Cloud technology has revolutionized business operations, but the digital transformation required to adopt and scale cloud technology exposes vulnerabilities that traditional cybersecurity approaches struggle to address — often leaving organizations vulnerable to adversaries.

Organizations face mounting challenges in managing security risks across cloud-native applications. Application code changes introduced over time create new risks for security teams to manage. Even with robust pre-production application security testing, there are still vulnerabilities that aren’t detected, misconfigurations that don’t surface and environment variables that aren’t accounted for. Cloud-native applications, often overlooked in cloud security strategies, have become prime targets as organizations grow more reliant on them.

This is where application security posture management (ASPM) comes in. ASPM is technology built to evaluate, manage and enhance the security of an organization’s custom applications. Incorporating ASPM in a unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) reduces the need for point cloud security products and strengthens overall cloud security posture. CrowdStrike Falcon® ASPM, natively integrated into CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security, redefines how organizations secure applications with comprehensive visibility and risk management across modern cloud environments.

Here, we discuss the value of ASPM within a modern cloud security strategy and address key questions new adopters might have: What capabilities does ASPM include? What pain points does it solve for security and development teams? What should security leaders expect from an ASPM solution — and what does CrowdStrike bring to the table?

Why Do You Need ASPM?

Effective ASPM strengthens application security by aggregating, correlating and contextualizing risks in real time. By aligning with continuous delivery workflows, ASPM helps secure deployed code while keeping pace with rapid development cycles. Its key capabilities include:

• Prioritizing risks based on exploitability, reachability and business context
• Enforcing unified policies
• Automating scanning, triaging, remediation and response workflows
• Reporting the exploitability of vulnerabilities and threats that impact business services

These capabilities are essential due to the complexity of modern applications and the rate at which application code changes. Today’s applications are made up of tens or even hundreds of microservices, databases, APIs and third-party connections. This makes it challenging for teams to secure applications throughout development, testing, deployment and post-deployment code changes. ASPM provides a lens into this complex environment so issues are identified early.

ASPM’s capabilities extend beyond identifying cloud application risk. When cloud infrastructure security and workload protection tools find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, ASPM adds application context so those issues can be quickly remediated. Further, it complements application security testing tools to provide a better understanding of risk.

How Falcon ASPM Helps Manage Business Risk

A robust ASPM solution must deliver holistic application inventory and visibility, automatically identifying and mapping applications across on-premises and cloud environments. Falcon ASPM leads in this domain by offering real-time, precise visibility and mapping for both cloud and on-premises applications. This visibility encompasses all microservices, APIs, data flows and dependencies, providing a comprehensive view of application architectures.

Falcon ASPM’s method for mapping applications is unique in several ways. First, it is agentless, meaning there is no impact to application performance. Second, it does not rely on network traffic monitoring or user activity. Each microservice, regardless of whether it is being used, is captured in the map and inventory, and ultimately assessed for risk. Finally, the process is real-time and continuous, making it useful for understanding applications as they exist in production. Both development and security teams have clarity in what they have deployed and what they are responsible for securing, even as application code changes are shipped. 

The post How ASPM Elevates Security for Today’s Cloud Ecosystem appeared first on MASSIVE News.

But application security is a tricky process to navigate for many DevOps and DevSecOps teams. Today’s applications are constantly evolving with new features and updates, continuously introducing the possibility of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could heighten risk. Further, organizations navigating the transition from DevOps to DevSecOps may lack the metrics needed to effectively track and measure their application security posture.

Here we discuss the challenges in securing cloud-native applications and identify ways to measure the efficacy of an application security strategy in reducing risk. 

Security Starts Left but Doesn’t End There

Integrating security early and frequently in the software development lifecycle and CI/CD pipeline — a process known as “shifting security left” — is an application security best practice. However, modern applications constantly evolve and frequently receive updates after they’re deployed. According to the CrowdStrike 2024 State of Application Security Report, 71% of organizations update applications weekly, and 19% do so multiple times a day.

Application security teams must continually review application code changes as they are developed and deployed to confirm they are free of known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and other security problems. To accomplish this, application security teams use a variety of scanning and testing tools to uncover potential issues in the application code, configuration or runtime execution. 

While these tools are essential for secure development, there must be a balance across the entire lifecycle of the application. Pre-production security tools can either miss issues altogether or generate an abundance of false positives. For example, software composition analysis (SCA) tools find vulnerabilities in open source libraries but are unable to identify vulnerabilities in custom code. Static application security testing (SAST) is valuable for analyzing custom code but cannot detect runtime configuration issues and business logic errors. Conversely, dynamic application security testing focuses on discovering vulnerabilities that occur during execution, such as injection attacks or misconfigurations, but it does not have visibility into the source code, meaning it may miss vulnerabilities like hardcoded credentials, logic errors or insecure coding practices that are only detectable by SAST.

Measuring the success of an application security strategy shouldn’t focus solely on the number of detected vulnerabilities or security issues, or on remediation speed. Rather, success should be measured by managing risk and prioritizing the most impactful issues.

Moving Beyond DevOps KPIs

DevOps, initially focused on accelerating software development and delivery, has for many organizations evolved into DevSecOps, which is responsible for integrating security into the CI/CD process. 

As DevOps evolves into DevSecOps, the metrics used to track and measure success must also change. Google’s DevOps research assessment (DORA) team tracks the following five metrics to determine DevOps success and maturity: deployment frequency, lead time for code changes, mean time to recovery, change failure rate, and reliability. While many industry leaders use DORA metrics to measure DevOps success, these tend to focus on the volume of vulnerabilities and the speed of resolution rather than the efficiency and effectiveness of resolving security risk. They lack the specific application security metrics necessary for DevSecOps.

There are several additional metrics DevSecOps teams must consider when measuring the security of their applications.

Making Sense of Application Security and CI/CD

To measure application security effectiveness, teams must identify the processes and tools embedded in their CI/CD pipeline, then evaluate the coverage and gaps spanning stages from pre-production to production.

The post Shift Left, Measure Right: Assessing the Efficacy of Application Security in the Age of CI/CD appeared first on MASSIVE News.