Gartner recently released its first-ever Innovation Insight for Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
What is ASPM?
If you’re new to the topic, Gartner provides the following definition.
Application security posture management analyzes security signals across software development, deployment and operation to improve visibility, better manage vulnerabilities and enforce controls. Security leaders can use ASPM to improve application security efficacy and better manage risk.
Here are the core ASPM capabilities that Gartner cites:
Why Does ASPM Matter?
At its core, ASPM is important because it isn’t just about finding security bugs and vulnerabilities. Rather, it’s about effectively and accurately assessing risk based on contextual information about a threat and its overall impact. For example:
- Is this threat in a development, testing, or production environment?
- Is this threat in an internal application or an external application?
- Is this threat present within an application service that is internet-facing?
- Does this threat involve access to sensitive data like PII?
The value of ASPM isn’t based on the volume of threats discovered or the CVSS scores of those threats. The value lives within the ability to analyze a threat and correlate it to risk based on context.
ASPM offers a way to measure or validate that your pre-production testing, reviews, and secure coding practices are yielding secure applications. Gartner points out that ASPM is particularly impactful because it can help reduce some of the friction that organizations experience when they share responsibility of application security, particularly in terms of:
- Visibility
- Correlation
- Triage and prioritization
- Remediation
Who Needs ASPM?
While there is a wide range of specific use cases, ASPM will be best fit for organizations that build custom applications and make frequent updates to those applications through mature DevOps teams using continuous integration and continuous delivery.
The teams that derive the most value from ASPM are those that already have application security testing (AST) tools in place (like SCA, SAST, DAST, IAST) but need a clearer and more comprehensive view of their applications and attack surfaces in production. Organizations with AST and CSPM tools will also greatly benefit from ASPM by reducing the number of false positives and alerts for vulnerabilities that don’t create real business risk.
Bionic’s Approach to ASPM
Bionic’s approach to ASPM squarely aligns with Gartner’s research, but also emphasizes the importance of identifying sensitive data and securing data flows through applications.
We’ve built a solution aligned with four main pillars of ASPM.
- Visibility & Inventory
- Risk Scoring & Drift
- Unified Risk Posture
- Workflows & Orchestration
From these four pillars, we’ve developed a platform that helps teams with:
- Application visibility. Bionic provides you with a code-accurate view of every application service, dependency, function, data flow, and API.
- Application and API security. Bionic continuously analyzes your application security posture as it changes to detect zero-day/critical CVEs, unauthenticated APIs, hardcoded secrets, drift, etc.
- Application data security. Bionic identifies sensitive data and understands when an application is accessing PII, PHI, and PCI to protect against data breaches, leaks, and potential data protection noncompliance.
- Application reliability and resilience. Bionic clarifies the architecture of even the most complex and distributed applications, giving teams the visibility and information they need to create resilient, robust applications and reduce tech debt.
- Vulnerability contextualization. Bionic assesses vulnerabilities through the lens of risk to your business. It takes into account the criticality of the application service, its environment, whether it’s an internal or external application, whether it’s connected to the internet, the presence of sensitive data, and overall business use and logic.
To learn more about ASPM and how Bionic can help you better see and secure your application attack surface, schedule a demo today.
Check out Jacob’s glassboard video on this topic.
