Top 7 ASPM Best Practices for Building Robust Application Security

Security teams are drowning in vulnerabilities, false positives, and compliance demands—while development moves faster than ever. Traditional security tools can’t keep up, leaving organizations exposed. That’s why Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) has become the backbone of modern application security. 

ASPM systems are purpose-built security platforms that secure custom applications by reviewing code, APIs, and dependencies for known vulnerabilities.

But simply adopting an ASPM platform isn’t enough—you need the right strategy to make it work.

What can you do to fully utilize your current or future ASPM platform to provide the level of security your development processes and applications require? It starts with developing an ASPM program that follows these seven best practices.

Why ASPM is the Backbone of Modern Application Security

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) is a critical solution in modern cybersecurity strategies. ASPM helps address the growing complexity of applications powered by microservices, open-source dependencies, cloud-native architectures, and varying DevSecOps methodologies.

Traditional security tools can struggle in this new landscape because they do not provide enough context or visibility into an application’s vulnerabilities. ASPM tools aim to bridge this gap by offering a holistic, real-time approach to managing an organization’s application security posture.

Benefits of Adopting ASPM for Modern Organizations

Organizations that implement ASPM will likely gain multiple benefits to their security posture and development processes. While these application security benefits depend on adopting the right platform, let’s break down what’s possible with ASPM. 

Proactive Risk Management

Waiting for problems to occur before fixing them is not an effective way to prevent attacks and stay compliant—you need to be proactive. An ASPM solution can continuously monitor application security risks in new code, API usage, and any changes in dependencies for possible vulnerabilities. 

With ASPM, your teams can identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before attacks can exploit them. This proactive approach reduces the attack surface and enhances the resilience of your application.

Enhanced Visibility and Control

ASPM allows teams to better understand an application’s security posture. Developers and security experts will understand where known vulnerabilities exist, how to mitigate them, and how they relate to overall risk management strategies.

Additionally, security and development teams can collaborate on remediations and overarching changes. This level of visibility allows organizations to prioritize remediation efforts based on impact and the overall risk posture.

Seamless Integration with DevSecOps

Modern ASPM tools integrate seamlessly with most existing development pipelines, which helps embed security throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) and DevSecOps.

The shift left approach equips developers to identify and address vulnerabilities early into the development process, greatly reducing the cost and complexity of remediation.

Maintain Compliance

Regulatory requirements for application security are constantly changing, and you need to keep up. A single non-compliant action can result in significant fines and reputation damage. 

ASPM helps automate compliance checks at key intervals while simplifying the reporting process. The right platform will help your organization adhere to regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, alongside generating the reports you need to file.

Common Application Security Challenges That ASPM Solves

Enterprises face a wide range of security challenges when it comes to their applications. ASPM systems go far in solving the following challenges:

• Lack of context in security alerts: Traditional security tools generate a high volume of alerts, but many lack the necessary context, making it challenging to prioritize remediations.
• Siloed security and development teams: Security and development often work in isolation, even though application security depends on both teams. ASPM helps foster collaboration by integrating security insights directly into developer workflows, creating faster response times.
• Growing attack surface in cloud-native environments: Adopting microservices and cloud-native architectures has significantly expanded the modern attack surface. ASPM continuously assesses risks across these dynamic environments to provide comprehensive security coverage.
• Manual and inefficient processes: Manual processes are still necessary, but initial checks can be automated to improve efficiency and remove human error. An effective ASPM platform will automate scanning and provide alerts with the necessary context to start remediation.
• Compliance complexity: Meeting regulatory and industry compliance requirements can be challenging, especially for those operating in highly regulated sectors. Keeping your code, dependencies, and API secure will help with data protection regulations to help avoid fines.

7 ASPM Best Practices to Strengthen Your Security

ASPM platforms are critical for any proactive security strategy as they ensure that vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated before they can be exploited. 

Alongside choosing the right platform, organizations should adopt key best practices to maximize the effectiveness of their ASPM solution. We’ll break down the best practices that are well worth adopting to secure your application fully.

