The world of compliance can feel like a labyrinth for security and development teams, and the complexity and breadth of standards can create gaps between what is required and what is actually implemented.
As Andy Ellis, Hall of Fame CSO, said in our ASPM Book, “As we look at the compliance landscape, it’s clear that there’s not going to be one universal law. That means CISOs need to read the tea leaves and implement solutions that protect data to a high enough standard to comply with any of the hundreds of different variations of privacy regulations that are going to come into effect over the next five years.”
One of the most sought-after compliance certifications is FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program). It’s the gold standard for cloud service providers or software companies, and is a mandatory authorization that companies must obtain to work with the U.S. federal government. Any cloud or cloud-based organization wanting to sell into or partner with federal agencies must be FedRAMP certified.
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) generally — and Cycode in particular — has proven to be a secret weapon for companies that build software and applications and need support in simplifying FedRAMP compliance. Unlike traditional point solutions, ASPM offers a holistic approach that gives teams real-time complete visibility, risk-based prioritization, automated remediation, continuous monitoring, detailed reporting, dashboards, and compliance mapping.
Keep reading to discover how ASPM can address stringent FedRAMP requirements, and how Cycode can simplify the path to compliance.
But first…
What is FedRAMP?
FedRAMP is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Key requirements of FedRAMP include stringent security controls, continuous monitoring, and regular audits to ensure that cloud service providers (CSPs) can protect federal data effectively.
These requirements are particularly challenging due to the high level of detail and continuous oversight required. Application security, in particular, is a critical area where many organizations struggle to meet FedRAMP’s rigorous standards. Ensuring that applications are secure from development through deployment and beyond requires comprehensive visibility, control, and continuous monitoring.
Wondering how FedRAMP compares to other compliance standards like NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF)? While they’re allies in the cybersecurity landscape, FedRAMP ensures secure cloud services, while SSDF promotes secure software development practices by emphasizing security integration, risk management, and continuous improvement.
We explore both in more detail in the following resources:
How Can ASPM Help?
ASPM plays a vital role in supporting FedRAMP’s baseline security controls by providing a holistic approach to managing application security. Unlike traditional AppSec, which often focuses on individual security activities, ASPM integrates these activities into a cohesive strategy and platform that enhances visibility, control, and response capabilities across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
By aggregating data from the various teams organizations use across the SDLC, ASPM platforms help organizations comply with FedRAMP, SSDF, and other requirements. Let’s explore exactly how in more detail…
Operational Visibility & Continuous Monitoring
Operational visibility is crucial for understanding the security posture of applications in real-time. FedRAMP’s requirement for continuous monitoring (CM-1) mandates that organizations must have real-time insights into their security status.
ASPM provides this comprehensive visibility, enabling organizations to detect and respond to threats more effectively and in real-time. By maintaining continuous scanning and thanks to proprietary AST tools such as SAST and SCA, ASPM ensures that all components meet FedRAMP’s stringent requirements, including real-time tracking of security controls and ongoing assessment of application vulnerabilities.
Traditional point solutions may offer periodic (and disparate) monitoring, but ASPM ensures continuous visibility, closing gaps that could otherwise lead to undetected vulnerabilities.
Security & Compliance Enforcement
FedRAMP’s stringent policies, outlined in CA-2, mandates that a rigorous assessment of security controls is conducted before an information system is authorized to operate and periodically thereafter.
ASPM supports the standardization and automation of security and compliance reporting, mapping, and enforcement for source code, container registries, IaC configurations, cloud systems, and more. Unlike traditional AppSec tools that require manual checks, ASPM automates and enforces the compliance processes, ensuring consistent adherence to security policies across all applications.
These automated workflows reduce the risk of human error and enhance the consistency of security measures, making it easier to maintain compliance with FedRAMP.
Prioritization & Remediation
Effective prioritization and remediation of vulnerabilities are critical to maintaining application security. FedRAMP requires a robust vulnerability management process (RA-5) where organizations must identify and remediate vulnerabilities based on their severity and impact. ASPM platforms help organizations prioritize and address the most critical vulnerabilities first, ensuring that limited resources are used efficiently. This targeted approach is essential for meeting FedRAMP’s high-security benchmarks.
It’s important to distinguish between Complete ASPM and Standalone ASPM here.
Complete ASPM platforms like Cycode leverage proprietary scanners and integration with third-party security tools (more on this below) to monitor the entire CI/CD pipeline, ingest all vulnerabilities, dedupe, and correlate data to ensure effective prioritization of crucial vulnerabilities. Standalone ASPM platforms, on the other hand, rely on open-source scanners and lack robust integration capabilities. With limited information to work with, these tools simply can’t effectively prioritize threats.
