ASPM: Accelerating Development And Business Velocity While Reducing Risks

Idan Plotnik is the co-founder and CEO of Apiiro, a leader in cloud-native application security.

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In the modern software development world, speed and efficiency are of paramount importance. Developers are tasked with delivering high-quality and secure applications to the cloud, while businesses are striving to bring them to market as quickly as possible.

The newest term emerging in this landscape is application security posture management (ASPM), a revolutionary approach that significantly enhances both developer and business velocity by holistically reducing application risks.

ASPM: A Game Changer For Developers

In today's world, developers face myriad challenges while navigating and managing countless software development and delivery processes. These range from security processes like risk assessment questionnaires to threat models and security code reviews or tools like SAST, SCA, secrets and container scanning, DAST and API security testing. These processes and tools are siloed and reactive, creating endless and contextless alert backlogs and taking hours of manual triage work.

While "shift-left" approaches were developed to streamline secure software development, they had drawbacks that led to an increased burden on developers. The main reason for this is that security teams forwarded the noisy alerts to the developers without the necessary context and knowledge required to triage and fix them.

This created friction between security and development teams and, in some organizations, even got to the level of the CISOs and CIOs. Developers felt that shift-left processes were disruptive and hindered their focus on delivering functional code, reducing overall productivity and impacting the business.

After talking with hundreds of software engineering and application security leaders, CISOs and CIOs, I have learned that in today's reality of agile development and continuous delivery, we cannot stop developers on a single vulnerability based purely on CWSS or CVSS scores anymore. This blocks the business from delivering value to its customers and wastes engineering team time.

Application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC) solutions were intended to solve that problem. They emerged many years ago with the sole purpose of integrating with all of the application security testing (AST) tools, correlating the alerts and providing a single dashboard for application security engineers to manage all their vulnerabilities.

This approach didn't work because of the missing context. ASOC solutions did not have a deep understanding of the application architecture, attack surface, development processes or developer knowledge. Therefore, they could not prioritize risks based on the impact on the business.

In addition, ASOC was focused on a list of vulnerabilities, while modern applications are built as a graph of components. These missing capabilities created long alert backlogs (false positives) and blind spots (false negatives).

ASPM changes the landscape by augmenting the ASOC approach (integrating with third-party security tools and/or providing built-in security solutions) with an automated, accurate and real-time application inventory of every code component (like APIs, data models, dependencies, frameworks, PII, etc.) and their relationships. They also bring a deep understanding of developers' knowledge and monitor changes over time to be able to continuously map the application architecture and attack surface, identify critical risks, and prioritize them based on the application environment and business context.

Accelerating Development And Delivery Processes

Ultimately, ASPMs automate the application risk assessment processes and enable the triggering of contextual remediation actions and security processes to allow developers to focus only on the risks with the biggest impact on the business. Because ASPMs have a greater context of the application, they also are able to associate risks to their code owners, asses the root cause of duplicate alerts, and trigger contextual remediation actions and guardrails to reduce the mean time to remediation (MTTR) and prevent risks from being delivered to the cloud.

This new contextual approach not only saves valuable time for application security teams and developers but also enhances the overall security and quality of the software they develop and deliver to the cloud.

Boosting Business Velocity With ASPM

From a business perspective, ASPM is equally transformative. By bringing the business, security and development teams into one platform that unifies risk visibility, prioritization and remediation as well as automating the application security processes, ASPM significantly accelerates the development and delivery processes, allowing businesses to bring more secure applications to the cloud much faster.

Moreover, by ensuring a higher level of security and quality in the developed software, businesses can confidently promote their software development life cycle as secure and reliable, giving them a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Achieving Success In The ASPM Journey

While ASPM offers numerous benefits, unlocking its full potential requires security and development teams to understand their business goals and challenges.

From my experience building application security programs for both small and large organizations, these are the steps you need to take to achieve success in your ASPM journey:

Step 1: Know What You Have

• Build an accurate and real-time application inventory.

• Understand your applications' attack surface.

Step 2: Understand How Secure You Are

• Identify, assess, unify and prioritize risks according to their business impact.

• Build a coverage map of all of your AppSec tools and processes.

• Trigger AppSec processes with context.

Step 3: Fix What Matters And Prevent With Context

• Fix risks with context to reduce the MTTR.

• Prevent risks before being deployed to the cloud.

Step 4: Measure Progress And Build Culture

• Define your risk appetite and measure it based on SLA.

• Cultivate a culture of security awareness across the development teams by running contextual training and using gamification techniques with positive reinforcement.

Final Thoughts

ASPM is revolutionizing the secure software development landscape, enhancing both developer and business velocity while reducing application risks.

By unifying risk visibility, prioritization and remediation as well as automating many of the time-consuming, complex tasks involved in the development and delivery processes, ASPM allows developers to focus on what matters to the business—enabling them to deliver high-quality, secure applications to the cloud much faster.

As we move forward in the digital age, the role of ASPM in shaping the future of software development cannot be overstated.

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