ASPM explained
Application security posture management entails continuously assessing applications for threats, risks, and vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Gartner describes ASPM as an approach that assesses “security signals” across the three key SDLC phases to boost visibility, enforce security policies, and ultimately, strengthen organizations’ overall security posture.
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The need for ASPM
As organizations increasingly rely on complex, distributed applications and adopt cloud-native technologies, traditional application security approaches are struggling to keep pace.Several factors contribute to the growing necessity of ASPM:
Accelerated Development Cycles: With the adoption of DevOps and Agile methodologies, software is being developed and deployed at unprecedented speeds. This rapid pace often leaves security teams scrambling to keep up, potentially leading to critical vulnerabilities slipping through the cracks.
Expanding Attack Surface: Modern applications are no longer monolithic structures. They're composed of microservices, APIs, and third-party components, significantly expanding the potential attack surface. This complexity makes it challenging to maintain a comprehensive view of an organization's security posture.
Cloud and Container Adoption: The shift to cloud-native architectures and containerization has introduced new security challenges. Traditional security tools often lack visibility into these dynamic environments, creating blind spots in security coverage.
Software Supply Chain Risks: Recent high-profile attacks have highlighted the vulnerabilities in the software supply chain. Organizations need better visibility and control over the security of third-party components and dependencies integrated into their applications.
Regulatory Compliance: With increasing regulatory requirements around data protection and privacy, organizations need more robust mechanisms to demonstrate compliance and manage risk effectively.
Resource Constraints: Security teams are often understaffed and overwhelmed by the volume of security alerts and vulnerabilities. They need tools that can help prioritize application risks and streamline remediation efforts.
Siloed Security Tools: Many organizations use a variety of disconnected security tools, each generating its own set of alerts and data. This fragmentation makes it difficult to get a holistic view of the application security landscape.
ASPM addresses these challenges by providing a unified, comprehensive approach to application security. It offers continuous visibility across the entire application portfolio, helps prioritize risks based on business impact, and facilitates collaboration between security and development teams. By doing so, ASPM enables organizations to manage their application security posture more effectively in the face of evolving threats and complex IT environments.
How ASPM works
Implementing ASPM involves the use of an ASPM solution that carries out the following processes.
Software discovery and inventorying
ASPM identifies all apps—and their respective components—in an enterprise’s IT system. It then creates up-to-date and comprehensive software composition analysis (SCA) and software bill of material (SBOM) reports that help you understand the components used during app development, their origins, vulnerabilities, and how to resolve them.
Vulnerability scanning
ASPM assesses all applications and app components for threats, misconfigurations, and non-compliance violations. It also scans software development, testing, and CI/CD pipelines for code-level vulnerabilities, leaked secrets, etc.
Triage
ASPM tools collate risks gathered from across your apps and security tools into a unified list, then ranks them based on their severity levels and projected impact to your applications and overall business.
Remediation
ASPM platforms offer step-by-step guides and tools that Dev, Sec, and Ops teams can use to fix threats at varying stages without disrupting the SDLC. This includes capabilities like:
Auto-remediation to immediately resolve misconfigurations
Bulk remediation for resolving software supply chain security vulnerabilities affecting multiple software components at once
One-click remediation to instantly isolate vulnerable systems during attacks
Continuous monitoring
ASPM solutions scan your software stack round-the-clock for emerging threats, new misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities to keep your apps safe 24/7.
Benefits of ASPM
Apps have complex arrays of vulnerable components, endpoints, and data/input fields that make them attractive targets for denial-of-service (DDoS), ransomware, and injection attacks. These can lead to data theft and exposure, render apps unavailable to end users, and result in hefty financial losses.
In the face of such attacks, ASPM is critical to boosting overall app security, availability, and reliability. Let’s take a closer look at why ASPM is important.
