Unifying and securing the software supply chain with ASPM

Securing the software supply chain

Once considered the domain of developers and security engineers, application security has rapidly ascended the leadership agenda. Why? Because modern software isn’t just code, it’s an interconnected supply chain. And like any supply chain, its weakest link defines its risk.

The past few years have made this painfully clear. Incidents like SolarWinds and Log4Shell have shown that attackers increasingly target the trust relationships embedded in how software is built, shipped, and consumed. What used to be buried in the CI/CD pipeline is now front-page news and board-level risk.

If you’re like most security leaders today, you’re asking tougher questions:

“What’s our exposure to open-source vulnerabilities?”
“Who owns the risk introduced by third-party code?”
“Can we detect if our build systems are tampered with?”
“Do we have visibility into what’s running in production and why?”

The answers are often incomplete. Not because teams aren’t working hard, but because security remains siloed.

Tools don’t talk to each other. Ownership is unclear. Metrics don’t align. And without a cohesive posture, security becomes a patchwork of best efforts rather than a system of trust.

Understanding ASPM in context

This is where Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) comes in — not as just another tool, but an operational approach designed to address the need for a more effective way to unify and enhance the security investments you’ve already made.

As organizations scaled their application security programs, they didn’t get stronger, they got noisier. Teams ended up with:

Multiple (and often overlapping) dashboards, but no unified view of risk,
Hundreds of alerts, but no way to prioritize based on context, and
Security issues that live forever in Jira tickets, detached from owners or pipelines.

In short: a fragmented application security stack without the connective tissue to drive decisions.

ASPM platforms were designed to solve this architectural problem, not by replacing existing tools, but by aggregating their outputs, normalizing the data, and layering governance across the whole lifecycle. Think of ASPM as:

A risk observability layer over your code-to-deploy journey,
A policy enforcement plane across pre-commit, build, deploy, and production, and/or
A bridge between application security and engineering, aligning ownership with visibility.

Critically, ASPM is not another scanner. It is the context layer that allows all your scanners – and the humans behind them – to work smarter, not harder.

For security leadership, ASPM offers what was previously elusive: a coherent picture of application risk posture, tied to business-critical assets, teams, and SLAs. It turns fragmented efforts into measurable progress.

The software supply chain: A fragmented battlefield?

Today, software is rarely built – it’s assembled. Each application is a mosaic of internal code, open-source dependencies, third-party services, infrastructure templates, CI/CD pipelines, cloud configurations, container runtimes, and APIs. This modularity has fueled innovation and velocity, but it’s also introduced a deeply fragmented and opaque attack surface.

Each element in this chain brings value and risk. Consider the following:

A CI pipeline misconfiguration leaks secrets.
An outdated IaC template quietly provisions an exposed port.
A critical library is silently updated with a malicious dependency (hello, dependency confusion).

Too often, we still treat application security as synonymous with code scanning. But the reality is far broader — and, together, we need to think differently. Attackers don’t care where your code came from. They care where the weakest link is.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And in software supply chains, those links can be hidden anywhere.

The fragmentation isn’t just technical, but rather organizational:

Security owns the tooling but not the pipelines.
Developers are expected to remediate issues without owning the risk.
Compliance asks for visibility that no one can consistently provide.

This is what turns the software supply chain into a battlefield, not just because it’s under attack, but because it’s often unclear who’s defending what, and how.

If every node in your supply chain can introduce risk, then securing that chain isn’t a task, it’s a posture. And posture demands visibility, ownership, and orchestration.

Enter ASPM.

ASPM: Bridging the gaps

This is where ASPM begins to matter, not as another point solution, but as the connective layer across the security tooling, teams, and decisions that shape your software supply chain.

Modern application security programs have evolved into a complex web of scanners, plugins, and workflows of SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets detection, infrastructure-as-code validation, container scanning, SBOMs, and more. Each tool plays a role, but no one sees the whole. What emerges is a fragmented picture fraught with the following:

Duplicate alerts across systems
Vulnerabilities with no ownership
Fixes prioritized by noise, not context
Security debt accumulating across repositories

ASPM platforms bridge these gaps by aggregating, correlating, and normalizing the signals across all these tools. They then overlay policy logic, risk scoring, and governance controls on top.

Here’s where the shift happens:

Instead of multiple dashboards, you get one source of truth.
Instead of alert fatigue, you get actionable prioritization.
Instead of guessing who owns a finding, you can trace issues to the team and repo.
Instead of relying on siloed tool outputs, you gain supply chain-wide insight into your posture across pre-commit, build, deploy, and runtime stages.

An ASPM platform doesn’t fix vulnerabilities, it fixes the process around fixing them. And for security leaders, that’s where meaningful leverage lies.

A strategic layer, not a silver bullet

ASPM isn’t a silver bullet — and it isn’t meant to be. Its strength lies in acting as a strategic governance layer that brings structure, context, and clarity to an increasingly complex application security environment.

Modern software development moves fast and operates across distributed teams, pipelines, and platforms. In this landscape, security can’t rely on static, top-down policies. It needs to be orchestrated continuously, with visibility and ownership built in at every stage. That’s where ASPM quietly delivers its most meaningful value.

Resilience isn’t built by reacting to problems — it’s built by anticipating them.

With ASPM, you gain the foresight to act early, align teams, and protect what matters most. The question, then, isn’t whether ASPM replaces your existing tools. It’s whether you can confidently manage modern application risk at scale without one.

Atos and its Eviden business work together with leading organizations to strengthen their application security postures, improve supply chain resilience, and help their security programs shift from reactive to proactive. Connect with us to discuss how we can change your security posture by leveraging ASPM and other transformative tools and frameworks to unify and enhance your security investments.