4 Strategies to Enhance Your Application Security Posture

The rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape presents an array of challenges for businesses of all sizes across all industries. The constant emergence of new cyber threats, including those now powered by AI, is overwhelming current security models. A 2023 study by the Ponemon Institute found that organizations receive an average of 22,111 security alerts per week. This deluge of alerts, many of which are false positives, is preventing teams from effectively prioritizing and dealing with potential threats. 

A holistic approach to addressing this problem is what Gartner calls Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). The strategies of ASPM address the limitations of traditional AppSec approaches using automation, integration, and the strategic use of open-source tools. Adopting the recommended strategies of ASPM can enable companies to fortify software applications throughout their lifecycle. 

Here are the four biggest challenges that AppSec professionals face today on the road to an enhanced application security posture and the ASPM strategies they can use to address them.

Challenge 1: Security Alert Chaos

The flood of daily security alerts makes it impossible for security teams to differentiate between real threats and false positives. False positives can be caused by aggressive detection settings, outdated threat definitions, and a lack of contextual awareness by security tools. Whatever the cause, the torrent of false positives wastes time, lowers security team morale, and obscures real threats. As a result, risks of a major oversight increase, and response time to actual threats slows, leading to undetected breaches, data loss, financial damage, and erosion of customer trust.

Another source of alert chaos is the ever-growing number of security tools in the software delivery pipeline. Not every alert in every tool is critical, yet the constant flow of these alerts from multiple directions can again distract AppSec teams from real threats.

In addition to missing real threats that lead to data loss and damage to reputation, alert fatigue causes AppSec team burnout, leading to high turnover rates that further undermine team effectiveness, especially given the current cybersecurity skills shortage.

ASPM uses automation to prioritize alerts to dramatically reduce the need for manual intervention while enabling teams to immediately focus on genuine threats. The strategy incorporates two prioritization techniques. A risk-based approach categorizes alerts purely based on severity, exploitability, and impact to ensure high-priority issues receive immediate attention. A business-context approach prioritizes alerts based on the broader business context, not just severity. This enables organizations to decide — based on their potential impact on the specific business and environment — which issues need immediate attention and which issues can be deferred. This second approach can be particularly helpful in reducing alert fatigue.

Intelligent automation workflows are also used to ensure a fast response to alerts that have been prioritized as critical. Automating response workflows relies on:

• Triage and response triggers to launch immediate investigation or remediation of critical alerts, such as by patching known vulnerabilities or isolating affected systems
• Integration and orchestration to embed automated security checks within the development pipeline, ensuring they occur in real-time with minimal disruption
• Use-case-specific triggers that cross-reference a vulnerability with deployed patches to reduce false positives

A third area of alert management is a user-driven approach that acknowledges the expertise of individual team members, giving the team control over who receives which security alerts. User-driven alert management may rely on the following:

• Role-based alert routing where alerts are routed according to the role and expertise of team members
• Customizable alert subscriptions that enable team members to subscribe to specific types of alerts relevant to their area of responsibility; for example, a Pub/Sub Model subscription would enable developers working on payment systems to subscribe to alerts related to financial data security.

Challenge 2: Developers Distracted by Security Tasks

Shifting left in DevSecOps is the well-intended practice of embedding security early in the software development lifecycle. However, shifting left often requires developers, who typically lack any form of specialized security training, to perform many time-consuming manual security tasks that distract them from their primary focus and slow the software development lifecycle. Shifting left has also meant that developers must learn how to use multiple security tools, each with its own learning curve and maintenance requirements, further eroding their ability to meet project deadlines.

To successfully implement shifting left, AppSec must deliver solutions that eliminate the burden of manual security tasks. The ASPM strategy is to integrate tools directly into the development environment to make security checks a seamless part of the development workflow. Such integrations would provide real-time feedback and actionable security guidance, minimizing disruptions and significantly enhancing productivity.

For example, an integration could enable automatic identification of vulnerabilities such as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), allowing developers to immediately address these issues before they become more difficult to address down the road. In this way, ASPM can reduce the burden on developers while enhancing both productivity and security.