Data-driven visibility and threat mitigation
Besides continuously collecting risk data across multiple software development phases, ASPM consolidates security findings from all application security (AppSec) tools in your stack—including application security testing (AST) and database security scanning tools—into one unified dashboard.
ASPM delivers real-time data on vulnerabilities in your code, software components, APIs, security policies and processes, etc. before and after app deployment. It also allows you to see exactly what’s going in your app from code to cloud, empowering you to effectively resolve threats and vulnerabilities before they become full-blown attacks.
Improved security and ops
ASPM shifts application layer security left, promoting a security-first approach that motivates developers to push only secure code.
When application and code security are made priorities, enterprises produce better quality apps with fewer vulnerabilities; this translates into fewer attacks, faster detection, less time spent remediating threats after the fact, and more time spent on innovation.
Competitive advantage and business continuity
Improving your application security posture from the get-go means building secure-by-design (SbD) apps; these shave off the extra time IT teams spend on reworking vulnerable code or app components, which, in turn, speeds up SDLCs and helps get your product to the market first.
Similarly, when apps are innately secure, you typically have less downtime resulting from security incidents, ensuring high availability and allowing customers uninterrupted access to your applications.
Moreover, since it is cheaper to prevent security incidents than to face the resulting financial and reputational damage, ASPM implementation is also cost-efficient.
Data protection and compliance management
ASPM safeguards data fields and databases containing PHI, PCI, PII, and other sensitive data from threats. ASPM tools also automate the creation of compliance reports and audit trails, making compliance management less burdensome.
By implementing ASPM, you are letting your users know that protecting their data and abiding by industry best practices/regulations are top priorities. This enhances your company’s reputation and builds customer trust.
ASPM and DevSecOps
ASPM and DevSecOps are both complementary concepts in cybersecurity. DevSecOps represents a shift-left approach to software development, which advocates introducing app security in the early phases of the SDLC.
However, without ASPM, DevSecOps remains a largely abstract concept, and implementing it is cumbersome. This is because it requires some degree of automation, the collaboration of three varied teams, and the adoption of a security-first mindset—all of which ASPM facilitates.
Essentially, ASPM engenders secure coding practices and automates DevSecOps processes across the SDLC, while also facilitating cross-team collaboration for improved app security.
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ASPM vs. other security tools
While ASPM is crucial, it doesn’t replace other existing security tools and frameworks, namely, cloud security posture management (CSPM), data security posture management (DSPM), application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC), and software as a service security posture management (SSPM). Below, we compare ASPM to these platforms by way of their primary use cases.
| Tool | Use Case |
|---|---|
| ASPM | Secures apps throughout their lifecycle, from development to deployment |
| CSPM | Secures cloud infrastructure such as DBaaS, IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS |
| DSPM | Safeguards sensitive data like PII, PHI, NPI, SPI, etc. |
| ASOC | Automates and orchestrates app security processes, primarily at the development and testing stages |
| SSPM | Protects against vulnerabilities associated with SaaS solutions, including misconfigurations, outdated patches, loose access controls, etc. |
Key features of ASPM solutions
ASPM solutions offer a range of essential features designed to enhance the security and resilience of applications. These key features enable organizations to gain visibility, identify risks, and streamline the management of their application security posture. Below are the critical features of ASPM:
1. Full-Stack Visibility
ASPM solutions provide comprehensive visibility across the entire application stack, from infrastructure to the code layer. This means gaining insights into configurations, permissions, dependencies, and vulnerabilities across all components, whether on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid environments. Full-stack visibility ensures that no security blind spots are missed and that security teams can proactively identify and address potential risks.
2. Continuous Monitoring and Risk Assessments
ASPM continuously monitors applications in real-time, allowing for the identification of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security issues as they arise. This proactive approach ensures that organizations are always aware of their application security posture and can assess risks dynamically. Continuous risk assessment prioritizes vulnerabilities based on severity, allowing teams to focus on the most critical issues first.
