How to Make Application Security Just Another Software Quality Issue

Ravid Circus, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Seemplicity, outlines how application security can become a software quality issue. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Application security hasn’t failed, but it’s built on assumptions from a slower, more predictable era. Traditional models were designed for monolithic environments and infrequent releases, not today’s fast-moving, cloud-native applications assembled from hundreds of components.

As the pace of releases accelerates and complexity grows, legacy security review cycles and siloed testing tools simply can’t keep up. What’s needed now is a more cohesive, holistic approach to managing application security; one that matches the speed and scale of modern software development.

The Limits of Legacy AppSec and the DevSecOps Wake-up Call

Despite the shift-left push, most teams still rely on tools and processes that don’t deliver on the shift-level promise. DevSecOps promised collaboration, but in practice, it’s introduced more tooling, more data, and little in the way of unified action.

Security findings are scattered across scanners, CI/CD pipelines, cloud platforms, and ticketing systems. Teams work in silos, often duplicating effort or missing critical issues altogether. Developers are flooded with findings that lack context, while security teams chase down ownership and manually triage alerts.

The problem isn’t visibility; it’s cohesion. Without a way to transform big lists of problems into digestible “security backlogs,” the implementation layer is stalled. A unified approach is needed to tie these pieces together and drive action across teams. That’s where application security posture management (ASPM) comes in—not as another tool but as a framework for regaining control.

The Rise of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)

ASPM isn’t just a new category; it’s a new mindset. ASPM is about stepping back and building a deeper understanding of application risk. It reframes the problem from “how do we find more vulnerabilities?” to “how do we continuously understand, prioritize, and address the ones that matter most?”

Conversations often focus on centralization, prioritization, and visibility. However, there needs to be more emphasis on operationalizing. For example, moving from a list of problems to a list of solutions, thinking about the “fixer experience,” how to reduce noise, and providing remediation guidelines.

This context is what enables meaningful prioritization. ASPM platforms evaluate risk based on exploitability, exposure, business criticality, and compensating controls. The result is a ranked, focused queue that helps teams act with confidence, not guesswork.

Equally important is that ASPM is an orchestration layer. It routes remediation tasks to the right teams through the systems they already use, whether Jira, ServiceNow, or GitHub. It automates policy enforcement, so security standards are met by design, not afterthought. It enables audit-ready tracking and metrics without pulling developers out of their flow.

In short, ASPM turns scattered signals into structured action.

Best Practices for Implementing ASPM 

ASPM aims to create a security operating model that can scale with your development velocity, not bottleneck it. That means moving beyond just better prioritization and toward actual execution. Here are a few key principles to keep in focus when implementing ASPM:

1. Start with signal consolidation, not just more data. Aggregate findings across scanners, clouds, pipelines, and ticketing systems into one place. Fragmented signals slow you down; consolidation is step one toward clarity.
2. Enrich data with context. Consolidated data is only useful when you can make sense of it. Layer on metadata, asset ownership, exploitability, and business impact so teams can understand what matters and why.
3. Prioritize risk based on real-world impact. Focus on what’s exploitable and impactful, not just what scores the highest. But prioritization alone doesn’t move the needle if those priorities sit idle.
4. Automate remediation workflows without disrupting dev teams. Security teams must go beyond identifying risk to orchestrating action. That means routing the right issues to the right people, with the proper context, and doing it without friction or delay.
5. Meet developers where they work. Embedding security into developer workflows ensures fixes happen where code gets written, not weeks later in disconnected tools or review processes.
6. Make governance and reporting effortless. Automate policy enforcement and keep audit trails, SLAs, and trend data up to date. That way, proving compliance becomes a byproduct of doing the work, not another task on the security team’s to-do list.

ASPM isn’t a silver bullet, but it is a way to operationalize security at the speed of modern software. The challenge is no longer just understanding risk—it’s ensuring that risk gets addressed, efficiently and continuously, across the organization.

Signs You’re Ready for ASPM

If you’re seeing any of the following, it may be a sign your organization is ready for ASPM:

• You’re juggling multiple tools but frustratingly still lack a unified view of application risk.
• Vulnerabilities and exposures pile up faster than they can be triaged, and ownership is unclear.
• Friction, such as noisy alerts that lack actionable context, overwhelms developers.
• Security policies exist, but enforcement and tracking require manual workarounds.
• Reporting on risk posture, SLA compliance, or trends is slow and takes days, not minutes.

Know what “good” looks like

An ASPM-aligned approach is not just about visibility and prioritization—it should drive action and measurable progress. Rather than just analyzing risk, this approach reduces risk by seamlessly connecting security and engineering. If you’re evaluating platforms or building internal processes, ask the following:

• Does it correlate findings across security scanning tools, or just list them?
• Does it add context?
• Can it prioritize based on exploitability and business impact?

And most importantly:

• How well does it integrate into existing workflows and ticketing systems?
• Is policy enforcement built in?
• Can you track what’s improving over time?

Prioritization is just the midpoint. A strong ASPM foundation ensures that security efforts don’t stall at triage—they get delivered, tracked, and improved.

Think architecture, not just tooling

ASPM is a shift in how you structure application security operations. Even if you’re not adopting a formal ASPM platform today, you can start applying its principles: centralizing signals, enriching with context, enforcing policy at scale, and automating remediation. The right tools can support that, but only if your operating model is ready for it.

Security leaders are under pressure to do more with less while proving their effectiveness to the business. ASPM provides the structure and strategy to do both if you know what to look for and how to implement it with intent.

To Sum it Up: Securing What You Build, at the Speed You Build It

Application development keeps accelerating, and security must evolve in parallel. It’s no longer enough to surface more findings or shift left alone. What’s needed is a structured, end-to-end approach that unifies signals, prioritizes real risk, and works within developer workflows. ASPM provides the model to do just that. Adopting ASPM principles isn’t just a technical upgrade but a strategic change that brings security back into line with how modern software is built.