ASPM

ASPM is an acronym for Application Security Posture Management. ASPM provides organizations a systematic approach to secure their applications.ASPM has 7 steps known as: Visibility and Inventory, Risk Assessment, Threat Detection and Monitoring, Compliance and Governance, Remediation and Mitigation, Integration with DevSecOps, and Continuous Improvement.

Step 1: Visibility and Inventory:

What?: This step is to monitor all the applications that are in the system and make sure they are updated with no known vulnerabilities. It is also about ensuring there are no unintended applications in the system. It is also about mapping how the different applications interact with each other.
Why?: This is done to have systems that can discover vulnerbilities earlier that the organization can fix.
How? It is done by implementing automatic auditing systems that can scan the system in specific time periods. They can check if there are new updates for applications available, if there are new unintended applications in the system, or if some applications have been altered in some suspicious way.

Step 2: Risk Assessment:

What?: This step is about determining which applications are more crucial than others so the organization knows what applications to prioritize.
Why?: Prioritizing the applications is important because an organization would be more secure by prioritizing the most critical vulnerabilities first.
How?: The most recognized way of determining the severity of vulnerabilities is to use the CVSS score system. There are applications that can automate the task so an organization can increase the speed of the process.

Step 3: Threat Detection and Monitoring:

What?: The purpose of this step is to implement monitoring systems that can look for suspicious interactions with applications in real time.
Why?: This is done so you can detect real-time hacking attempts and react quickly to the incident.
How?: You can implement various forms of monitoring systems that can look for predefined suspicious behavior and alert the SOC or the security team.

Step 4: Compliance and Governance:

What?: The purpose of this step is to make sure the organization is following the laws and regulations of the country they are in.
Why?: This is important to avoid fines and potentially trials for breaking the law.
How?: It is to implement the requirements that are demanded by the government.

Step 5: Remediation and Mitigation:

What?: The purpose is to automate actions to fix a vulnerability when it is detected.
Why?: This is done to quickly fix vulnerabilities that can happen during the process of developing an application.
How?: This can be done by creating policies that demand certain requirements for something to be allowed to be implemented. This will hinder people from implementing something that can create crucial vulnerabilities. It is also possible to automate a monitoring system to block vulnerable configurations in a system if discovered.

Step 6: Integration with DevSecOps:

What?: The purpose is to make sure security is part of the software development life cycle.
Why?: This makes sure that an organization might discover vulnerabilities earlier which makes it financially cheaper to fix the vulnerability.
How?: An organization can implement security gates that can alert the developers if certain aspects of their coding will create a vulnerability.

Step 7: Continuous Improvement:

What?: Assessing the effectiveness of all the previous steps and looking for improvements.
Why?: This is to make sure the security process of the organization is continuously up to date.
How?: It is important to make sure there are systems that can evaluate the processes like response time to an incident or a fix. It is also important to have an honest evaluation culture within the organization.

Summary

Implementing the steps in ASPM will help an organization in making sure security is not neglected in the SDLC process. This will help with avoiding and reacting quickly to cyber incidents that can stagnate the development of an organization.