Without Complete ASPM, organizations might struggle with manual prioritization, alert fatigue and endless numbers of false positives, leading to inefficient resource allocation and potentially leaving high-risk vulnerabilities unaddressed.
Configuration Audits
Regular configuration audits are a cornerstone of maintaining secure application environments. FedRAMP mandates stringent configuration management controls (CM-2), requiring regular audits to ensure configurations comply with security policies. ASPM automates the auditing process by mapping all relevant reporting and compliance into a single dashboard. This helps teams see — at a glance — whether or not all configurations comply with security policies and makes it easy to identify any deviations that could pose risks. This proactive approach supports the continuous monitoring required by FedRAMP.
Compare this to traditional methods, which often rely on manual audits and are time-consuming and prone to error. ASPM’s automation ensures continuous compliance with minimal effort.
Reporting
Accurate and detailed reporting is essential for demonstrating compliance with FedRAMP. FedRAMP’s reporting requirements (CA-7) include the need for comprehensive documentation of security measures, incidents, and responses. ASPM streamlines the reporting process, providing clear and comprehensive documentation that meets these standards and allows teams to easily tie vulnerabilities back to their owners.
This context and transparency is crucial for both internal stakeholders and external auditors.
ASPM also ensures that reports are not only accurate, but also easily accessible. This simplifies the audit process and reduces the administrative burden on security teams.
Importantly, not all ASPM platforms are created equal. We’ve mentioned Complete vs Standalone ASPM briefly already, but let’s dig into this in more detail.
Complete ASPM vs Standalone ASPM for FedRAMP Compliance
A Complete ASPM platform is one that — in addition to offering integrations with third-party security tools — has a comprehensive suite of proprietary scanners for Application Security Testing (AST) and pipeline security.
By integrating data from native and third-party tools, Complete ASPM platforms give teams the most comprehensive view of their SDLC. The result? Fewer false positives and more robust remediation suggestions and capabilities. This, of course, is also ideal for compliance purposes where teams need to be able to accurately trace vulnerabilities to the source.
Unlike Complete solutions, Standalone ASPM solutions don’t have native scanning capabilities. Instead, they’re only able to ingest data from third-party security tools.
If they do have scanning capabilities, they’re extremely limited in providing complete visibility. As a result, they’re not able to prioritize vulnerabilities based on a complete picture of risk, and aren’t able to provide effective remediation capabilities.
Why Cycode?
Cycode stands out as the only Complete ASPM platform on the market that helps teams aggregate and correlate data from across the SDLC to build a comprehensive compliance program.
Here’s how:
Pipeline Security, AST, and Posture Management All-In-One
The average organization uses over 49 tools. It’s no wonder organizations often say their view of their SDLC is fragmented and that it’s hard for them to understand where their compliance gaps are.
Cycode is different, and is a game-changer for security and compliance teams. By combining pipeline security, AST, and posture management into a single platform, organizations can easily understand, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities from a single platform. No more context-switching or correlating data from disparate point solutions.
Pipeline Security
Pipelines are an attractive target for malicious actors, and relying on separate point solutions can be cumbersome and inefficient, leading to fragmented data and delayed responses.
Cycode offers protection against vulnerabilities, exposure, and unauthorized access across the software supply chain, including CI/CD security, scanning and detecting secrets, source code leakage detection, and continuous monitoring and logging to identify and mitigate threats swiftly.
This all-in-one approach helps maintain the speed and scalability of development while enforcing security policies and FedRAMP compliance requirements.
AST
Cycode’s Complete ASPM platform offers advanced Application Security Testing (AST) capabilities, including developer-friendly Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) that help teams identify, prioritize, and remediate risks.
Again, point solutions — especially for SCA and SAST — can result in inconsistent risk assessments and increased false positives, complicating compliance efforts.
By contrast, Cycode’s integrated ASPM platform ensures better, more accurate risk prioritization, fewer false positives, and seamless alignment with FedRAMP’s stringent security standards.
Posture Management
Seamless integration with existing security infrastructure, including third-party security tools via Cycode’s Connector X, ensures a unified approach to posture management.
By ingesting findings, prioritizing vulnerabilities for fixing, and offering built-in remediation, Cycode identifies root causes, traces the entire risk path, and helps teams visualize threats through a single pane of glass.
The result? All compliance-related elements from third-party tools to be consolidated into one report and dashboard, supporting the most comprehensive FedRAMP compliance programs.
Proprietary Scanners
Cycode’s proprietary scanners offer unparalleled depth and accuracy in vulnerability detection, ensuring no security threat slips through the net. Unlike open-source or third-party scanners, which can introduce vulnerabilities or be compromised, Cycode’s scanners are built with FedRAMP compliance in mind.
