How to Improve Your Security Posture with the Least Effort Using ASPM 

Security posture management has become exponentially more complex for organizations developing and managing a vast ecosystem of applications. Evolving architectures like microservices, hybrid cloud infrastructures, and frequent release cycles introduce constant change and challenges.  

Amid these growing challenges are the existing security gaps organizations are struggling to address. According to our 2024 State of Security report, 71% of organizations have security debt (flaws that remain unfixed for longer than a year).  

Even more worryingly, half of organizations have persistent, high-severity flaws that constitute ‘critical’ security debt. These critical flaws jeopardize key aspects of business security, from confidentiality to integrity and availability. Could application security posture management (ASPM) be a game-changer to eliminating these ever-growing gaps?  

The Growing Challenges of Securing Modern Applications 

Modern applications make everything easier for companies and their users. From streamlining everyday tasks to automating complex processes, they are the fuel that ignites productivity and growth nowadays.  

While the benefits of modern apps are clear, the more they multiply, the more security risks they introduce. The average enterprise manages thousands of applications, many of which are internally developed. 70% of organizations admit the number of web apps in their environment makes it difficult to assess the levels of risk they introduce.  

Meanwhile, teams are pressured to speed up software delivery through CI/CD pipelines, which may introduce new vulnerabilities that traditional tools miss, especially in internally developed applications or those that undergo frequent updates.  

Beyond the extended attack surface, fragmented security tooling—from cloud to SAST, DAST, containers and pen testing—leaves security teams scrambling to obtain the necessary data to make informed decisions. In decentralized environments, important insights get lost in transit. 

A lack of vulnerability contextualization, marked by little insight into exploitability or business impact, hinders the team’s ability to analyze vulnerabilities, prioritize threats, and respond to each with the speed they demand.  

The overwhelmingly large number of threats, which continues to snowball year after year, further exacerbates this issue. Overall, teams struggle to define priorities and allocate resources effectively, as there are too many security gaps and too little time to mitigate them.  

Why Application Security Posture Management Is a Game-Changer  

Modern application environments are characterized by distributed architectures, rapid release cycles, and complex development ecosystems. These complexities demand an evolved approach to security, one that addresses vulnerabilities and integrates seamlessly into an organization’s workflows to enable informed decision-making. ASPM proves indispensable. 

ASPM is a strategy that involves processes, policies, and specific tooling, all aligned to cover the end-to-end security needs of web applications. With features like data consolidation, risk prioritization, and seamless integration within other developer and security workflows, ASPM tools automate and streamline key stages covered by a typical ASPM strategy.  

Some of the key components of ASPM tools include:  

• Insight Consolidation: ASPM unifies scattered information into a centralized platform, providing a single source of truth for security teams. Veracode Risk Manager goes beyond aggregating security findings to deeply correlate and contextualize risks, tracing them back to their root cause.  
• Contextual Risk Prioritization: ASPM tools, like Veracode Risk Manager, use intelligent scoring and factor analysis to identify and elevate issues that pose the highest threats to application integrity, and Best Next Actions provides step-by-step solutions for eliminating risk at the root cause. 
• Automated Investigation: Unified issues are pre-investigated, correlated, and prioritized based on asset and environment context.  
• CI/CD Integrations: ASPM seamlessly integrates security checks at each stage of development, identifying risks early and preventing costly and time-consuming fixes later in the pipeline. 
• Automation of Compliance and Reporting: ASPM simplifies compliance reporting, tracks regulatory requirements, and reduces manual overhead. Veracode Risk Manager also goes beyond basic compliance functionality by automating audit preparation.  

The Real-World Business Benefits of an ASPM Tool  

Knowing the components of a typical ASPM tool, it’s easy to see the impacts these tools can have on application security. However, other clear business benefits justify the ASPM investment. These include:  

1. Reduced Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR): Vulnerabilities are detected faster, meaning teams can activate their remediation workflows faster. This avoids escalating threats and all their potential repercussions. Veracode’s risk visibility from code to the cloud makes remediation 10x faster.  
2. Enhanced risk visibility: Risk can be seen and analyzed via one platform covering every app. This consolidated view eliminates blind spots and enables more proactive vulnerability management.  
3. Reduced security debt: As we highlighted earlier, security debt still haunts most enterprises. An ASPM tool can prevent vulnerabilities from accumulating over time, reducing long-term security risks and offering more predictability.  
4. Cost reduction and increased ROI: A more stable AppSec environment also leads to long-term cost reductions, as it helps avoid emergency security investments, customer compensation, or expensive incident recovery solutions. It’s not just about decreasing costs but increasing revenue through a boost in productivity. According to a recent study, a composite organization achieved a notable 184% ROI from Veracode’s ASPM tool.  
5. Optimized resource allocation: With all team members aligned and accessing the same resources, it’s easier for CISOs and leaders to split tasks and allocate resources more strategically. Improve team collaboration and avoid siloes.  

How To Leverage ASPM For Maximized Benefits  

The most important decision you will ever make regarding maximizing ASPM is choosing the right tool. This tool is integral to filling your security gaps and achieving your business goals, as every AppSec activity revolves around it.  

Look for a solution that scales with your organization, integrates seamlessly with your existing cloud and security tools, and provides robust vendor support. Ensure that the tool offers enhanced risk prioritization capabilities, which are key to speedy remediation, along with the ability to rationalize security risk across all security tools. Additionally, ensure this platform has an open ecosystem that can aggregate insights from various solutions and correlate them for a unified view of risk. 

Leverage the tool’s capabilities to automate as many processes as possible, including issue pre-investigation and repetitive tasks like regulatory reporting, vulnerability tracking, and risk assessments. ASPM tools should foster cross-team collaboration among security, development, and operations, ensuring that every team member clearly understands their role and responsibilities and that policies are in place to define the usage.  

Consider measuring key insights such as Mean Time To Detection (MTTD) or Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) so you can track security posture progress and see where potential issues may arise.  

A Smarter Way to Improve App Security Posture  

Here’s the bad news: securing modern applications isn’t getting any easier, especially with an ever-growing number of tools generating more findings without a way to connect the dots. Zooming out and considering the long-term vision, a comprehensive ASPM tool is indispensable to correlating your security data across tools, providing a unified view of risk, and securing your ever-growing application portfolio. 

Veracode Risk Manager is a tool-agnostic ASPM solution designed to help your team work smarter and reap clear business benefits. Its advanced capabilities, from code-to-runtime root cause issue tracking to automated pre-investigation and factor analysis, you’re able to easily congregate data across any tool, gaining unobstructed visibility into the unique risks your applications face.  

Book a demo to learn more and see the tool in action.