How to Use ASPM to Improve CSPM

In recent years, organizations have increasingly moved their applications and infrastructure to the cloud to take advantage of its scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness. However, this shift to the cloud has also introduced new security challenges, particularly in the realm of application security. Attackers are constantly looking for ways to exploit vulnerabilities in applications to gain access to sensitive data or disrupt business operations. To mitigate these risks, organizations need to adopt a comprehensive security posture management approach that covers both cloud security posture management (CSPM) and application security posture management (ASPM).

While CSPM solutions focus on monitoring and securing the cloud infrastructure itself, it’s the ASPM solutions that secure the applications running on that infrastructure. ASPM is a holistic approach to application security that involves continuous discovery and monitoring, assessment, business logic exploitation and remediation of applications and their vulnerabilities across the entire software development life cycle. It helps organizations identify and prioritize security issues and provides guidance and tools to help them mitigate and remediate vulnerabilities.

By integrating ASPM into their security posture management strategy, organizations can discover in-use APIs they may not have known about, identify vulnerabilities in their applications, prioritize remediation efforts and ultimately reduce their overall security risk. Furthermore, by filling coverage gaps in CSPM, ASPM can help organizations save money by avoiding costly security breaches and downtime.

To leverage ASPM to save costs and fill coverage gaps found in CSPM, follow these best practices:

Discover and prioritize critical applications – One of the biggest challenges for CSPM is discovering and determining which applications and services are most critical to the organization. ASPM can help by discovering all APIs in use, mapping those APIs to specific web and mobile applications, providing visibility into the security posture of all applications and identifying which ones have the most sensitive data. This information can help organizations prioritize their security efforts and allocate resources more effectively.

By focusing on the most critical APIs and applications first, organizations can save costs and reduce their overall risk exposure. They can also ensure that their security efforts are aligned with their business goals and objectives.

Automate security testing and compliance checks – Another way that ASPM can save costs and fill coverage gaps is by automating security testing and compliance checks. With the increasing complexity of cloud environments, manual testing and compliance checks can be time-consuming and error-prone. Automating these processes can help organizations identify vulnerabilities and non-compliant configurations more quickly and accurately.

By automating security testing and compliance checks, organizations can save costs on manual testing and reduce the risk of human error. They can also ensure that their security efforts eliminate regressions as new features are added to cloud-native applications in today’s dynamic environments.

Integrate security into the development process – ASPM can also help organizations fill coverage gaps by integrating security into the software development process. By incorporating security scans into the development process, organizations can ensure that security is built into the application from the ground up. This can help reduce the number of vulnerabilities that need to be remediated later in the process.

Monitor application behavior in real-time – Another key aspect of ASPM is monitoring application behavior in real-time. This involves using run-time tools that can detect and alert on suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access attempts or data exfiltration. By monitoring application behavior in real-time, organizations can quickly detect and respond to security incidents, minimizing the potential impact on the business. Machine-learning (ML) based anomaly detection has become more mainstream in addressing these types of API and application-centric attacks in recent years.

Use automation to streamline remediation efforts – Remediating vulnerabilities can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. However, by using automation tools to streamline the process, organizations can reduce the time and effort required to fix vulnerabilities in application code, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and cloud services. For example, some ASPM solutions can automatically provide Terraform and CloudFormation scripts to auto-remediate application- and API-layer exploits by hardening run-time production configurations. By using these tools to automate the remediation process, organizations can save time and reduce their overall security risk.

Integrate ASPM With CSPM

To get the most out of their security posture management efforts, organizations should integrate ASPM with CSPM. By doing so, they can fill coverage gaps in CSPM–including API discovery and vulnerability checks–to identify and address vulnerabilities in their applications that cannot be detected by CSPM alone. This integration can also help organizations save costs by avoiding security breaches and downtime caused by application vulnerabilities. Unlike CSPM, ASPM enables organizations to continuously monitor the security posture of applications and services so they can identify areas for improvement and take action to remediate vulnerabilities and reduce risks.

Overall, ASPM is a powerful tool for organizations. By discovering all APIs, identifying and prioritizing critical applications, prioritizing remediation efforts, automating security testing and compliance checks, integrating security into the development process, using risk-based prioritization and monitoring for continuous improvement and auto-remediation, organizations can reduce their overall risk exposure and ensure that their applications and data are secure.

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Doug Dooley

Doug is the Chief Operating Officer of Data Theorem. He heads up product strategy, marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Before joining Data Theorem, Dooley worked in venture capital leading investments of cloud-centric security, machine-learning, and infrastructure startups for Venrock. While at Venrock, Dooley served on the boards of Evident.io (Palo Alto Networks), Niara (HPE), and VeloCloud (VMware). Prior to Venrock, Dooley spent almost two decades as an entrepreneur and technology executive at some of the most innovative and market dominant technology infrastructure companies – ranging from large corporations such as Cisco and Intel to security and virtualization startups such as Neoteris, NetScreen, and RingCube. Earlier in his career, he held various management, engineering, sales, and marketing roles at Juniper Networks, Inktomi, and Nortel Networks. Dooley earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.

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