“ASPM is a cybersecurity approach for monitoring, managing and optimizing application security across the development lifecycle. This includes enhanced visibility, contextual risk analysis & risk prioritization. Discover how to get started. ”
The cyber security market is consolidating, and AppSec is no exception. Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) answers this need by centralizing security insights across all stages of development, from initial coding through testing, deployment, and beyond. With ASPM, security teams gain real-time visibility into vulnerabilities and malware risks in a single, unified view. This approach empowers teams to prioritize and manage risks more effectively, ensuring applications align with both security standards and modern development practices.
But how can organizations successfully adopt and implement ASPM? In this guide, we’ll explore best practices to maximize ASPM’s effectiveness, streamline security workflows and create a resilient security culture that minimizes risk. Whether your team is starting from scratch or fine-tuning an existing strategy, these actionable steps will help you align with ASPM principles, ultimately strengthening your application security and supporting your business goals.
What is ASPM?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a cybersecurity approach for monitoring, managing and optimizing application security across the development lifecycle. This starts at development, all the way through testing, deployment and up to code to cloud. ASPM consolidates security insights from various sources and tools to provide real-time visibility into application vulnerabilities and compliance issues, through a unified dashboard. This informs risk prioritization and management, ensuring enterprise applications meet security standards and support modern DevOps and development practices.
Application security testing can flood your team with vulnerability data – making it incredibly challenging to prioritize and respond.
ASPM: Identify and Reduce Risks Faster
Watch this hands-on demo and see how Application Security Posture Management helps AppSec teams analyze massive numbers of vulnerabilities, understand their overall security posture, and make recommendations on which vulnerabilities to fix.
Discover ASPMASPM includes SAST, DAST, API security, SCA, SBOM, SSCS, Container security, IaC security, AI-driven security, and more.
ASPM Best Practices
How can AppSec teams implement ASPM to ensure they gain its security benefits? Below are actionable steps to take, which can bring your application security practices closer to the ASPM framework. Think of this as your Application Security Posture Management checklist.
This is an ongoing process, so be patient with yourself. You can also implement an ASPM solution that provides these capabilities out-of-the-box, accelerating the process.
1. Ensure Centralized Visibility and Control
Aggregate and cross-analyze data from all AppSec tools – SAST, DAST, API security, SCA, SBOM, SSCS, Container security, IaC security, AI-driven security and more – into a single, comprehensive view. This will ensure you have a single-source-of-truth of all your application risks for accurate and effective risk identification, prioritization and management.
If you are using an ASPM solution, ensure it offers a centralized dashboard across all your AppSec tools and environments, as well as support for ingesting data from SARIF files. The dashboard should show you the risk throughout the SDLC with business context.
You can enhance your visibility and decision-making by integrating this dashboard with CI/CD tools, cloud tools, ticketing systems and the developer IDE. These can help with early detection of vulnerabilities and with streamlining workflows.
2. Prioritize Vulnerabilities and Risks Based on Exploitability and Context
Use risk-based prioritization to address exploitable vulnerabilities and threats with the most significant business impact – first. This will ensure development resources are focused where they matter. In the short-term, this reduces potential friction and encourages DevSec cooperation. In the long-term, this builds developer trust in the AppSec team and helps nurture a security culture. Both of these things are critical for enhancing the enterprise application security posture.
If you are using an ASPM solution, ensure it scores each application and ranks it by risk, based on your specific business needs and architecture. Score risks should be calculated within the context of your unique environment, code and business risk.
3. Embed Security Early (Shift Left)
Integrating your ASPM with IDEs, cloud tools, CI/CD pipelines and ticketing systems (as mentioned in practice #1) also allows for shifting left your security processes. The shift left approach means that scanning, identifying and guiding remediation of vulnerabilities and malicious code take place at the earliest stages of development. This improves the quality of code and reduces the overall cost of remediation by catching issues before they reach production. It is also more developer-friendly, because it doesn’t require developers to change code after it’s already been committed and deployed.
When you choose an ASPM solution, make sure it supports such shift-left integrations and includes early scanning and remediation capabilities. Another way to shift left and make ASPM developer-friendly is to ensure the tool supports multiple frameworks and languages, so the entire tech stack is supported and developers aren’t confined to a single language or framework.
4. Regularly Review and Refine Policies
ASPM is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, your security should be customized to your business and industry needs. To do so:
- Tailor identification and remediation policies to your specific environment, industry and risk tolerance.
- Align ASPM policies with broader cybersecurity frameworks you abide by or initiatives within your organization.
- Regularly review these policies to account for changes in your application stack or risk landscape.
Therefore, when choosing an ASPM solution, ensure it supports granular policy customization that can align with your security efforts and business-specific compliance needs.
5. Automate Security Workflows
Establish automated workflows to handle security incidents as they arise, especially in high-stakes or high-velocity environments. Create a plan for how to respond to different types of threats based on the level of risk. For example, you can set up workflows to trigger remediation for certain types of issues automatically or route them to specific security personnel based on severity. These will streamline your security efforts, reduce the chance of errors, free personnel for the sophisticated tasks where they are needed and reduce friction between departments.
A ASPM vendor that supports the aforementioned integrations with CI/CD solutions and ticketing systems, as well as customizable policies, can support this.
6. Foster a Collaborative DevSec Culture
The success of application security relies on a strong DevSec culture. Foster one by enhancing communication between development and security teams, providing developers with comprehensive resources about security and their importance in the organizational security posture, and choosing a security solution that is developer-friendly.
For example, you can:
- Provide ongoing training for developers to build security-conscious habits
- Train security teams on the SDLC and the importance of reducing security “noise”
- Incorporate ASPM metrics into developer team goals to enhance accountability
- Share leading vendor blogs with developers to educate about risks and solutions
- Encourage developer feedback about existing security solutions and practices in use
- Choose security tools that integrate with developer workflows – IDE, feedback tools, cloud environments, ticketing systems, multiple language and framework support, and more.
Why ASPM
Standalone AppSec tools will help you build strong enterprise application security, but you might deal with friction and inconsistency when trying to prioritize remediation efforts.
These ASPM best practices for 2024 and 2025 will help you align and scale security efforts while easily communicating this risk to the business.
You can implement these practices on your own or choose an ASPM solution that supports them. Coupled with a strong security culture, Application Security Posture Management principles will help your organization build strong software with minimal risk, helping your business maintain your competitive advantage and turning you into a business enabler that accommodates business and development needs while driving a strong security posture.
Leader in Application Security Posture Management
Checkmarx Dominates the ASPM category Growth and Innovation Indices in Frost Radar™ through market leadership and innovation such as analytics and tailored dashboards, prioritized remediation and risk rankings, as well as frictionless developer experience.
