Application Risk Management

Perimeter-focused application security is no longer sufficient. Effective application security requires a holistic approach that encompasses everything from secure coding practices to insider risk management. Organizations must also reduce their attack surface by proactively identifying and remediating potential issues. 

What is Application Risk Management?

Application risk management is a standards-based approach to identify, assess, prioritize, and remediate risks across an organization’s software ecosystem. Rather than focusing on the entire digital estate, it targets the vulnerabilities and threats unique to modern environments, such as outdated dependencies, embedded secrets, and compromised containers. 

Why is Application Risk Management Important?

Cloud-native development, open-source software, and artificial intelligence have introduced unprecedented efficiency into the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), but they’ve done so at a cost.

Many applications now rely on a complex web of third-party services and components, resulting in an immense attack surface. Lacking proper guardrails, agile software development can introduce significant vulnerabilities. And without a means of efficiently prioritizing risks and threats, security engineers may be overwhelmed by unnecessary alerts. 

By implementing risk management across the SDLC, businesses address all three of these challenges, intelligently identifying and addressing their most harmful vulnerabilities well before production. 

Key Components of an Application Risk Management Strategy

To effectively manage and mitigate application risk across its ecosystem, an organization should build its strategy around the following pillars: 

Visibility

Understanding the vulnerabilities in an application’s codebase isn’t enough. Risk management requires a complete inventory of the entire software supply chain, including vendors, direct dependencies, and transient dependencies. Keep this inventory up-to-date through automated Software Composition Analysis and regular assessments. 

Automation

Each time a new risk is identified, quickly determine both the affected assets and the operational impact should the risk be exploited by an attacker. Because this is nearly impossible to achieve manually in a modern software ecosystem, automation is a necessity. 

Integrate automated tools into their SDLC to streamline detection, identification, and remediation. Automatic enforcement of controls and guardrails is also essential to ensuring security doesn’t interfere with development. 

Remediation Workflows

Once you identify a critical or severe risk, immediately assign someone for remediation and provide them with step-by-step guidance. This process should include automated ticket and alert management. 

Governance and Compliance

Alongside vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, scan your ecosystem for potential compliance violations. Ensure you have both the necessary policies in place for compliance and the capacity to automatically enforce them.  

Types of Risks Addressed by Application Risk Management

Application risk management covers multiple dimensions, including: 

• Internal Vulnerabilities such as insecure code, compromised accounts, flawed architecture, insecure deserialization and broken authentication
• Dependency Risks introduced through third-party components like open-source frameworks, APIs, and services
• Misconfigurations that may create security gaps in applications, containers, or cloud environments
• Potential Non-Compliance with regulations like the GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS
• Insufficient Security Controls, including authentication and authorization, identity and access management, and flow control mechanisms in the CI/CD pipeline
• Mobile Application Risk like insecure data storage, weak cryptography, and other threats unique to the mobile landscape
• Insider Threats stemming from either carelessness or the intentional misuse of privileges and permissions

FAQ

What are the main goals of application risk management?

Application risk management seeks to improve software security by proactively identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on business impact. It also supports a shift-left approach to development, addressing vulnerabilities early in the pipeline through secure development practices. Lastly, by more effectively managing potential security issues, an application risk management strategy improves an organization’s overall resilience. 

How can application risk management improve operational efficiency?

Proactively identifying and remediating risks as early as possible in development allows both developers and security engineers to spend less time fixing security in production environments. It also reduces unplanned downtime and repositions application security as part of the development process rather than a roadblock to deployment. 

What are some examples of application risk assessment frameworks?

Common application risk assessment frameworks include:

• The NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which provides comprehensive guidance that includes risk management
• The OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SMM), an open framework to help organizations facilitate secure software development
• FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk), a quantitative model designed to work alongside other software risk management frameworks
• The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) used by Microsoft for its DevSecOps processes

Can application risk management tools integrate with DevOps workflows?

Yes — they can and should integrate with DevOps workflows and systems. Incorporating application security directly into CI/CD pipelines, issue tracking software, and code repositories allows an organization to automatically enforce application risk management policies and controls without impacting development velocity. 

How often should applications undergo risk assessments?

Applications should be continuously and automatically monitored via an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform. 

Manual assessments should be carried out often as necessary for an organization to have a complete picture of the application’s risk landscape. Depending on the business’s security needs and regulatory requirements, this could mean annual, quarterly, or even monthly reviews. Architecture also plays a role – Mobile application risk management requires a different approach from managing risk within desktop environments, for instance. 

Organizations should also perform a thorough assessment after major events such as: 

• Architecture changes
• Major code changes
• The release of new threat intelligence
• A breach involving a third-party dependency