The Ultimate Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Buyer&#;s Guide

Why Read This Guide?

According to Statista, the cost of global cybercrime is expected to surge by nearly 50% in the next few years reaching over $13 trillion by . 

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Let that sink in: $13 trillion in just a few years. 

Companies have invested millions of dollars in selecting cybersecurity tools that help detect security issues and prevent attacks in order to avoid being part of the statistic. These tools do an excellent job of detecting issues, but now companies face a new challenge: discerning among thousands of alerts triggered by these tools which ones are the most important to fix. And not just to fix fast, but to fix right at the root cause. 

That&#;s where Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) comes in&#;a solution that, according to Gartner, 40% of organizations developing proprietary software will have adopted by . 

The right ASPM solution gives security teams the ability to prioritize all issues across their applications, and automatically identify root causes&#;specifying the exact artifacts and lines of code responsible for security issues, and assigning and suggesting fixes to the right owner.

Once implemented, ASPM:

• Improves security coverage. ASPM allows you to improve security coverage of your pipelines, ensuring code pushed into production is reviewed by the proper security tools and processes.
• Automatically correlates findings. There will always be issues even with near-perfect coverage. ASPM solutions will also correlate, triage, and prioritize the findings that present the most risk across your applications &#; saving significant analyst time.
• Fixes at the root cause. Leading ASPM solutions will automatically identify the root cause: the exact artifacts, lines of code, and committers tied to issues. This allows you to fix at the root cause level, and not the symptoms.&#;
• Fosters faster remediation. Finally, since leading ASPM solutions can tell you exactly what needs to be fixed, and who needs to fix it - the only thing left is automating the process. Some solutions automatically create tickets, pull requests, or notifications &#; whichever is appropriate for the issue and your teams&#; processes.

So how do you begin the process of identifying the solution that fits your needs best? 

This guide is designed to ensure you&#;re considering the right questions to confidently select an ASPM solution that will dramatically improve your cybersecurity practices. 

We&#;ll lead you through: 

• What Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is
• Signs that you need an ASPM solution
• 9 must-have ASPM capabilities
• Essential vendor requirements
• Tips for obtaining internal buy-in from key stakeholders

Diving into ASPM

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a new technology defined by Gartner that &#;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.&#; Historically, application security has been fragmented. Application security engineers have to manage numerous scanners, make sense of the findings, find the right person to make the fix, and coordinate remediation.

ASPM streamlines this process, allowing security teams to take a more holistic approach to responding to risk than the traditional fragmented management of many point solutions. 

Here's why organizations are adopting ASPM at a rapid pace:

• Code to cloud security visibility: Unlike traditional tools that function in silos, ASPM solutions provide a comprehensive view of your entire application security environment. This encompasses development processes, code, the underlying infrastructure, and configurations. By correlating data from disparate sources, ASPM platforms paint a clearer picture of your security posture, allowing you to identify and address weaknesses more effectively.
• Security prioritization: ASPM solutions can automate many repetitive security tasks, such as de-duplicating alerts, de-prioritizing non-critical alerts, assigning owners, managing SLAs, and more. This frees up valuable time for AppSec and DevOps to focus on complex issues that require human expertise, like incident response, threat modeling, and penetration testing. Additionally, they can prioritize risks based on potential business impact. This prioritization ensures that security teams address critical vulnerabilities that pose the greatest threat first, optimizing their security efforts.
• Faster remediation times with automation and orchestration: Some ASPM solutions allow Security and Engineering teams to automate remediation actions, whether that&#;s the creation of a ticket to the right owner - or integrating a supplied code fix directly into your CI/CD pipelines. This approach results in a drastic mean-time-to-remediation (MTTR) for reduced exposure.
• Continuous monitoring and reporting: Traditional security approaches often involve periodic assessments, leaving applications vulnerable between scans. ASPM offers the advantage of continuous monitoring of your applications from numerous perspectives. Several ASPM solutions integrate threat intelligence feeds to stay updated on the latest attack methods, allowing you to proactively adjust your defenses.

ASPM is considered the future of application security

Naturally, as you consider purchasing an ASPM solution, you want to make sure it meets your needs now, but also will serve you well in the future. As mentioned before, Gartner expects 40% of organizations to implement an ASPM solution by . But why? And what will the short and long term benefits be? 

• Alignment with modern development: Traditional AppSec tools often struggle to keep pace with the rapid development cycles fostered by methodologies like DevOps and CI/CD. ASPM integrates seamlessly with these workflows, enabling security to be woven into the development process from the very beginning. This "shift left" approach helps to identify and fix vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle, before they become expensive problems to fix later.
• Securing expanding attack surfaces: The rise of cloud computing, APIs, microservices, and other technologies has created a sprawl of interconnected components within applications. This broadens the attack surface for malicious actors. ASPM provides the much-needed visibility to secure these complex environments. By offering a centralized view of your entire application portfolio, ASPM helps you identify and secure all potential entry points for attackers.
• Addressing the security expertise gap: There's a well-documented shortage of cybersecurity professionals. ASPM helps bridge this gap by automating routine tasks and simplifying workflows. This allows even smaller security teams to maintain strong application security by focusing their limited resources on the most strategic initiatives.

