ASPM for Highly-Regulated Industries: Meeting the Demands of Healthcare, Finance, and Energy

Software security vulnerabilities in healthcare, finance, energy, and other critical infrastructure industries have far-reaching consequences across global supply chains and markets. Highly regulated industries face complex attack vectors and require a broader defense-in-depth strategy to effectively manage application risk. That’s where the right Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) tool comes in. 

ASPM is a key part of this holistic approach. It brings visibility, prioritization, and control across the software development lifecycle and attack surface. Without ASPM, organizations risk exposure to AI-powered, automated, identity-based threats that can exploit weaknesses across their entire digital ecosystem. A modern ASPM platform helps organizations in mission-critical sectors balance security with increasingly strict compliance mandates (but without stifling innovation). It consolidates risk visibility, streamlines prioritization, and provides compliance tracking to help teams take decisive, policy-driven action. 

Using an ASPM for Healthcare: Reducing PII Risks and Simplifying Compliance 

Healthcare organizations manage highly sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) like patient records, contact details, insurance numbers, medical reports, and biometric data. 

Bad actors often target healthcare applications for this data using a range of tactics, including injection attacks and code-based exploits. A modern application security strategy helps prevent data exfiltration by identifying and fixing insecure code early in the development lifecycle. For example, tools like Veracode Static Analysis (SAST) and AI-driven remediation can detect and eliminate injection vulnerabilities before they reach production. 

Instead of reacting to threats post-deployment, an effective ASPM platform ingests scan findings from tools like SAST, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), and Dynamic Analysis (DAST), and then deduplicates, contextualizes, and correlates them against other findings (e.g., from cloud and infrastructure tools). This provides a unified, prioritized view of risk across your app landscape and allows teams to remediate the highest-risk issues first. 

For healthcare providers subject to HIPAA, HITECH, and HITRUST regulations, ASPM simplifies compliance by enabling: 

• Proactive risk reduction at the root cause, keeping PII safe 
• Mapping security gaps to compliance frameworks, aiding audit readiness 
• Visibility into remediation progress across teams and toolchains 

Rather than endure penalties, healthcare organizations should use ASPM to demonstrate due diligence in protecting sensitive data and reducing risk at the source. 

An effective ASPM solution provides: 

• Unified risk visibility across code to runtime 
• Automated pre-investigation of issues, with findings traced back to owners 
• Root-cause remediation guidance via Best Next Actions™ 
• Two-way ticketing integration to track remediation progress 
• Reporting dashboards to visualize risk trends and compliance progress 

Using an ASPM in Finance: Improving Real-Time Threat Visibility 

Financial services process millions of transactions and API calls daily, making them an ideal target for fraud, account takeovers, and API abuse. Modern apps often rely on open banking APIs, third-party fintech integrations, and large volumes of open source and AI-generated code, introducing hidden vulnerabilities. 

Bad actors exploit these weaknesses to harvest cardholder data, initiate unauthorized transactions, or commit identity fraud. Common issues include improper authentication (e.g., hardcoded credentials) and insecure data transmission patterns (e.g., unencrypted Bluetooth/NFC). 

Despite the stakes, 76% of financial institutions retain known application security flaws for over a year – many rooted in third-party components. 

Veracode’s SCA tools identify and monitor such third-party dependencies, even when source code isn’t available, by flagging vulnerabilities and providing remediation insights. These findings are then analyzed by the ASPM platform, which contextualizes them against the broader attack surface and organizational policy. This allows teams to triage and resolve the most critical flaws first. 

While ASPM itself does not perform scanning, it acts as the central intelligence layer, ingesting results from multiple sources and mapping them to regulatory frameworks like GDPR, PCI DSS, SOC 2, SOX, CCPA, and PSD2. ASPM allows security leaders to manage risk-based policies, enforce remediation timelines, and prioritize high-risk issues according to compliance obligations. 

ASPM in Energy and Critical Infrastructure: Strengthening Modern Networks 

Energy, oil & gas, and other critical infrastructure entities are frequent targets for nation-state actors. While legacy SCADA and ICS systems are often air-gapped and not directly exposed, modern applications managing customer data, contracts, supply chain workflows, and remote monitoring present exploitable attack surfaces. 

It’s these modern networks, rather than the non-internet-connected SCADA servers, that present the most risk. Attackers seek vulnerabilities in cloud-based dashboards, mobile tools, and operational systems tied to OT environments. 

Veracode’s ASPM platform helps energy organizations address this modern risk by: 

• Prioritizing flaws across custom code, APIs, open source components, and third-party integrations 
• Contextualizing application risk in relation to regulatory frameworks like ISA/IEC 62443 
• Identifying risky patterns like injection flaws, weak authentication, or exposed services 
• Aligning security posture with corporate policy, remediation SLAs, and audit requirements 

State-Sponsored Threats and ASPM’s Role in National Security 

Cyberwarfare is now the fifth dimension of conflict, alongside land, sea, air, and space. NotPetya, a politically motivated malware strain, crippled Ukrainian infrastructure, affecting power grids, airports, banks, and hospitals. Incidents like these underscore how application-layer vulnerabilities can cascade into national crises. 

Bolster AppSec by Addressing Flaws at Scale with AI and ASPM

According to our 2025 State of Software Security report: 

• 70% of critical flaws originate from third-party components 
• These flaws take 50% longer to fix due to lack of source code access 
• Nearly half of organizations continue to operate with unresolved high-severity flaws 

Veracode’s platform addresses this through deep scanning of code, components, and APIs using SAST, SCA, and DAST tools. Findings are then passed to the ASPM layer, which automates pre-investigation, prioritizes risk by severity and context, and supports policy-driven remediation across teams and tools. 

By embedding ASPM into your software development lifecycle, you can: 

• Continuously assess risk from third-party software 
• Automate remediation guidance for the most critical issues 
• Meet compliance goals without sacrificing speed or innovation 

Download our Blueprint to Secure the Software Supply Chain to learn more about what highly-regulated industries should look for in enterprise grade risk reduction solutions.