What is ASPM?
Application security posture management (ASPM) is the continuous process of discovering, prioritizing, and remediating risks across the software development lifecycle. While tools like SAST and DAST test specific stages, ASPM unifies them. This connects findings by adding context and enforcing policy across the full application lifecycle.
Gartner describes ASPM as an approach that assesses “security signals” across the three key SDLC phases to boost visibility, enforce security policies, and ultimately, strengthen organizations’ overall security posture. With a code-to-cloud context, ASPM can connect the dots across all your tools and stages. This helps your security team with more accurate prioritization and faster remediation.
Get the Application Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
This 6-page guide goes beyond basics — it’s a deep dive into advanced, practical AppSec strategies for developers, security engineers, and DevOps teams.
Why AppSec Teams Need ASPM
Application security is more complex than ever. Teams are juggling multiple tools across the SDLC, from SAST and DAST to container scanners, SBOMs, and API security platforms. Each tool generates findings in its own silo, with limited context and no unified way to prioritize risk.
At the same time, development cycles are accelerating. Code ships rapidly across distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and hybrid environments. AppSec teams are expected to secure everything without slowing anyone down, often without full visibility into how applications are built, where they run, or what data they handle.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) addresses these challenges by bringing all signals together. It unifies findings from across the toolchain, adds context from runtime and cloud environments, and helps teams focus on the vulnerabilities that actually matter. For modern AppSec programs, ASPM turns scattered signals into actionable insight.
What are the benefits of ASPM
AppSec teams are overloaded with tools but lack the context to act. Vulnerabilities are scattered across scanners, pipelines, and cloud environments, with no easy way to connect the dots. ASPM changes that by giving teams the visibility, context, and control they need to manage application risk at scale.
Unify risk across code, pipelines, and cloud
ASPM brings together findings from SAST, DAST, container scans, IaC checks, and more. It connects issues across the full application lifecycle so AppSec teams can manage risk from a single place.
Focus on what’s actually exploitable
ASPM helps teams prioritize based on real risk, not just severity scores. It surfaces the issues that are reachable, exposed to the internet, tied to sensitive data, or part of an active attack path.
Assign ownership automatically
Every finding is mapped to the right repo, pipeline, and team. Security teams can route issues directly to the people responsible, cutting down delay and confusion.
Track posture over time
ASPM monitors how your application security posture evolves across releases. Teams can catch regressions early, measure progress, and keep stakeholders informed with clear metrics.
Strengthen compliance and audit readiness
ASPM enforces security policies across development and deployment workflows. It gives teams the traceability and reporting they need to support internal controls and meet external requirements like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and industry-specific standards.
For example, Aon decided to automate compliance to improve management and protection. The company used 100+ frameworks with Wiz. What took hours now only takes minutes. Plus, it now has real-time visibility throughout cloud environments.
Aon also improved M&A security evaluations before deals close, which has added strategic value to its business ventures.
Integrate with how developers work
ASPM plugs into CI/CD systems and developer tools to surface security issues early. Developers get the context they need without leaving their workflows, and security teams can shift left without slowing things down.
ASPM vs. other security tools
While ASPM is crucial, it doesn’t replace other existing security tools and frameworks, namely, cloud security posture management (CSPM), data security posture management (DSPM), application security orchestration and correlation (ASOC), and software as a service security posture management (SSPM). One thing to note: ASPM fills a gap that these tools don't cover: application layer risk visibility across the SDLC.
Below, we compare ASPM to these platforms by way of their primary use cases.
| Tool | Use case |
|---|---|
| ASPM |
|
| CSPM |
|
| DSPM |
|
| ASOC |
|
| SSPM |
|
Key features of ASPM solutions: What to look for
ASPM solutions offer a range of essential features designed to enhance the security and resilience of applications. These key features enable organizations to gain visibility, identify risks, and streamline the management of their application security posture. Below are the critical features of ASPM:
1. Full-stack visibility
ASPM solutions provide comprehensive visibility across the entire application stack, from infrastructure to the code layer. This means gaining insights into configurations, permissions, dependencies, and vulnerabilities across all components, whether on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid environments.
Full-stack visibility ensures that no security blind spots are missed and that security teams can proactively identify and address potential risks.
2. Continuous monitoring and risk assessments
ASPM continuously monitors applications in real-time, allowing for the identification of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other security issues as they arise. This proactive approach ensures that organizations are always aware of their application security posture and can assess risks dynamically.
Continuous risk assessment prioritizes vulnerabilities based on severity, allowing teams to focus on the most critical issues first.
3. Integration with CI/CD pipelines
To keep pace with the rapid development cycles of modern applications, ASPM integrates seamlessly with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
By embedding security checks early in the development process, ASPM helps ensure that vulnerabilities are detected and remediated before they make it into production. This approach promotes a shift-left security strategy, allowing teams to address security concerns as part of their development workflow.
