What is the difference between ASPM and CSPM?

Modern cloud environments are complex and dynamic. Cloud-native applications are even more complex and dynamic, changing multiple times every week, day, or even hour. With this complexity come significant security challenges — your applications and data face sophisticated threats at every moment. Robust security is nonnegotiable.

Among the crucial strategies that today’s enterprises are adopting to help manage these challenges are application security posture management (ASPM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM). ASPM focuses on securing applications, and CSPM focuses on securing the applications’ underlying cloud infrastructure.

ASPM and CSPM can work together to provide security, but many security engineers are unclear about their differences. In this post, we’ll look more closely at what they are, explaining their key features and benefits. Then, we’ll look at how they are different in enhancing your security posture.

ASPM vs CSPM: Understanding the basics

To secure your cloud environments and applications effectively, you’ll need a clear understanding of how ASPM and CSPM each address specific aspects of security to protect different layers of your IT infrastructure.

What is ASPM?

ASPM is “the holistic process of evaluating, managing, and enhancing the security stance of an organization’s custom applications. It ensures applications adhere to security standards, resist cyber threats, and remain compliant.” ASPM tools help you continuously discover and remediate security weaknesses within your applications. They also help ensure you meet established security requirements before and after deployment.

What is CSPM?

CSPM “provides multi-cloud visibility with a single source of truth for cloud resources, and it automatically prevents cloud misconfigurations.” It automates the identification and remediation of cloud infrastructure risks. Security teams lean on CSPM tools for risk visualization and assessment, incident response, and compliance monitoring. By monitoring for misconfigurations and providing continuous threat detection, CSPM helps you ensure that cloud security best practices are uniformly applied across your cloud environments.

Exploring ASPM in detail

Let’s look more closely at how ASPM addresses the challenges of securing complex, frequently changing applications built and run in the cloud.

Problems that ASPM solves

ASPM tackles several critical application security issues. First, it addresses the threats inherent in application development and deployment. These include:

• Vulnerabilities: ASPM identifies Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), either natively or through integrations with other application security testing tools.

• Application misconfigurations: ASPM tools can detect configuration issues in your application, such as hard-coded secrets, unrotated credentials, and insecure environment settings.
• Architectural misconfigurations or anti-patterns: ASPM tools can identify and address structural design flaws, such as single-point-of-failure issues, to strengthen your application's overall resilience.

ASPM also helps your organization manage risk in cloud-native applications at all times, from development and deployment to runtime. Because ASPM integrates security signals throughout the application life cycle, it can provide a better view of overall risk at any given time and through each code change and iteration. This approach ensures that security teams can easily identify the top risks in their applications and are well equipped to provide developers with the details they need to fix the issues creating those risks.

Main ASPM features and capabilities

The most comprehensive ASPM solutions offer a range of features to enhance your application security. These capabilities include:

• Visibility: Provides a complete map of  your applications with all microservices, APIs, and third-party connections..
• Inventory capabilities: Maintains a detailed inventory of all application components.
• Triaging and prioritizing vulnerabilities in production: Helps security teams prioritize risks based on potential impact to ensure that the most critical vulnerabilities are addressed first.
• Security policy enforcement: Ensures that applications adhere to organizational or industry standards and regulatory requirements.
• Integration with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and other security tools: Works with CI/CD processes to embed security checks, allowing for automated testing and remediation.
• Resilience: Enhances the ability of your applications to withstand and recover from security incidents.

The benefits of ASPM

Implementing ASPM will bring significant benefits to your organization, including:

• Improved insight and visibility into the security posture of your deployed applications
• Enhanced security and compliance with industry standards and regulations
• Reduced risk of security breaches through risk-based vulnerability prioritization
• Streamlined development processes with embedded security practices
• Improved efficiency by automating and accelerating manual security tasks

Exploring CSPM in detail

Now, let’s switch gears to look at CSPM and how it helps organizations manage risk and maintain security in their cloud environments.

Problems that CSPM solves

First and foremost, CSPM addresses the challenges of securing dynamic and complex cloud environments. Maintaining consistent security across dynamic cloud environments is a difficult task. CSPM brings automation and visibility to significantly reduce this difficulty.

Unlike traditional on-premises environments, cloud infrastructure lacks a defined perimeter. Cloud environments can operate at a much larger scale and move at a faster pace. Often, this scale and pace cannot be matched by security measures dependent exclusively on human oversight and manual tasks. By facilitating automation, CSPM ensures security policies are uniformly applied across your cloud environments.

Main CSPM features and capabilities

CSPM tools enhance your cloud security and compliance management by providing the following capabilities:

• Discovery and visibility: Continuously discover and monitor cloud resources, giving you near real-time visibility into your environment’s security posture.
• Misconfiguration management and remediation: Detects cloud misconfigurations, which are a common cause of data breaches; many CSPM tools also provide automated remediation of discovered issues.
• Continuous threat detection: Detects threats and anomalies in real time, enabling your security team to respond swiftly to prevent full-blown security incidents.
• DevSecOps integration: Embeds security into the development life cycle by integrating with DevSecOps processes.

The benefits of CSPM

Implementing CSPM can deliver significant benefits for your organization, enhancing your overall cloud security and operational efficiency. Here are some of the advantages that CSPM solutions offer:

• Comprehensive visibility across multi-cloud environments
• Prevention of cloud misconfigurations
• Reduction in alert fatigue
• Streamlined and automated compliance and security posture management
• Regulatory compliance assessments and alignment with frameworks and best practices

Comparing ASPM and CSPM

Understanding the differences between ASPM and CSPM is crucial for a comprehensive security strategy. Both frameworks enhance security, but each one focuses on different aspects.

Key differences

Key similarities

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security for application and cloud security

ASPM and CSPM are both critical technologies for maintaining a strong security posture in your applications and cloud environments. ASPM focuses on securing your applications, and CSPM ensures your cloud infrastructures are properly configured and compliant with security standards.

CrowdStrike Falcon^® Cloud Security is a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform that encompasses CSPM. It delivers unified visibility, continuous monitoring, and automated compliance management for multi-cloud environments. With the addition of  CrowdStrike Falcon^® ASPM, CrowdStrike extends cloud security to applications, providing a complete security posture management solution for modern IT infrastructures.

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