ASPM offers a more efficient, scalable, and effective way to secure applications in today's dynamic threat landscape. By providing a unified view, automating tasks, prioritizing risks, and enabling continuous monitoring, ASPM empowers organizations to proactively manage their application security posture and being prepared for what lies ahead in application security.

The Value of ASPM: What Results Can You Expect?

ASPM makes effective and efficient prioritization possible based on correlation across apps and associated security risks. With this knowledge, you&#;re able to determine what issues require attention now, and what issues are less urgent. 

Consider this example from BHG Financial&#;s experience with ASPM: 

As cloud development efforts at BHG grew, the team began to experience an unsustainable increase in alert noise and inability to address risk in a unified, efficient way. 

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Ultimately, you want to measure the results of your prioritization and triaging efforts, and the subsequent fixes implemented. As security teams get used to prioritization processes, they can autonomously address issues, using context surfaced up by ASPM solutions. Armed and empowered with that ability, both security and development teams can streamline processes. Software engineers, developers, and product owners alike should be able to address application issues, reducing extensive coordination with security, and actually increasing collaboration and cooperation in remediation efforts. With both teams on the same page regarding prioritization and SLAs via comprehensive support from ASPM solutions, organizations can expect significant reductions in resolution times.

Signs you need an ASPM solution

An easy way to understand if an ASPM solution should be considered amongst your tech purchases is to note if you or your team are asking these questions on a regular basis: 

• Are you generating various risks in the application development process?
• Are you having trouble unifying detections from various tools?
• Is your application and cloud security data siloed? 
• Are you dealing with incomplete, duplicative, or conflicting data issuing from detection tools?
• Are you unable to automate remediation tasks? 
• Is remediation a manual, time-consuming process for your team??
• Is addressing critical vulnerabilities taking days or even weeks? 
• Are you struggling to assign fixes to the correct owners? 
• Are vulnerabilities you previously addressed recurring? 

&#;Bundled Scanning&#; vs. Modern Application Security Posture Management Solutions

Many vendors in the Application Security Testing space now market Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solutions. While consolidating scan results is one important facet of ASPM, these solutions lack many of the core capabilities needed in an ASPM solution, including:

• Comprehensive coverage across code, cloud, apps, and infrastructure delivered through third party integrations
• Root cause analysis that correlates issues in runtime back to their origin in code
• Remediation orchestration and automation to fix issues at any stage of the SDLC

When you begin evaluating ASPM solutions to test, consider the following differences between &#;ASPM solutions&#; that are really bundled scanning solutions, and modern ASPM solutions that work with any security solution you use today - or may use down the line.

Bundled Scanning Modern ASPM Approach Detection focused; focused on building detections and identifying risk rather than correlating insights for remediation Actionability focused: focused on deriving insights from any security solution for better prioritization and remediation Visibility Often lacks visibility into many important aspects of an application - especially infrastructure. Complete code to cloud visibility across the entire application lifecycle, including infrastructure context. Correlation and deduplication Limited to correlation and deduplication of application security testing findings (SCA/SAST/DAST). Correlates application security testing findings alongside infrastructure security findings (CNAPP, vuln scanners, and more). Enforcement May block commits and builds based on custom policies defined in pre-production. Blocks commits and builds based on certain policies across all stages of the SDLC. Prioritization and triage Offers the ability to prioritize risk, based on factors provided by users or inferred from the application. Takes into the entire tech environment, business and application context, and vulnerability exploitation trends. Uses AI to identify and rank the most critical vulnerabilities. Root cause identification Lacks runtime context to trace runtime issues back to where they originate in code. Automates the analysis to identify where security issues originate: highlighting the exact lines of code, artifacts, and owners to fix issues at the source to prevent recurrence. Remediation Integrates into workflow tools and CI/CD pipelines, such as ticketing systems, and may provide guidance on possible fixes. Integrates into existing ticketing workflow tools and CI/CD pipelines. Uses greater context, GenAI, and root cause analysis to provide code fixes that are easily integrated and tested within existing CI/CD pipelines. Offers actionable remediation guidance from multiple data sources spanning the application lifecycle. Reporting May indicate risk for components or applications. Enables risk-based views by role, so everyone from the CISO to the BU leader to the engineer can see MTTR SLAs. Allows stakeholders to know their true risk level across their environment by getting rid of duplicate and false positive alerts.

