The Cyber Defense eMagazine November Edition for 2023

equired to understand the full scope of software risk, and the effectiveness of current security
tooling and teams.
• Connect key data sources, tools, and workflows within the existing environment: It is vital
to enable a frictionless path to security adoption across multiple development teams by
connecting existing tools, issue-tracking, and software delivery frameworks within a uniform user
experience. This simplifies training, breaks siloes across interrelated teams, and above all,
standardizes security visibility across all sources of software.
In practice, many organizations achieve these capabilities in a piecemeal fashion using a variety of tools
including vulnerability management platforms, application security testing (AST) tools, and homegrown
methods for issue-tracking and reporting. While these methods provide data and context on issues that
are uncovered at various stages of the SDLC, they offer an assortment of snapshots that can’t be easily
pieced together. The expanding threat footprint has accelerated the need for solutions that unify
fragmented tools, data, and workflows to provide a holistic view of software risk. This has driven the
evolution of application security posture management (ASPM).
What is ASPM?
ASPM solutions consolidate security data, visibility, and enforcement of controls across software
development, deployment, and operations. They enable organizations to distill security signals across
multiple sources of security data, orchestrate tooling, and view risk posture across all applications within
a single management layer. According to a recent Gartner study, over 40% of organizations developing
proprietary software applications will adopt ASPM by 2026 to rapidly identify and resolve application
security issues. There are several key capabilities that ASPM solutions provide to accelerate security
efficacy.
• Integrates with your existing tools: Often, organizations use security tools from multiple
vendors to cater to different scanning needs (SAST, SCA, IAST, DAST, API scanning, and more).
Each of these tools provides their own assessment of risk, but lacks the larger context of other
testing results or the business criticality of key software components and assets. ASPM solutions
provide value by integrating with all third-party security and developer tooling, and normalize data
from these tools to provide a single source of truth with a common risk taxonomy. This is central
to how ASPM solutions provide context on vulnerable software assets, and map out visibility of
all relevant issues at every stage of the SDLC.
• Provides a way to define, manage, and enforce policies: Setting universal security policies is
key to implementing guardrails which prevent issues from going downstream. ASPM solutions
provide a way to specify policies which define criticality thresholds, remediation SLAs, and testing
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