Legacy application security tools have persistent limitations. They struggle to unify visibility across all application layers and distill overwhelming volumes of vulnerabilities into clear risk-based priorities.
Gartner’s new research report, Improve Application Security With Posture Management Tooling (March 2025), explores the need for application security to advance beyond legacy approaches and how Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) positions enterprises to tackle the speed and complexity of modern application development.
In the report, Gartner recognizes Cycode as a representative ASPM vendor helping customers navigate advances to a more unified and risk-based approach to application security. Here are our three actionable takeaways and how Cycode helps you execute analyst recommendations
Takeaway 1: Manage Complexity with a Complete Approach
Applications have evolved. Development has shifted from monolith architectures, predominantly proprietary code, on-prem infrastructure, and quarterly releases to microservice architectures, interconnected supply chains, cloud-native infrastructure, and continuous integration and deployment. Application security must evolve to match the speed and address the increasing complexity of modern development.
Gartner outlines these challenges writing, “As software engineering teams continue to adopt agile and DevSecOps methodologies, past application security practices cannot support the speed of development. This creates additional risk because security teams cannot respond fast enough to prioritize and respond to application risks.”
ASPM addresses this by offering a unified, extensible platform to consolidate security controls across the SDLC. But not all tools are created equal, and extensible integrations must be paired with high-fidelity insights or teams risk drowning in noise. Furthermore, stand-alone ASPM tools require yet another tool adding complexity and cost to already bloated tech stacks.
How Cycode Helps: Complete ASPM
Data quality matters. Cycode’s Complete ASPM combines enterprise-grade proprietary scanners with extensibility from over 100 third-party connectors. This results in a comprehensive and cost-efficient solution that integrates with existing tools while providing the flexibility to adapt and optimize tools and budgets in the future. Key capabilities of a complete solution include:
- Unified risk-based application security posture management
- Fast and accurate SAST scans
- Modern SCA with reachability and exploitability analysis
- IaC and Container scanning to secure cloud-native applications
- Comprehensive Software Supply Chain Security to detect and secure hardcoded secrets, code leaks, and harden CI/CD integrity (read more below)
With Cycode, organizations can leverage best-in-class scanning and best-in-suite posture management to reduce tool sprawl and gain actionable risk-based insights.
Takeaway 2: Secure Your Software Supply Chain Security
Attackers have shifted focus from just exploiting code to compromising the software supply chain—targeting open-source dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, and even trusted tools. The latest evidence of this is the recent tj-actions supply chain attack. These supply chain attacks are stealthy, hard to detect, and increasingly common.
“Software supply chain security is a growing concern for organizations with modern application development practices, and legacy applications with old libraries that have not been updated,” writes Gartner. “Most of the risks are related to using open-source software, packaged software, outsourced software development and the software development pipeline itself.”
ASPM broadens the scope of application security to protect not just the code, but everything that contributes to the application—open-source components, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD workflows, and developer productivity tools. True posture management must account for this full ecosystem.
How Cycode Helps: Integrate Software Supply Chain Security into ASPM
Cycode provides end-to-end software supply chain security. We detect vulnerable dependencies—prioritized by reachability and exploitability—generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), and secure your CI/CD pipelines with secret detection, misconfiguration analysis, and runtime protection. From developer environments to production pipelines, Cycode helps you harden every layer of your software supply chain. Key capabilities include:
- Secure reachable and exploitable dependencies with modern SCA
- Generate SBOMs in different formats
- Detect and secure secrets across the SDLC including productivity tools
- Harden the integrity of CI/CD pipelines and protect them in runtime with CIMON
- Prevent and respond to accidental or malicious code leaks and insider threats
Takeaway 3: Advance from Detection SIlos to Risk-Reduction Synergies
Organizations often have the data to identify and mitigate risk, but that data exists in silos across tools, teams, and stages of the SDLC. As a result, security teams struggle to focus on what matters: exploitable risks with active threats that impact the organization.
“Having a centralized repository of artifacts related to security vulnerabilities and application configurations is inherently beneficial,” sayst Gartner. “However, the true power of an ASPM tool is its ability to analyze and report on the risk of an application that is derived from the collected artifacts.”
ASPM aggregates signals from across the SDLC and applies risk-based analysis to focus remediation efforts. It shifts the paradigm from alert-driven triage to strategic, data-informed risk reduction.
How Cycode Helps: Aggregate Data, Quantify Risk, and Automate Workflows
Cycode’s Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG) correlates data across scanners, tools, and pipelines to give you a complete, connected view of your application security posture. With built-in and transparent risk scoring, you can prioritize what is exploitable, what is reachable, and what poses the highest risk to your business. In tandem with no-code workflows to automate ticketing and remediation processes and AI-powered remediation, Cycode enables teams to identify, prioritize, and fix what matters faster.
Put ASPM into Practice with Cycode
Gartner’s latest research affirms what modern security teams already know: legacy tools can’t meet today’s challenges. ASPM is the way forward—and Cycode is helping to define what’s possible.
Explore how Cycode delivers on these principles with a unified platform built for the realities of modern development. Book a demo to see Cycode in action.
