Seven steps to close coverage gaps with ASPM

The old adage “knowledge is power” holds especially true in the realm of AppSec. By remaining aware of the potential threats to applications and closing gaps in coverage, AppSec teams can demonstrate to leaders that they are in a solid position to protect vital assets.  

However, visibility is riddled with challenges, not the least of which are highly productive developers racing to market, often using AI-generated code that contains potential security issues. Finding and closing coverage gaps in your AppSec program is not a simple scan-and-fix process — it’s an ongoing combination of efforts. You need to:

1. Understand your application landscape

2. Define security policies

3. Implement a policy builder

4. Track security controls

5. Address coverage gaps

6. Integrate with application security testing (AST)

7. Monitor and improve

Application security posture management (ASPM) is an emerging security practice that can support these efforts. ASPM helps AppSec teams manage and scale programs, acting as a control hub and providing visibility into all application assets and their relationships. Read on to find out how ASPM solutions like Snyk AppRisk can support you through the seven steps of closing program gaps. 

Understand your application landscape

The first key to identifying and closing gaps is a full understanding of your application landscape. ASPM tools can continuously manage application risk by collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing security issues across the software life cycle. Snyk creates a structured inventory of the software assets involved in building, deploying, and running applications, not only listing them but providing critical information on:

• Asset ownership

• Business criticality

• Technologies used

• Deployment status

• Runtime configuration

• Security testing results and findings

This comprehensive shared view provides the context needed for analyzing risk and assessing threat profiles for different applications. With risk understood, AppSec teams can empower developers to close the gaps that measurably reduce risk — and communicate results to business leaders in terms that matter to them.

Define security policies

Not all applications are created equal. Critical applications handling sensitive data must be subject to stricter policies than lower-risk applications, for example. ASPM assesses and prioritizes risks by bringing together holistic context about the application, vulnerabilities, and controls. Instead of rigid gates, the controls and guardrails are tailored to the application. The application risk profile helps focus precious developer time by calculating and communicating the return on effort for their work.

Contextual enforcement of AppSec policies and controls ensures consistency across the organization through automated monitoring and enforcement. Factors to consider when creating policies include the application’s:

• Business importance: Is it a daily tool core to operations or a nice-to-have? 

• Threat level: Does it contain financial data or a survey on coffee preferences? 

• Organizational context: What is the application’s role within the broader organization? 

Implement a policy builder 

Security policies are preventive care for your applications. They help guide developers to create robust assets without sacrificing speed. A policy builder lets you save time by automatically creating security policies aligned with company goals and compliance requirements. It’s critical that your policy builder be intuitive and flexible. You’ll need one that can calculate effective policy for any asset, taking into account such factors as business criticality, data sensitivity, and traffic levels. A high-performing policy builder can continue to improve security policies over time. And it’ll allow you to change the policy manually when you need to.

Track security controls

A clear and shared understanding of all components of every application in the enterprise includes a firm understanding of where security controls are running (or not running, as the case may be) in line with policies. Has every application that reaches production gone through the right controls? Automating policy creation and monitoring existing controls offers certainty that security controls are working consistently across the application landscape. Once you identify missing or inadequate controls, you can prioritize which ones to build out first for better coverage.

Address coverage gaps 

Once you find the coverage gaps, the process of fixing them can be difficult. Collaboration with developers gets tough when your goals don’t align. They need to be able to focus on coverage gaps that may have significant business impact rather than getting overwhelmed fixing every gap that’s found. ASPM equips AppSec teams to not only identify but prioritize business-critical areas through important contextual information, enabling better collaboration between security, development, and operations. 

Integrate with application security testing (AST)

ASPM offers AppSec solid governance and management to close gaps and reach comprehensive security coverage. But this coverage will only be complete with end-to-end integration among security tools. At a minimum, ASPM must be closely aligned and integrated with AST, since AST tools provide the main point of developer interaction and the critical foundation of any AppSec program. Solutions that integrate with the full security landscape can provide your team peace of mind and improve interactions with developers and leaders.

Monitor and improve

Security is never a “set it and forget it” practice. In AppSec, you’re only as good as today’s security — not what you implemented last month — which means monitoring and continuous improvement are crucial. Set up notifications for control deviations so you can stay on top of non-compliance. Regularly review and update security policies to keep them current. Continually adapt to changing company direction, emerging technology, evolving threats, and whatever else could take you by surprise. 

Fire on all cylinders

Beyond a simple scan, finding and fixing coverage gaps involves an ongoing orchestration of effort: understanding the landscape, creating effective policies and controls, integrating systems, prioritizing remediation, and continuously improving. An ASPM-style approach supports all of these tasks. 

Because we know what it takes to get all of them running together smoothly, Snyk has integrated them into our ASPM solution, Snyk AppRisk. To learn more about ASPM, read the Snyk and Accenture whitepaper Empower Developers, Reduce Risk: How ASPM Unlocks DevSecOps. 

You can also book a Snyk AppRisk demo to learn more about our comprehensive and proactive approach to reducing application risk.