What is ASPM?
Application security posture management (ASPM) is a unified security approach that continuously discovers, prioritizes, and remediates risks across the entire software development lifecycle.
Unlike traditional tools that work in isolation, ASPM delivers three core capabilities:
Unified visibility: Connects findings from SAST, DAST, and other security tools
Risk prioritization: Adds context to help teams focus on exploitable vulnerabilities
Policy enforcement: Ensures consistent security standards from code to production
With a code-to-cloud context, ASPM can connect the dots across all your tools and stages. This helps your security team with more accurate prioritization and faster remediation.
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. Gartner also predicts that by 2026, “over 40% of organizations development proprietary applications will adopt ASPM to more rapidly identify and resolve application security issues.”
Wiz Named a Leader in IDC’s ASPM MarketScape
See why IDC recognized Wiz as a leader in Application Security Posture Management and how we’re helping organizations reduce risk across the SDLC.
Why AppSec Teams Need ASPM
Modern application security faces three critical challenges that traditional tools can't solve alone:
1.Tool sprawl and fragmentation:
Security teams manage 10+ disconnected tools across the SDLC, as seen in PROS's tool consolidation journey
Each tool generates isolated findings with no unified context
Manual correlation creates delays and missed critical risks
2. Accelerating development demands:
Code ships rapidly across distributed, cloud-native environments
AppSec teams must secure applications without slowing delivery
Limited visibility into how applications are built and deployed
3. Context and prioritization gaps:
Thousands of alerts with no clear way to prioritize risk
Missing connections between vulnerabilities and business impact
Security teams struggle to focus on truly exploitable issues
ASPM addresses these challenges by bringing all signals together. It unifies findings from across the toolchain, adds context from runtime and cloud environments, and helps teams focus on the vulnerabilities that actually matter. For modern AppSec programs, ASPM turns scattered signals into actionable insight.
What are the benefits of ASPM
AppSec teams are overloaded with tools but lack the context to act. Vulnerabilities are scattered across scanners, pipelines, and cloud environments, with no easy way to connect the dots. ASPM changes that by giving teams the visibility, context, and control they need to manage application risk at scale. This unified approach is especially important given the prevalence of public-facing application vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations.
Unify risk across code, pipelines, and cloud
ASPM creates a single source of truth for application security by integrating findings from multiple tools:
Static analysis: SAST findings from code repositories
Dynamic testing: DAST results from running applications
Infrastructure security: IaC misconfigurations and container vulnerabilities
Dependency scanning: Open source and third-party component risks
Runtime insights: Production security events and behaviors
This unified approach eliminates security silos and gives AppSec teams complete visibility across the development lifecycle.
Focus on what’s actually exploitable
ASPM prioritizes vulnerabilities based on exploitability, not just severity scores. It identifies high-priority issues using four key risk factors:
Reachability: Can the vulnerability actually be triggered in your environment?
Exposure: Is the vulnerable component accessible from the internet?
Data sensitivity: Does exploitation provide access to critical business data?
Attack path potential: Could this vulnerability enable lateral movement or privilege escalation?
This context-driven approach helps security teams focus on the 5% of vulnerabilities that pose real business risk, a critical capability when one study found that 57% of organizations use server software with severe vulnerabilities even when patches are available.
Assign ownership automatically
Every finding is mapped to the right repo, pipeline, and team, as demonstrated by Zendesk's ownership model. Security teams can route issues directly to the people responsible, cutting down delay and confusion.
Track posture over time
ASPM monitors how your application security posture evolves across releases. Teams can catch regressions early, measure progress, and keep stakeholders informed with clear metrics.
Strengthen compliance and audit readiness
ASPM enforces security policies across development and deployment workflows. It gives teams the traceability and reporting they need to support internal controls and meet external requirements like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and industry-specific standards.
For example, Aon decided to automate compliance to improve management and protection. The company used 100+ frameworks with Wiz. What took hours now only takes minutes. Plus, it now has real-time visibility throughout cloud environments.
Aon also improved M&A security evaluations before deals close, which has added strategic value to its business ventures.
Integrate with how developers work
ASPM plugs into CI/CD systems and developer tools to surface security issues early. Developers get the context they need without leaving their workflows, and security teams can shift left without slowing things down.
Get the Application Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
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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). One thing to note: ASPM fills a gap that these tools don't cover: application layer risk visibility across the SDLC.
Below, we compare ASPM to these platforms by way of their primary use cases.
| Tool | Use case |
|---|---|
| ASPM |
|
| CSPM |
|
| DSPM |
|
| ASOC |
|
| SSPM |
|
Key features of ASPM solutions: What to look for
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
ASPM reduces alert fatigue by replacing thousands of generic alerts with prioritized, actionable insights.
Contextualized alerting delivers:
Business impact assessment: Shows how vulnerabilities affect critical applications and data
Exploit likelihood scoring: Identifies which vulnerabilities can actually be exploited
Remediation guidance: Provides specific steps to fix issues, not just identify them
Owner assignment: Routes alerts to the right teams based on code ownership
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.
What makes Wiz an ASPM Leader
Wiz has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Application Security Posture Management 2025 Vendor Assessment, reflecting both the strength of its current capabilities and its long-term vision for ASPM. Unlike point solutions that only scan code or aggregate findings, Wiz delivers ASPM as part of a unified CNAPP platform — combining Wiz Code for application-layer risks, Wiz Cloud for infrastructure security, and Wiz Defend for runtime threat detection. All of these components are powered by the Wiz Security Graph, which connects vulnerabilities, identities, data, and runtime context to provide the most complete view of application risk.
What sets Wiz apart is its developer-centric design and remediation-first approach. By integrating directly into developer workflows — IDEs, pull requests, CI/CD pipelines, and MCP — Wiz embeds security into the tools engineers already use, reducing friction and accelerating fixes. The acquisition of Dazz further strengthened Wiz’s remediation engine, enabling automated deduplication of findings, tracing issues to their root cause, and campaign-driven workflows that drive real progress on vulnerability backlogs.
IDC specifically highlighted Wiz’s ability to cut noise, surface root causes, and deliver practical outcomes, giving organizations confidence that the issues prioritized are the ones that matter most. Combined with its open integration ecosystem and rapid agentless deployment, Wiz helps security teams scale ASPM without adding complexity. For organizations navigating overwhelming vulnerability volumes, fragmented toolchains, and the pressures of AI-driven development, Wiz offers a proven, leader-recognized path to unifying and maturing their application security posture.
Watch 5-min demo: How Wiz secures applications
See how Wiz connects code to cloud context using the Security Graph, highlights real code issues, enforces CI/CD policies, and enables one-click remediation—all in a single platform.
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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. Want a security layer that connects code to cloud risk? Book a Wiz Code demo to see how ASPM should work—agentless, contextual, and built for real-world DevSecOps workflows.
Want to dive deeper into code security? Get the free Secure Coding Best Practices [Cheat Sheet].