1. Adopt a Risk-Based Approach

Prioritization is critical to making meaningful improvements—not all security vulnerabilities pose the same level of threat. A risk-based approach focuses on identifying and addressing the most critical security risks based on factors like exploitability, business impact, and likelihood of occurrence. 

An ideal ASPM platform should implement risk-scoring mechanisms and automatically categorize vulnerabilities. This capability ensures that security teams allocate resources efficiently, reducing the overall attack surface while maintaining operational efficiency.

2. Integrate ASPM Across the SDLC

Security should not be an afterthought; instead, it must be embedded at every stage of the SDLC. By integrating ASPM early, organizations can detect and address security issues before they become costly and complex.

This level of integration involves:

• Adding security checks into CI/CD pipelines
• Ensuring automated scanning during code commits
• Leveraging ASPM tools to monitor security postures continuously

When ASPM is a core part of the SDLC, security and development teams can work together to prevent vulnerabilities from entering production.

3. Streamline and Improve Remediation Efforts

Identifying vulnerabilities is only the first step—efficient remediation efforts are what strengthen security.  Improving remediation requires a few specific steps: 

• Establishing clear workflows to address vulnerabilities
• Leveraging the right ticketing systems
• Providing contextual insights to guide developers in fixing vulnerabilities

The overall goal is to minimize the gap between detection and remediation, reducing the window of opportunity for potential attackers to exploit.

4. Build Collaboration Between Security and Development Teams

A common challenge in application security is the disconnect between security and development teams. Security professionals often focus on risk reduction, while developers prioritize speed and functionality. 

Organizations should foster a security-first culture that encourages collaboration to bridge this gap. You can help build a collaborative environment by holding regular security reviews, integrating security champions within development teams, and using developer-friendly ASPM tools that provide actionable insights rather than just issuing security alerts. 

When teams work together, security becomes a shared responsibility rather than an obstacle to productivity.

5. Merge with Shift Left Security

Shift left security is an emerging methodology that addresses vulnerabilities early in the development process, reducing the need for costly fixes later. By integrating ASPM with Shift Left Security principles, organizations can detect misconfigurations, insecure code, and policy violations so these issues don’t reach production. 

The ASPM and shift left approach involves implementing secure coding practices, using static application security testing (SAST), and educating developers on security best practices. The earlier you implement security processes, the more effective and cost-efficient it becomes.

6. Revise Workflows to Include ASPM

Traditional security workflows often operate in isolation from development processes, leading to inefficiencies and missed vulnerabilities. To fully leverage ASPM, organizations must revise their workflows to ensure security is continuously assessed and managed, which goes hand in hand with building a collaborative environment.

How might you revise workflows to integrate ASPM? There are several ways to go about it, like automating security scans within development pipelines, setting up real-time alerts, and defining clear escalation paths for high-risk vulnerabilities. 

Adjusting workflows to align with ASPM capabilities ensures that security is proactive rather than reactive.

7. Scale Slowly

Implementing ASPM management across an entire enterprise requires careful planning and gradual expansion. Businesses should start with a pilot program, focusing on a few critical applications or teams, rather than attempting a full-scale rollout immediately.

Scaling slowly allows security leaders to refine processes, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments before scaling ASPM across the enterprise. A phased approach reduces disruption, ensures smoother adoption, and helps teams build confidence in the new security measures.

Secure Your Applications and Stay Compliant with Apiiro

Enterprises face a growing number of threats that must be mitigated to avoid costly attacks. 

ASPM platforms have emerged as a powerful way to secure custom applications from the beginning rather than waiting for an attack to discover an issue.

However, following the best practices we’ve explored above is crucial to fully benefit from all that’s possible from ASPM tools. You’ll need to take a risk-based approach, unify security and development, and scale slowly.

Apiiro offers one of the best application security posture management solutions for any organization with custom apps that must be secure and compliant. Our platform creates a centralized source of truth to keep security and development teams on the same page to build a more secure platform.

Ready to stop depending on other security frameworks to cover your applications as a side effect? Book a demo today to speak to an application security specialist and learn how Apiiro can bolster your security.