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What is application risk management?

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Overview

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Application risk management is the process of identifying, prioritizing, and reducing risks within the software development lifecycle. By aligning technical vulnerabilities with business priorities, organizations strengthen application security posture management (ASPM) and ensure that remediation efforts focus on what matters most.

Application risk management

Why is application risk management important?

Modern enterprises face an ever-expanding attack surface across web, mobile, API, and cloud-native applications. Testing tools such as SAST, DAST, SCA, and IaC generate massive volumes of findings, but without effective application risk management, organizations struggle with:

  • Application security risk that lacks clear business context.
  • Backlogs filled with duplicate or low-priority issues.
  • Limited visibility across siloed testing tools and workflows.
  • Compliance challenges due to poor reporting and traceability.

By adopting a risk-based application security approach, teams can cut through noise, focus on the most impactful issues, and deliver secure applications at scale.

How does application risk management work?

Application risk management connects security testing results with business context, enabling smarter decisions. This approach integrates directly with developer pipelines, CI/CD workflows, and governance platforms to provide actionable insights.

Key practices include:

  • Vulnerability prioritization: Rank issues by severity, exploitability, and business impact.
  • Application security risk analysis: Align technical findings with the applications that matter most.
  • Risk-based application security: Automate policies that block high-risk releases while allowing low-risk builds to move forward.
  • Application security posture management (ASPM): Provide a unified view of vulnerabilities across the enterprise.
  • Continuous monitoring: Track posture changes as applications evolve.

Benefits of application risk management

  • Reduced application security risk: Focus remediation on the vulnerabilities with the highest impact.
  • Efficiency: Eliminate duplicates and false positives with vulnerability prioritization.
  • Business alignment: Enable executives to see security in terms of business-critical applications.
  • Compliance support: Streamline reporting for audits and regulations.
  • Integrated security: Strengthen application security posture management (ASPM) with centralized visibility.

Application risk management with OpenText Application Security

OpenText delivers enterprise-ready application risk management capabilities as part of its unified platform:

  • Vulnerability prioritization: Drive faster remediation with contextual insights.
  • Risk-based application security: Automate workflows across CI/CD, IDEs, and ticketing systems.
  • Application security risk visibility: Align vulnerabilities with business-critical assets.
  • Application security posture management (ASPM): Provide a single source of truth for risk and compliance.
  • AI-powered guidance: OpenText™ Application Security Aviator™ (Fortify) reduces false positives and accelerates fixes.

Application risk management provides the foundation for risk-based application security by combining vulnerability prioritization, application security risk visibility, and application security posture management (ASPM) into one strategy that enables faster, smarter remediation.

Related products

OpenText™ Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)

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OpenText™ Application Security Testing

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OpenText™ Core Application Security

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