ASPM vs. ASOC: How do they differ?

What is application security posture management?

ASPM tools focus on continuous monitoring, assessment and management of an organization's AppSec landscape to ensure all applications meet security best practices and compliance requirements and are resilient to threats.

They offer visibility into the security status of applications across development, testing and production environments. This includes logs, API integration to on-premises and cloud AppSec and DevOps services and tools, and more.

Key components of ASPM include the following:

• Visibility. Continuous tracking of AppSec metrics and vulnerabilities across all stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and DevOps pipelines.
• Risk management. Prioritization and remediation of vulnerabilities based on risk assessments to minimize potential threats.
• Automation. Use of automated tools to detect, analyze and mitigate security issues in real time or near-real time.
• Compliance. Ensuring applications adhere to industry regulations, standards and best practices for security.
• Collaboration. Enabling cooperation among development, security and operations teams to integrate security into the development process.

Overall, ASPM tools help organizations implement and maintain security posture by proactively identifying and addressing weaknesses in applications and development environments.

What is application security orchestration and correlation?

ASOC tools help stitch together other tools and technologies to create an end-to-end AppSec monitoring function. These tools focus more on monitoring attacks and threat surfaces than configuration issues and vulnerabilities.

ASOC tools integrate, automate and manage a variety of security tools and processes to provide a unified approach to AppSec -- think security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) for AppSec.

Key components of ASOC include the following:

• Orchestration. Automating the coordination and management of different security tools, such as static analysis and dynamic code analysis, software composition analysis, vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. This ensures these tools work together efficiently and consistently across the SDLC.
• Correlation. Aggregating and analyzing data from different security tools to identify patterns, prioritize vulnerabilities and reduce false positives. Correlation helps provide a comprehensive view of security risks by linking related security findings from different sources.
• Centralized management. Providing a single console where security teams can monitor and manage the security posture of all applications, including tracking the status of vulnerabilities, compliance and remediation efforts.
• Automation. Streamlining repetitive tasks, such as vulnerability scanning, reporting and remediation workflows, to improve efficiency and reduce time to detect and respond to issues.
• Risk prioritization. Enabling organizations to focus on critical issues by using correlated data to assess the severity and impact of vulnerabilities.
• Integration. Seamlessly integrating with DevOps pipeline tools and security services integrated into the pipeline, such as secrets management and static application security testing/dynamic application security testing, to ensure security throughout the SDLC.

Overall, ASOC tools help organizations enhance AppSec by making it more efficient, comprehensive and manageable. This can result in better risk management and faster remediation of security issues.

ASPM vs. ASOC: Which should organizations use?

In a nutshell, ASPM is best for continuous monitoring and validation of an app's security posture. For organizations with a large footprint of public-facing apps, ASPM is a strong contender to help keep security operations teams apprised of the threat surface, as well as keep the surface configured in a desired state.

For organizations needing a more comprehensive integration across vulnerability management, development, deployments and runtime operations, ASOC is the security tool of choice.

Note, however, that the two technologies do overlap to some degree, and it's possible the two could converge into one unified tool -- or even potentially integrate into SOAR and cloud-native application protection platform spaces -- in the near future.

Dave Shackleford is founder and principal consultant with Voodoo Security; SANS analyst, instructor and course author; and GIAC technical director.