Criteria Checklist for Selecting an ASPM Solution

Selecting the right ASPM solution requires considering the following capabilities:

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Additional considerations

There are other considerations for evaluating enterprise security software. Custom reporting will allow you to create reports within the ASPM solution, visualizing data for different business stakeholders. Role-based access control helps set permissions and views for different departments. The ability to ingest custom findings, like one-off pen tests or unsupported detection tools, is also important. Finally, AI-generated remediation guidance and fixes are a growing area, helping automate the remediation process and enhancing efficiency.

Getting Internal Buy-In

You know what you&#;re looking for. You know the value. Now how do you get various stakeholders on board?

Setting the stage

Because ASPM solutions are used extensively by security and engineering teams, you want to get everyone on the same page about the problems you're looking to solve. An ASPM solution should drive more efficiency out of your existing detection tools. If your security team uses SCA, SAST, DAST, IEC scanning, or secret scanning, you want to drive more efficiency and put all these results in one place. Hopefully, everyone will agree this could be more efficient and that an ASPM solution could help.

It should also be obvious which issues need to be fixed today and which can wait. Understand your prioritization logic company-wide. Agree on what your critical apps are, what types of risks are most pertinent, and what are not. This should be a back-and-forth dialogue, but there should be alignment on the most important risks and what to prioritize once an ASPM solution is deployed.

Once you've identified these issues, you want to know exactly what needs to be fixed and the best path to fix them, as well as the right owner.

Understanding your application security risk is crucial. Every developer, head of security, vulnerability manager, CISO, and CIO should grasp the aggregate application security risk landscape across the company. They should also understand the specific security risks for any major application and the timeline for fixing those risks. This information should be accessible in a unified dashboard, allowing all stakeholders to review, monitor, and discuss the same data.

Key stakeholders for ASPM

Once you identify who needs to be aware, evaluating an ASPM solution becomes essential. The primary stakeholders typically include the CISO, application security teams, cloud security teams, vulnerability management teams, and the engineering team.

• CISO: The CISO is responsible for the application security team and must invest in an ASPM solution to enhance program efficiency and integrate existing security investments like NSCA, SaaS, DAST, etc. An ASPM helps drive collaboration between security and DevOps/engineering teams, ensuring faster fixes and reducing clutter and duplicate alerts. It also aids in governance and audit efforts by demonstrating reduced risk and adherence to SLAs.
• Application security teams: These teams are primary evaluators of ASPM and benefit from unified security tool visibility across the company's SDLC. They need to test prioritization capabilities, automation, and seamless issue resolution.
• Cloud security teams: These teams benefit from ASPM tool integration with cloud security tools, including CASPM and container scanners, providing comprehensive coverage and context.
• Vulnerability management: With the increase in application vulnerabilities, vulnerability managers play a significant role in ASPM, coordinating remediation efforts across infrastructure and applications.&#;
• Engineering team: They are crucial evaluators, focusing on the context and workflow capabilities provided by ASPM, which helps them efficiently address security fixes.

Involving at least two stakeholders&#;application security and DevOps/engineering&#;is vital for a successful evaluation. Application security representatives should ensure that the ASPM solution can unify security tools and provide visibility across the SDLC. They should also test prioritization and automation features. Engineering/DevOps teams should evaluate remediation guidance, workflow, and reporting capabilities to ensure they benefit from the ASPM solution.

Final Considerations

The ASPM market is changing rapidly. Many vendors that have specialized in providing scanners have marketed &#;ASPM&#; solutions that simply merge their scanning solutions into one console.

When you&#;re looking to select a vendor, consider the following:

Licensing

How does the ASPM provider license?

• ASPM solution providers that charge per developer, user, or integration won&#;t support you as you grow.
• Consider ASPM vendors that offer a flexible resource-based licensing model that is transparent.

Innovation and support

How does my ASPM vendor allocate its R&D resources?

• Are they making minor enhancements to scanners or are they continuously building better correlation and signals on top of existing scanners?
• If I change out security scanners and tools, will my ASPM provider support my newer tools?
• How quickly can my ASPM provider build new integrations?

Developer-adoption

Are customers of this ASPM provider getting meaningful adoption from developers?

• How do developers use the ASPM solution?
• How does the product facilitate developer adoption?

At the end of the day, ASPM solutions that win over your development team and strengthen your DevSecOps practices will be the most effective in driving down risk and driving security efficiency. 

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The Ultimate Cheap 10GbE Switch Buyers Guide

We are going to make this a bit of a living document. We are starting with just listing the 10GbE switch reviews one of our new team members found. There may be ones that we missed.

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Final Words

We have a set of switches that are being tested now. So, we expect to have well over a dozen and a half switches by the end of the year. It felt like this would be the time to make a larger Buyer&#;s Guide for our 10GbE content, and it was a good research project. We can now use this to point to.

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