Keeping your business secure should be a top priority ASPM. However, challenges like ransomware, DDoS attacks, advanced persistent threats, and social engineering make this problematic. Let’s not forget the complexities of a cloud environment, such as interdependencies, multi-cloud deployments, and compliance.
So you must implement proactive security measures to identify threats before they impact your organisation.
This article will examine how application security management (ASPM), security information and event management (SIEM), and SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance can help you avoid fake threats.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)
ASPM is a continuous security framework that helps you manage security throughout the application lifecycle. Continuously scan your code, configurations, and dependencies for vulnerabilities. Plus, it provides real-time information based on risk levels, helping you resolve issues faster.
Here’s a quick rundown of how APSM works. It all starts with the planning and design phase.
Review your application’s architecture and security policies to identify risks before development begins. It scans your code for vulnerabilities during development and instantly alerts you to insecure coding practices.
When the development team moves to the build and integration phase, the ASPM tool analyses CI/CD pipelines to detect security flaws and identify overlooked vulnerabilities.
During the testing phase, security checks with functional tests are conducted, and any vulnerabilities or compliance issues are immediately reported. During implementation, validate configurations and ensure security measures are implemented.
Their job doesn’t end there. Once your application is up and running, ASPM monitors security by tracking threats, attack surfaces, and compliance risks. If an incident occurs, this helps you respond quickly, fix vulnerabilities, and reduce downtime.
Here are some of the significant benefits of an ASPM tool:
- Continuous risk monitoring: ASPM gives you continuous visibility into your app’s infrastructure. It monitors code, dependencies, and configurations in real time to detect threats and ensure your app remains secure.
- Faster remediation: When security risks are detected, it alerts you instantly to ensure you fix them fast. It prioritises risks based on severity, so you know what to tackle first. It also automates preconfigured remediation steps, reducing manual effort and response time.
- Security shift-left: Shift-left security means integrating security early in the development process to catch and fix issues before they reach production, and that is the core function of an ASPM tool. It scans code as you write and catches vulnerabilities before they reach production. This reduces costly fixes and security gaps later in the process.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
SIEM is a set of tools and services that collect data from across a company’s security architecture and enable rapid threat detection and response by alerting the cyber defence team in the event of an attack.
Organisations use SIEM for several functions, including:
- Forensic and Threat Hunting: The information SIEM collects is invaluable for proactive threat hunting and post-incident investigation. Instead of manually gathering and processing data that they need from various systems and solutions, your team can query the SIEM and increase the effectiveness and speed of the investigation.
- Regulatory Compliance: Every business, including yours, must adhere to various data protection regulations, each with strict requirements. Your team can use SIEM solutions and tools to help prove compliance because the information they collect and store can show that the necessary controls and policies are in place and enforced.
- Detect and Analyse Threats: Security Information and event management tools have built-in support for data analytics tools and policies, which can be applied to the information gathered and automatically detect signs of potential intrusion into a company’s network or system.
SIEM systems help you detect and respond to security threats by collecting and examining data from your IT environment. They act as a central hub, pulling logs from servers, applications, and networks to identify suspicious activity.
They offer real-time analytics that continuously monitor your data, identify anomalies, and alert you to potential security incidents before they escalate. Instead of manually reviewing logs, you get an automated information streamlining investigation and response.
The key benefit of SIEM is centralised log management, which helps you monitor security events across multiple systems from one place. This improves visibility, facilitates threat correlation, and enables rapid response. It also simplifies compliance by maintaining detailed records of security incidents.
As businesses move to cloud and hybrid infrastructures, SIEM becomes even more critical. Integrates with cloud services and on-premises systems, helping you secure a complex, distributed environment. It works for both on-premises servers and cloud applications and provides a unified security strategy.
Challenges and Risks of Cloud-Hosted Data
Hosting your company’s data in the cloud provides an extra layer of efficiency; however, a few challenges come with it.
Data Visibility and Control Concerns ASPM
By storing data in the cloud, you lose some control over its management and security; you don’t always have complete visibility into where it’s stored and who can access it.
Unfortunately, if data is untraceable, identifying security risks becomes more difficult. You’ll run into issues like shadow IT: security blind spots created by employees using unauthorised apps, misconfigurations, overly permissive access settings, and more.
Shared Responsibility Model with Cloud Providers
When using cloud services, security is not just the provider’s responsibility, but a shared responsibility.
While the cloud provider protects infrastructure like servers and networks, you must protect your data, applications, and user access. If you assume that the provider handles everything, you risk data leaks, misconfigurations, and non-compliance. You must implement strict access controls, encrypt sensitive data, and monitor for security threats.
Regulatory Compliance and Governance ASPM
Compliance and governance can be complex when managing data hosted in the cloud. Depending on your industry and location, you need to configure your cloud security settings to comply with strict data protection laws like GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA, or risk being fined.
You should also monitor where your data is stored, as some regulations require it in specific regions. Conducting an audit can be challenging if you don’t have a complete view of your cloud environment.
Understanding SOC 1 and SOC 2 Compliance ASPM
This is because it ensures compliance with industry standards and regulations to reduce security risks. Below are two of the most popular types of regulatory compliance within the system and organisational controls (SOC).
SOC 1
SOC 1 compliance helps companies prove that they handle financial data securely.
For instance, if your company provides payroll, billing, or financial transaction services, clients may require a SOC 1 report before working with you.
The compliance process involves an independent audit that reviews how you manage risks related to financial reporting. The role of the process is to define your control objectives—these are the policies and procedures that protect financial information.
There are two categories of SOC 1 gossip.
A Type I report evaluates your controls simultaneously, while a Type II report tests them over several months to ensure they function consistently.
SOC 2 ASPM
Advanced by the American Organization of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), SOC 2 is a voluntary compliance standard for service organisations that outlines how they should manage their customers’ data. Businesses can tailor it to their requirements and develop controls that meet the following trusted services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
A Type I report analyses your security controls at a point in time and verifies that you have implemented all required controls, but does not test their effectiveness. A Type II report evaluates your controls throughout 3 to 12 months and analyses their efficacy.
Compliance with SOC 2 demonstrates that your company maintains high information security and that you and your team handle sensitive information responsibly. It also gives you a competitive advantage, as customers and investors prefer to do business with organisations that can demonstrate strong information security practices, especially in the IT and cloud services sector.
Build a Holistic Cybersecurity Strategy ASPM
Improving the security of your cloud data goes beyond adopting a single strategy; organisations need to adopt multiple approaches to ensure unbreakable security.
One way to achieve this is by integrating ASPM to gain accurate and real-time visibility into your cloud and on-premises applications, APIs, microservices, dependencies, and data flows. Additionally, SIEM integration will provide your team with analytics that will help them detect threats, risks, or suspicious activity and provide long-term trending of any issues, which is helpful for security audits and compliance.
Combining SOC 1 and SOC 2 with ASPM and SIEM will bring more benefits to your business. If you are a financial services organisation or any other company that collects user information, SOC 1 and SOC 2 are your best chance to demonstrate to users and regulators that you practice secure data storage and compliance.