Application Security Posture Management

There are several key capabilities in an effective ASPM solution.

Integration with third-party tools: For an ASPM solution to provide value, it must be able to pull in data from diverse sources including development, deployment, and operations. The ability to work within an existing development environment is core to how ASPM solutions elevate the efficacy of an AppSec program. This requires the ability to integrate with both manual and automated AppSec testing tools, developer tools, and issue trackers. Connectivity to key data sources that map software assets, security data, and ticketing is central to how an ASPM solution ensures visibility across heterogenous development environments.

Centralized policy: Enabling scalable AppSec workflows is vital to how ASPM solutions standardize security practices across teams, projects, and tools. This requires ASPM solutions to centrally define, enforce, and monitor the security policies that orchestrate testing and prioritization. Additionally, defining these security policies as code enables security and development teams to seamlessly integrate issue assessment, controls, remediation, and validation within pipelines and maintain continuous compliance.

Prioritization and triage: Having the means to consolidate relevant data points and standardize workflows is the first hurdle in AppSec management, but security teams must also be able to leverage these ASPM capabilities to maintain developer productivity. An ASPM solution should deduplicate redundant results across tools and help prioritize the issues that teams should tackle first, based on centrally defined policies for risk criteria. This risk criteria can include issue severity, software criticality, and defined SLAs for remediation. With these capabilities, developers can eliminate unnecessary escalations and focus on the security work that matters most.

Risk management: An ASPM solution must be able to provide an overall view of risk posture across an organization’s software footprint. It should include a detailed breakdown of where vulnerable software components and applications are, the status of issue resolution, and any policy and compliance violations. Effectively, security leaders need to be able to leverage an ASPM solution to audit their applications, understand their organizational risk from a software perspective, and generate key KPIs on AppSec program effectiveness.

As applications become more sophisticated, organizations are struggling with the complexity and operational costs of the AppSec programs that have been built to secure them. This complexity makes it difficult to implement consistent AppSec practices, understand the risk posture of applications, and measure the effectiveness of their program as a whole. ASPM tools address these challenges by giving teams a single place to manage their entire AppSec program, better aligning security and development teams and giving them a consolidated view of what’s been tested, what’s been found, and what’s being fixed.

Software Risk Manager by Synopsys is a comprehensive ASPM solution that enables teams to

• Implement policy-driven AppSec at scale by defining and enforcing security policies that specify parameters for test execution and vulnerability management
• Unify user experience across disparate application security testing tools to simplify your resourcing and operations while improving tool consolidation across teams
• Consolidate vulnerability reporting and management across projects, teams, and tools to provide a complete picture of normalized, deduplicated, and prioritized security risks
• Simplify AppSec integration and orchestration in development workflows to integrate security workflows into existing developer toolchains and enable quick onboarding for existing projects and builds
• Optimize core application security testing with a single, unified solution to efficiently deploy, manage, and report on core application security testing functions