4. Automated threat detection and remediation
Automation is a cornerstone of ASPM solutions, enabling automated threat detection and response capabilities. ASPM leverages intelligent automation to identify threats based on patterns, behaviors, or predefined rules.
Additionally, ASPM can offer automated remediation suggestions or trigger workflows to resolve vulnerabilities quickly, reducing the time between detection and resolution.
5. Compliance mapping and reports
ASPM solutions help organizations stay compliant with industry regulations and security frameworks by continuously monitoring applications for compliance-related issues. They provide comprehensive reporting and audit trails, ensuring that security and compliance teams can track and verify adherence to standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and more.
ASPM’s automated compliance checks reduce the burden of manual audits and ensure that applications remain secure and compliant over time.
6. Contextualized alerts and insights
Rather than overwhelming teams with endless security alerts, ASPM solutions deliver contextualized insights that help prioritize responses.
By correlating data from across the application stack, ASPM provides a deeper understanding of each vulnerability's context—whether related to a critical component, a high-value asset, or a low-risk issue—allowing teams to make informed decisions quickly.
7. Remediation guidance and best practices
ASPM solutions go beyond simply identifying issues—they also provide actionable remediation guidance. This includes offering recommendations for resolving vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or compliance gaps.
Many ASPM tools include access to security best practices and automated workflows to streamline remediation efforts, helping development and security teams stay aligned.
Wiz's approach to ASPM
Traditional appsec tools stop at detection. Wiz Code goes further by tying vulnerabilities to runtime context and business risk. Additionally, Wiz combines ASPM and CNAPP capabilities so organizations can seamlessly connect code-to-cloud visibility with contextual risk prioritization for faster and more effective remediation. Wiz Code offers the following:
Built-in scanners
Wiz's built-in scanners detect a wide range of application security risks:
Software composition analysis (SCA): Identifies vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies
Static application security testing (SAST): Detects security issues in custom code
Infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning: Finds misconfigurations in infrastructure definitions
Container image scanning: Identifies vulnerabilities in container images
These scanners work across multiple programming languages and frameworks, providing broad coverage for application security.
Code-to-cloud context
Wiz Code provides a comprehensive view of application security by connecting code vulnerabilities to their runtime impact in the cloud. This approach does the following:
Identifies vulnerabilities in application code and third-party dependencies
Maps these vulnerabilities to their actual deployment in cloud environments
Provides context on whether vulnerable code is exposed to the internet or contains sensitive data
Risk prioritization
Idan Cohen, Technology Procurement at Wiz, explains the platform’s approach to risk prioritization in a Wiz Bite talk:
“We reduce the alert fatigue of the enormous amount of vulnerabilities companies are facing by focusing on the resources that truly matter—the ones with the biggest attack surface, the biggest blast radius through identity or secrets, or the most critical assets.”
What does reducing alert fatigue and improving security look like? Wiz's approach to risk prioritization in ASPM includes:
Considering both the severity of code vulnerabilities and their cloud exposure
Highlighting high-risk issues that are actively exploitable in production
Reducing alert fatigue by focusing on the most critical security concerns
Third-party findings integrations
Wiz doesn't limit itself to its own scanners. It also ingests findings from third-party tools:
Integrates results from external SAST and DAST tools
Consolidates security findings from various sources into a single view
Provides a holistic picture of application security across different testing methodologies
The integration depth can vary by tool, so it’s important to research your third-party tools for Wiz capabilities. You can schedule a Wiz demo yourself to learn more about how the platform can work with your ecosystem.
Integrated security workflow
The ASPM capabilities of Wiz Code streamline the security workflow by:
Offering a single pane of glass for both cloud and application security
Enabling security teams to triage and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently
Providing developers with actionable insights to fix issues earlier in the development cycle
Continuous monitoring
Wiz Code supports continuous ASPM by:
Scanning code repositories and cloud environments in real-time
Detecting new vulnerabilities as they emerge in the application lifecycle
Tracking the remediation progress of identified issues
Enhanced collaboration
By integrating ASPM capabilities, Wiz Code fosters better collaboration between security and development teams through the following:
Providing a shared view of application risks across different stakeholders
Facilitating clearer communication about security priorities
Supporting a shift-left approach to security in the software development lifecycle
Watch 5-min demo: How Wiz secures applications
See how Wiz connects code to cloud context using the Security Graph, highlights real code issues, enforces CI/CD policies, and enables one-click remediation—all in a single platform.
Watch demo now
Wiz Code's approach to ASPM represents a significant evolution in application security, moving beyond traditional SAST and DAST tools to provide a more holistic, cloud-native security solution that addresses the complexities of modern application development and deployment. Want a security layer that connects code to cloud risk? Book a Wiz Code demo to see how ASPM should work—agentless, contextual, and built for real-world DevSecOps workflows.
Want to dive deeper into code security? Get the free Secure Coding Best Practices [Cheat Sheet].