3. Integration with CI/CD Pipelines
To keep pace with the rapid development cycles of modern applications, ASPM integrates seamlessly with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. By embedding security checks early in the development process, ASPM helps ensure that vulnerabilities are detected and remediated before they make it into production. This approach promotes a shift-left security strategy, allowing teams to address security concerns as part of their development workflow.
4. Automated Threat Detection and Remediation
Automation is a cornerstone of ASPM solutions, enabling automated threat detection and response capabilities. ASPM leverages intelligent automation to identify threats based on patterns, behaviors, or predefined rules. Additionally, ASPM can offer automated remediation suggestions or trigger workflows to resolve vulnerabilities quickly, reducing the time between detection and resolution.
5. Compliance Mapping and Reports
ASPM solutions help organizations stay compliant with industry regulations and security frameworks by continuously monitoring applications for compliance-related issues. They provide comprehensive reporting and audit trails, ensuring that security and compliance teams can track and verify adherence to standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and more. ASPM’s automated compliance checks reduce the burden of manual audits and ensure that applications remain secure and compliant over time.
6. Contextualized Alerts and Insights
Rather than overwhelming teams with endless security alerts, ASPM solutions deliver contextualized insights that help prioritize responses. By correlating data from across the application stack, ASPM provides a deeper understanding of each vulnerability's context—whether it's related to a critical component, a high-value asset, or a low-risk issue—allowing teams to make informed decisions quickly.
7. Remediation Guidance and Best Practices
ASPM solutions go beyond simply identifying issues; they also provide actionable remediation guidance. This includes offering recommendations for resolving vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or compliance gaps. Many ASPM tools include access to security best practices and automated workflows to streamline remediation efforts, helping development and security teams stay aligned.
Wiz's approach to ASPM
Wiz supports ASPM through our newest product, Wiz Code, which offers:
Built-in Scanners
Wiz's built-in scanners detect a wide range of application security risks:
Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Identifies vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies
Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Detects security issues in custom code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning: Finds misconfigurations in infrastructure definitions
Container Image Scanning: Identifies vulnerabilities in container images
These scanners work across multiple programming languages and frameworks, providing broad coverage for application security.
Code-to-Cloud Context
Wiz Code provides a comprehensive view of application security by connecting code vulnerabilities to their runtime impact in the cloud. This approach:
Identifies vulnerabilities in application code and third-party dependencies
Maps these vulnerabilities to their actual deployment in cloud environments
Provides context on whether vulnerable code is exposed to the internet or contains sensitive data
Risk Prioritization
Wiz's approach to risk prioritization in ASPM includes:
Considering both the severity of code vulnerabilities and their cloud exposure
Highlighting high-risk issues that are actively exploitable in production
Reducing alert fatigue by focusing on the most critical security concerns
Third-Party Findings Integrations
Wiz doesn't limit itself to its own scanners. It also ingests findings from third-party tools:
Integrates results from external SAST and DAST tools
Consolidates security findings from various sources into a single view
Provides a holistic picture of application security across different testing methodologies
Integrated Security Workflow
The ASPM capabilities of Wiz Code streamline the security workflow by:
Offering a single pane of glass for both cloud and application security
Enabling security teams to triage and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently
Providing developers with actionable insights to fix issues earlier in the development cycle
Continuous Monitoring
Wiz Code supports continuous ASPM by:
Scanning code repositories and cloud environments in real-time
Detecting new vulnerabilities as they emerge in the application lifecycle
Tracking the remediation progress of identified issues
Enhanced Collaboration
By integrating ASPM capabilities, Wiz Code fosters better collaboration between security and development teams:
Provides a shared view of application risks across different stakeholders
Facilitates clearer communication about security priorities
Supports a shift-left approach to security in the software development lifecycle
Wiz Code's approach to ASPM represents a significant evolution in application security, moving beyond traditional SAST and DAST tools to provide a more holistic, cloud-native security solution that addresses the complexities of modern application development and deployment.
