data to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework. SentinelOne simplifies automated threat resolution with one-click remediation and reverses all unauthorized changes. Its NGAV and behavioral detection blocks unknown and hidden threats.
SentinelOne offers:
- Patented Storyline technology creates context in real time for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Kubernetes cloud-native workloads.
- Process re-linking across PID trees and reboots preserves precious context
Overall, SentinelOne is as comprehensive as a security platform gets. It’s future-ready and helps you tackle the specific AppSec challenges you are facing.
Conclusion
Application security is more complicated today than it ever was, but at the same time, thanks to robust Application Security Posture Management systems, it is easier than it used to be. A centralized view of granular security data points plus AI-driven insights into security data, all work together to make life easier for CISOs and security professionals. Platforms like SentinelOne Singularity, with their key capabilities spread across all kinds of attack surfaces, just make things even easier.
FAQs
1. What is the difference between DSPM and ASPM?
ASPM focuses on protecting applications throughout their life cycle. DSPM, or Data Security Posture Management, focuses on securing sensitive data wherever it is—in transit or at rest.
2. Difference between ASPM vs CNAPP?
ASPM is concerned with the security of applications. CNAPP or Cloud Native Application Protection Platform focuses on securing cloud-hosted applications and their underlying infrastructure.