AppSec: ASPM Goes Mainstream

AppSec is evolving and the Gartner Innovation Insight: Application Security Posture Management report has arrived, offering invaluable insights into this shifting landscape. It focuses on Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), highlighting its growing importance in addressing the increasing complexity of modern application security.  

In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, we feel ASPM has evolved from a nice-to-have to a must-have critical component for modern security programs. As a pioneer and market leader in ASPM, ArmorCode has been at the forefront of this transformation, empowering organizations to future-proof their application security strategies and programs. 

The latest Gartner Research predicts a significant surge in ASPM adoption, with 80% of organizations in regulated verticals using AppSec testing expected to incorporate ASPM by 2027, up from the current 29%.

Considering their estimate from a year ago of only 5% adoption, this actually reflects a staggering 1500% growth rate. We feel this surge highlights the pressing need for all organizations to adopt and implement ASPM without further delay—and ArmorCode can be your choice to lead this transition.

This recent Gartner Research publication also emphasizes the challenges organizations face in managing application security due to factors like diverse development teams, multiple security tools, and the complexity of modern applications. These challenges underscore the need for a unified approach to AppSec. Siloed tools and processes create visibility gaps and hinder effective risk management. 

ArmorCode’s AI-powered ASPM Platform is purpose-built to address these challenges, offering unified risk visibility that seamlessly integrates with your existing security and development tools.
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Key Findings from the Gartner Innovation Insight

• As applications become more complex, with security tools and responsibilities spanning multiple groups, visibility into the overall security posture of applications becomes difficult to obtain. This complicates efforts to assess, measure, prioritize and respond to application risks.
• Teams such as development, platform engineering, security and others often struggle to prioritize security issues. Addressing these issues broadly could lead to a more effective reduction in risk.
• As time passes and access to the original owners diminishes, legacy applications become major challenges for organizations. The lack of adequate tools to support these applications exacerbates the problem, making them common pain points.
• As a market segment, application security posture management (ASPM) has evolved from various solutions and promises to address these challenges. However, commercial products continue to evolve, offering diverse features and capabilities, complicating the evaluation and selection of tools.
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Core Features of An ASPM Platform 

The central challenge in addressing all the aforementioned AppSec hurdles lies in selecting the right ASPM tool. The Gartner Innovation Insight report outlines several core capabilities that define an effective ASPM platform. These key features are crucial for achieving comprehensive application security posture management:

1. Comprehensive Coverage Across Development and Operations

To ensure complete visibility and control, an ASPM platform must seamlessly integrate with diverse environments, including cloud platforms, containerized deployments, physical infrastructure, legacy systems, and various application architectures.

2. Data Correlation

A fundamental requirement is the ability to ingest, correlate, and analyze security data from multiple disparate sources. This unified view is essential for understanding the overall security posture and avoiding fragmented insights.

3. Intelligent Vulnerability Prioritization

Effective ASPM tools should provide intelligent vulnerability prioritization capabilities, enabling teams to focus on the most critical risks first. This prioritization should consider both user-defined risk factors and those automatically inferred from the application itself.

4. Streamlined Remediation

To accelerate vulnerability remediation, ASPM platforms should integrate with existing workflow tools and provide clear, actionable guidance on resolving identified issues.

2. Risk Indicators

Robust ASPM platforms should provide clear risk scoring for individual findings as well as for aggregated risk scores for organizations, applications, and individual components, allowing for a holistic understanding of risk.Other capabilities include orchestration, root cause identification, and owner identification. These capabilities are essential for addressing application security challenges. ‍
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How ArmorCode Addresses AppSec Challenges 

Don’t just keep up with AppSec—lead it, with ArmorCode

ArmorCode's AI-powered ASPM Platform comprehensively offers the core ASPM capabilities. With seamless integration across 260+ tools spanning cloud, container, infrastructure, and application environments, ArmorCode provides 360° visibility. Our AI Correlation feature intelligently connects findings across multiple attributes, consolidating data for a unified view. Risk-based prioritization considers advanced threat intelligence, business impact, asset criticality, and risk scores to ensure focus on the most critical vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, ArmorCode accelerates remediation through AI-powered remediation suggestions and no-code automation. No-code automation empowers users to automate significant portions of their security workflows, while AI Remediation leverages a specially trained Generative AI model to automatically generate potential remediation actions for known findings with a single click.

ArmorCode's Adaptive Risk Scoring normalizes technical severity across various testing sources, maps findings to assets, and assesses potential business impact from successful exploits, culminating in a comprehensive risk-based score for effective visibility and triage.

Avoiding Risks When Buying Your ASPM

This latest Gartner publication also talks about potential risks associated with ASPM platforms, including insufficient integration, scalability issues, false negatives, and inadequate understanding of risks. 

ArmorCode’s 260+ integrations, coupled with no-code automation, AI Correlation, AI Remediation, and Adaptive Risk Scoring help proactively address AppSec challenges. 

This Gartner Innovation Insight report mentions, “Some AppSec tool vendors, including AppSec testing, cloud monitoring, API security, and legacy vulnerability assessment, have begun incorporating ASPM capabilities into their offerings. These capabilities tend to be limited in scope to their own proprietary tools or a specific aspect of AppSec.” Well, we feel this might work for organizations that have existing security tools to take care of other functionalities or require domain-specific requirements. 

However, if your security ecosystem involves tools from multiple vendors, you require a platform that seamlessly integrates with all of them while providing a comprehensive set of ASPM capabilities. ArmorCode is the only vendor-agnostic ASPM platform, empowering organizations to select and integrate best-of-breed tools from the rapidly evolving scanner market. By offering a truly independent governance layer, ArmorCode ensures unified visibility across all tools and environments without bias or dependency on specific vendors. This flexibility prevents vendor lock-in, supports adaptation to changing requirements, optimizes toolchains, and enables full utilization of ArmorCode's orchestration and visibility capabilities.

Explore the full Gartner Innovation Insight report and capture many such interesting insights into application security posture management.

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Gartner, Innovation Insight: Application Security Posture Management, 9 January 2025, Giles Williams

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 1500% growth calculation provided by ArmorCode.