Other ASPM strategies that benefit developers include:

• Security integration with the tools developers already use to minimize disruption and learning curves
• Continuous real-time scanning while developers write code to provide immediate feedback without waiting for scheduled scans
• Providing developers with information about identified vulnerabilities, including step-by-step instructions for remedying them, to ensure fast and accurate fixes
• Collaboration between security and development teams to make security a collective responsibility and ensure new security measures don’t impose additional burdens on developers
• Offering developers well-designed training and support opportunities that can build competence and confidence in handling security issues without the training sessions themselves becoming a burden or distraction

Challenge 3: The Lack of a Big Picture

One of the biggest challenges in AppSec today is tool sprawl. The wide array of tools promising to plug different security gaps burdens security teams with a complex security ecosystem that locks critical data into tool-specific silos. This data fragmentation makes it impossible for security teams to gain a holistic view of the security environment, leading to confusion and missed vulnerabilities when insights from one tool don’t correlate with insights from another.

As noted above, the use of multiple tools also means multiple learning curves and integration points, often leading to misconfigurations that can introduce new vulnerabilities into the environment.

A critical ASPM strategy is developing unified visibility by integrating data and toolsets to offer a comprehensive security overview. Achieving this requires selecting security tools that integrate well with each other, support the broader goals of ASPM, and simplify the security toolchain without sacrificing coverage. The key elements of unified visibility are:

• Data integration to centralize data from various tools into a single repository, enabling real-time analysis and contextual understanding of security data
• A holistic context that combines insights from various stages of the software development lifecycle and pinpoints where vulnerabilities are likely to impact the application most severely
• Streamlined workflows that can be managed from a central console, boosting productivity and reducing response times by eliminating the need to access multiple systems

With unified visibility in place, organizations can enjoy faster response times to critical threats, improved compliance capabilities based on clear and consolidated reporting on security measures and incident responses, enhanced threat detection by surfacing previously undetectable patterns and anomalies, and more confident developers who can make informed decisions about code and architecture and ensure security gets embedded into the fabric of applications.

Challenge 4: Over-Reliance on Proprietary Software

The choice of security software can have a huge impact on the ability of AppSec teams to achieve their security goals. With the security landscape changing so fast, teams must have access to tools that are easily and quickly adaptable. Further, as these tools rapidly evolve, they must still offer the required reliability, so teams can count on them to protect the critical software development lifecycle.

Unfortunately, many proprietary tools today are inflexible and slow to evolve, despite their high cost. Further, once AppSec teams are locked into a particular tool, they may have little say in whether the tool will continue to evolve to meet their needs or whether the company will continue to ensure the reliability of their solution.

Moving from proprietary software to open-source software offers the following technical and business advantages for ASPM:

• Transparency: Security teams have access to a tool’s source code, and as a part of the tool’s open-source community, they can conduct in-depth audits, uncover potential vulnerabilities, and tailor the software to specific security needs. This open structure encourages a collaborative environment where peer review often results in more rapid identification and remediation of security vulnerabilities and security patches, and where improvements can be developed and integrated rapidly.
• Customization: Open-source software can be tailored to an organization’s specific security environment and needs without the constraints and limitations imposed by a vendor’s design. This flexibility enables AppSec teams to rapidly adapt their environments to new threats and changing security requirements.
• Flexibility and cost savings: By eliminating vendor lock-in, open-source software allows organizations to adapt to new security challenges without contractual limitations. Further, it can typically be implemented with little or no upfront costs, freeing significant resources for investment in other proactive security measures and ongoing innovation.

Conclusion

Every day that AppSec teams fail to improve their security posture, they increase the risk of potentially disastrous security breaches that can lead to loss of IP, ransomware attacks, regulatory fines, frustrated customers, long-term reputational damage, and, in extreme cases, even the failure of the business. By implementing the strategies of Application Security Posture Management, they can start reducing this risk and create a solid foundation for a safe and secure future.