Our comprehensive suite of proprietary application security scanning tools includes:
- CI/CD Security (Pipeline Security)
- Secrets scanning & detection
- Code leak detection
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning
Advanced Risk Assessment and Prioritization
Cycode’s Advanced Risk Scoring stands out from other ASPM players by providing a sophisticated, multi-dimensional approach to risk assessment and prioritization. Unlike traditional scoring systems that may rely on a single metric or a simplistic aggregation of factors, Cycode’s Risk Score integrates a variety of data points to deliver a more comprehensive and accurate assessment of potential security threats.
Key Features include:
- Contextual Analysis: Cycode’s Risk Score considers factors such as exploitability, asset criticality, and potential impact. This helps organizations prioritize vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to their environment, aligning with FedRAMP’s stringent requirements for risk management (RA-5).
- Dynamic Updates: The risk scoring system is continuously updated based on new threat intelligence and changes within the organization’s environment. This dynamic approach ensures that the Risk Score remains relevant and reflective of the current threat landscape, supporting the continuous monitoring mandate of FedRAMP (CA-7).
- Customizable Weighting: Organizations can customize the weighting of different factors in the risk score to better align with their specific security policies and compliance requirements. This flexibility allows for a tailored approach to vulnerability management, ensuring that the prioritization process aligns with the unique risk profile and operational priorities of the organization.
- Integration with Existing Tools: Cycode’s Risk Score integrates seamlessly with other security tools and platforms, providing a unified view of risk across the entire application lifecycle. This integration supports comprehensive posture management and enhances the ability to maintain a secure and compliant environment.
| FedRAMP Control | Overview of Control | How Cycode Addresses the Control |
| CM-1 | CM-1 requires creating and distributing a configuration management policy and procedures to manage system configurations systematically, including roles, responsibilities, and change management processes to ensure system integrity and security. | Cycode provides real-time monitoring of system and application security status, enabling organizations to detect and respond to threats promptly. By offering continuous visibility into the security posture, Cycode supports FedRAMP’s requirement for ongoing security monitoring. |
| CM-2.1 | CM-2.1 mandates establishing and documenting a baseline configuration for the system, ensuring a current, complete inventory of all components is maintained according to defined standards. | Cycode automates the process of auditing system and application configurations, ensuring compliance with security policies and identifying deviations that could pose risks. By continuously monitoring configurations, Cycode helps organizations maintain a secure environment and meet FedRAMP’s configuration management requirements. |
| CM-3.1 | CM-3.1 involves a process for managing system changes, ensuring all changes are tracked, reviewed, and approved to maintain system security and integrity, and to mitigate potential risks. | Cycode’s vulnerability scanning and assessment capabilities provide ongoing monitoring of systems and applications for weaknesses. By identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities, Cycode helps organizations implement effective security controls to protect against threats, aligning with FedRAMP’s security assessment requirements. |
| CA-5 | CA-5 requires a Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) to document planned actions to correct deficiencies and reduce vulnerabilities, ensuring continuous monitoring and improvement of the system’s security posture. | Cycode integrates with broader security initiatives by providing data on system vulnerabilities and user behavior. This information can be used to inform security awareness training programs and improve overall organizational security posture. |
| CA-7 | CA-7 emphasizes continuous monitoring to maintain awareness of security vulnerabilities and threats, involving regular assessments, detecting system changes, and implementing corrective actions. | Cycode’s reporting capabilities provide detailed information on system security status, vulnerabilities, and remediation activities, supporting FedRAMP’s requirements for continuous monitoring and reporting. By generating regular reports, Cycode helps organizations demonstrate compliance and inform decision-making. |
| RA-5.1 | RA-5.1 requires regular vulnerability scans to identify system weaknesses, using automated tools to track, prioritize, and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively. | Cycode’s risk-based vulnerability management approach prioritizes vulnerabilities based on severity and potential impact, enabling organizations to focus remediation efforts on the most critical risks. By efficiently managing vulnerabilities, Cycode helps organizations meet FedRAMP’s requirements for vulnerability management. |
| AC-1.2 | AC-1.2 mandates establishing and distributing access control policies and procedures, ensuring access is based on least privilege and need-to-know principles to protect system confidentiality, integrity, and availability. | Cycode generates detailed reports on system security status, vulnerability assessments, and remediation activities. These reports can be used to demonstrate compliance with FedRAMP security requirements and support ongoing security authorization processes. |
The bottom line is: achieving FedRAMP compliance is challenging. But Cycode’s Complete ASPM platform offers the capabilities needed to meet these rigorous standards effectively. By leveraging Cycode, organizations can ensure robust application security, streamline compliance processes, and maintain continuous protection against evolving threats.
Interested in learning more about Cycode? Book a demo now. Or, if you’re still trying to navigate the ASPM market, download our ASPM Buyer’s Guide now.
