11 Signs Your Business Needs an ASPM Platform

Applications are becoming intricate fortresses of data and functionality, while cyber threats are growing in both frequency and sophistication. Ensuring the security of these applications is no longer optional but critical. 

However, many organizations struggle to effectively manage their application security posture due to a web of challenges, including growing complexities, the huge volume of data from a number of security scanners, and resource constraints. This leads to an increase in technical security debt. 

Think of ASPM as a suit of armor for your application portfolio, offering centralized visibility, control, and automation to fortify your defenses and bolster your overall security posture. By recognizing a few signs, you can determine if an ASPM platform is the key to unlocking a more secure future for your applications.

This blog post will explore the telltale signs that your business is ready to leverage the power of an Application Security Posture Management platform. 

11 Clear Signs Your Business Needs ASPM

1. Growing Complexity of Applications

Modern applications are intricate beasts. Gone are the days of simple codebases. Today's applications are layered with dependencies, APIs, containers, and microservices. Beyond the application itself, the underlying infrastructure is more relevant than ever from a security standpoint. Traditional security methods struggle to keep up with this complexity.  

ASPM platforms provide a comprehensive view of your entire application landscape, including cloud-based, mobile, and web applications. It helps you identify and address vulnerabilities across all this proliferation and interconnected parts. 

2. Multiple Security Scanners in Place

Juggling multiple security scanners without an ASPM platform creates a scattered view of your application security posture. This fragmented view can lead to missed vulnerabilities or wasted time reinvestigating duplicates identified by different scanners. 

ASPM platforms consolidate findings from various tools into a single, unified view, providing a comprehensive picture of your vulnerabilities and streamlining the remediation process.

3. Growing Security Technical Debt

Accumulation of security issues, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses creates a growing burden for your security team. This security technical debt makes your applications more susceptible to attacks and can be difficult to manage without proper tools. 

ASPM helps prioritize vulnerabilities based on their risk and exploitability, allowing you to focus on the most critical issues first. It also provides automation and knowledge resources for developers, enabling them to remediate issues efficiently and effectively. By taking a data-driven approach with ASPM, you can gradually chip away at your security technical debt and improve your overall application security posture.

4. Security Team vs. Developer Imbalance

The delicate balance between your security team and your development team can be easily disrupted as the size of the development team grows faster than the security team. With a limited security team, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep pace with the demands of application development. This often results in security teams being stretched thin, struggling to prioritize vulnerabilities and educate developers on secure coding practices. An overwhelmed security team can create a bottleneck for developers waiting for security approvals or lead to vulnerabilities making their way to production. 

ASPM platforms offer a solution by helping the security team triage, prioritize, and remediate risks at scale. It can also empower developers by providing automation and integrating well into their workflows. Ultimately, ASPM helps create a more balanced and productive working environment for both teams.

5. Siloed Security Data

Security data scattered across different tools and spreadsheets makes it difficult to identify trends and gain actionable insights. This fragmented data makes it challenging to understand the overall health of your application security posture and hinders effective decision-making. 

ASPM platforms centralize security data, providing a comprehensive view of your security posture. This allows you to identify trends, prioritize risks, and make data-driven decisions to improve your overall security.

6. Business Growth and Expansion

As your organization expands, so too does the number of applications you manage. This creates a sprawling attack surface – the sum of all potential entry points for attackers. Juggling security patches, configurations, and vulnerabilities across dozens or even hundreds of applications quickly becomes a logistical nightmare.

An ASPM platform offers a solution by providing a single pane of glass view. This centralized control room gives you a clear picture of your entire application security posture, regardless of how many applications you manage.

7. Incident Response Challenges

Data breaches and security incidents can be overwhelming. Without proper tools and processes, responding effectively can be a chaotic scramble. Imagine trying to coordinate different teams, gather evidence, and patch vulnerabilities, all while under intense pressure. 

ASPM platforms can streamline incident response by providing automated workflows, orchestration, and customized dashboards. This allows you to react quickly and efficiently to security threats, minimizing damage and downtime.

8. Resource Constraints

Building a robust internal security team can be expensive. Many businesses simply don't have the budget and time to hire a team of skilled security specialists.  

ASPM platforms offer features and guidance that can empower even smaller teams to manage application security effectively. Think of it as having a security expert on call, 24/7, providing insights and recommendations to keep your applications safe.

9. Lack of Visibility

Gaining comprehensive visibility into the organization's application security posture is challenging, especially with disparate systems and siloed data. An ASPM platform provides centralized visibility and actionable insights, enabling organizations to identify and address security gaps more effectively.

10. Manual Security Processes

Are you relying on manual governance processes? This is a time-consuming, overwhelming, and error-prone approach. Imagine spending hours manually correlating findings from different scanning tools and prioritizing them across diverse application environments, just on Excel sheets. 

ASPM can automate these tasks, freeing up you and your team to focus on strategic initiatives and improving overall security efficiency.

11. Compliance Requirements

Regulatory compliance requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc., impose stringent security mandates on organizations. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in severe financial and reputational consequences. 

An ASPM platform helps organizations achieve and maintain compliance by providing continuous monitoring and risk assessment capabilities.

ASPM with ArmorCode

ASPM platforms can significantly enhance your security posture by providing centralized visibility, streamlined management, and automated processes. This translates to a more efficient DevSecOps and reduced risk of breaches.

The ArmorCode ASPM Platform consolidates insights from all of your security tools into a cohesive platform. Harnessing the power of AI, ArmorCode standardizes and correlates findings from scanning tools, prioritizes them according to business context and threat intelligence, and automates the process of triaging and remediation workflows. This equips developers with the necessary tools to address issues swiftly and at scale.

Unlock the full potential of the ASPM with the ArmorCode platform by requesting a demo today!