Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)

What is ASPM? 

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM for short), which we can translate into our language as “Application Security Posture Management”, is a holistic application security system in which findings from various tools are collected in a source of truth in order to identify, correlate and prioritize security vulnerabilities throughout the software development life cycle, from development to distribution. is the approach.

ASPM solutions correlate and analyze data from various sources to simplify problem interpretation, prioritization and remediation. It also manages and orchestrates security tools to enforce security policies. With ASPM, security teams can centrally manage application security findings, leveraging a unified view of security and risk status across the entire software development environment.

Why is ASPM Important?

As applications become more sophisticated, the complexity and operating costs of application security testing tools used to secure them are becoming a nightmare for organizations. This complexity also makes it difficult to measure a holistic and consistent application security risk posture.

ASPM tools enable teams to manage their entire application security program in one place, providing better collaboration between security and development teams and a consolidated view of what has been tested, what has been found, and what has been fixed.

What Features Are Required for an ASPM Solution?

We can summarize the main features of an effective ASPM solution as follows:

Integration of various application security testing tools : For an ASPM solution to provide value, it must be able to pull findings from a variety of sources, including development, deployment, and operations. The ability to work in an existing development environment is essential for ASPM solutions to increase the effectiveness of an application security testing program. This requires the ability to integrate with a wide range of application security testing tools, developer tools, and issue trackers, whether manual or automated. Connection to key data sources that map software assets, security findings, and issue tracking systems is essential for an ASPM solution to provide a bird’s eye view of the overall security posture.

Central principles: Enabling scalable application security workflows is vital for ASPM solutions to standardize security practices across teams, projects, and tools. This requires ASPM solutions to centrally define, enforce and monitor security policies that govern testing and prioritization. Additionally, defining these security policies as code enables security and development teams to seamlessly integrate issue assessment, audits, remediation, and validation within pipelines and maintain ongoing compliance.

Prioritization and Triage: We can define the first obstacle in application security management as “having the tools to combine relevant data points and standardize workflows”. But security teams also need to be able to leverage these ASPM features to maintain developer productivity. An ASPM solution should deduplicate results across tools and help prioritize issues that teams need to address first, based on centrally defined policies for risk metrics . These risk metrics may include issue severity, software criticality, and defined SLAs for remediation. With these features, developers can eliminate unnecessary upgrades and focus on their most important security work.

Risk management: An ASPM solution should be able to provide an overall view of the organization’s risk posture across its software footprint. It should include a detailed breakdown of where vulnerable software components and applications are located, issue resolution status, and policy and compliance violations. Security leaders need to be able to effectively leverage an ASPM solution to audit their applications, understand their enterprise risks from a software perspective, and establish key key performance indicators (KPIs) on the effectiveness of the application security program.

How Can Forcerta Help You?

Forcerta offers its customers the Software Risk Manager (SRM) product , a comprehensive ASPM solution from Synopsys , of which it is an authorized solution partner . Some of the opportunities that the Synopsys Software Risk Manager solution provides to our customers are summarized below.

• Conducting Application Security tests based on Security principles. (For example, activating determining which tests will be performed when a new code is added or a change is made to an existing code). 
• Synopsys SAST and SCA feature integrated with ASPM solution and connections with over 135 solutions.
• Uniformization and prioritization by finding the correlation between findings from different Application Security testing tools. Two-way synchronization between discovery tracking mechanisms. This improves tool consolidation across teams, sourcing and unifying user experience across different application security testing tools to simplify your operations.
• Ability to manage many Application Security Testing tools from one interface, with central policies and central reporting. Thus, optimizing core application security testing with a single, unified solution for efficient deployment, management and reporting of core application security testing functions.
• Unifying vulnerability reporting and management across projects, teams, and tools to provide a complete picture of security risks that are normalized, deduplicated, and prioritized.
• Simplifying AppSec integration and orchestration in development workflows to integrate security workflows with existing developer toolchains and enable rapid onboarding for existing projects and builds.

If you would like to get detailed information about an ASPM solution, you can contact Forcerta.

Resources:

• https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-application-security-post ure-management.html
• https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/software-risk-manag er.html
• https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2EK27CTN&ct=230726&st =sb