Application Security Vulnerability Management: Bridging AppSec and VM for Modern Risk Reduction

Application security has evolved far beyond traditional vulnerability management (VM). Today, security teams face massive scale, increasing complexity, and a constant flow of vulnerability findings that often vanish in hybrid and cloud-native environments. We’ve moved from managing a single virtual machine to dealing with an unlimited number of containers and ECS tasks, many of which only exist for about 15 minutes. Managing the explosion of short-lived ephemeral assets at scale is a critical challenge that requires application security and vulnerability management teams to be able to track and prioritize these alerts.  

This blog is based on our recent joint webinar with Cycode, which explores how combining ASPM and VM tools helps unify visibility, ownership, and action across the modern software stack without overwhelming remediation teams or burning out your engineering partners.  

Historically, ASPM and Vulnerability Management Diverged 

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) and Vulnerability Management (VM) have traditionally operated separately, with ASPM focused on code-level risks and VM focused on infrastructure. Nucleus has made strides here, ingesting data from many application security scanners.  

ASPM tools provide valuable data, such as exposed secrets, vulnerable packages, or hardcoded credentials. However, they leave the burden of interpretation to security teams, as “Here’s the issue—now you figure out if it matters,” because they: 

• Lack runtime and environmental context (e.g., container or repository awareness).
• Their data models aren’t built to ingest or normalize complex cross-domain data found in code, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud assets.
• Focus on code security, rather than enrichment with exploitability data or threat intelligence. 

This means ASPM platforms tell you what was found, but they rarely answer the critical questions: Does this actually matter? Who owns it? Does it pose a real business risk? What should we do next? That level of context can’t come from AppSec or VM tools alone. It requires integration across systems, teams, and data domains.  

Why Integration is the Future: Key Drivers 

There is a clear need for unified, context-rich prioritization across the software development lifecycle, key drivers being: 

• Traditional vulnerability management practices were not built for the ephemeral and dynamic nature of cloud-native environments. For example, while some application security findings stem from monolithic codebases, these applications are now deployed on transient infrastructure, making traceability and remediation significantly more challenging.
• Developers and security teams operate with different priorities and expectations. Developers want fast, low-friction feedback they can act on independently. Security teams need visibility into risk posture, traceability, and compliance. When they don’t share a common source of truth, both sides default to finger-pointing and rework.
• Security leaders are under increasing pressure to prove the ROI of their programs. It’s no longer enough to report on scanner coverage or ticket volume. What matters is risk reduction, resilience, and impact on the business. 

Real-World Insight: What We Heard in the Webinar 

Outdated vulnerability management concepts like persistent assets, predictable deployments, and centralized ownership no longer apply. VM teams must unlearn everything that used to work. Instead, AppSec and dev teams require context-rich insights woven into the development lifecycle. These teams need to track the adaptive context of ephemeral assets. Without linking runtime evidence to build-time source, remediation teams can’t effectively tell whether a vulnerability lives in the base image or a derivative layer like a spinoff, making remediation extremely difficult.  

Tool specialization over vendor generalization has real value. Developers are flooded with non-actionable alerts, while security leaders struggle to establish clarity or drive prioritization. Cycode and Nucleus intentionally reject this ‘do-it-all’ model. Both companies advocate for a best-of-breed approach that leverages the best ASPM and RBVM tools to effectively remediate at scale with morts across security, development, and operations.  

AppSec and Vulnerability Management Work Better Together 

The Cycode–Nucleus partnership demonstrates how security programs can integrate developer-centric insights with enterprise-wide risk visibility, aligning both execution and strategy. 

At the source level, Cycode brings this full circle by tracing vulnerabilities back to their origin: the repo, developer, and line of code where the issue began, optimized for developer workflows. On the other hand, at the runtime and enterprise level, Nucleus ingests these findings, normalizes them, and correlates them across infrastructure, applications, and cloud environments. 

Nucleus then adds key context, enriching runtime vulnerabilities with active exploitation context from over 17 threat intelligence feeds, normalized and relevant to your infrastructure and vulnerabilities. 

Thanks to Nucleus Adaptive Context applied to findings ingested from Cycode, container images and components are automatically grouped into deployment-aware contexts, such as application stacks, environments (dev/stage/prod), or runtime clusters. This allows teams to assess risk at the level they operate at rather than the image or host level. Additionally, Nucleus tracks vulnerabilities across image versions, even as containers are rebuilt, re-tagged, or redeployed; the platform maintains a complete finding lineage, linking a vulnerability to its origin version while monitoring how it propagates or is resolved in future versions.  

Nucleus operationalizes Cycode insights into automated, platform-agnostic workflows and organization-wide risk views, showing how vulnerabilities affect assets, services, and customer-facing systems. Rather than finding yourself in a situation where you’re scanning the same asset more than once, Nucleus deduplicates these findings, no matter how many scanners you have running. 

Overall, the integration supports this shift from coverage-first to impact-first security. As a result, engineers are remediating vulnerabilities prevalent to runtime exploitation and continuous exposure rather than wasting time on useless, “low-hanging fruit.” 

Summary of Benefits to the Business 

Cybersecurity is a business issue, not a technical one, according to 88% of boards of directors surveyed by Gartner. In this new reality, success means: 

• Faster time to remediation
• Reduced noise, fewer false positives
• Risk metrics that make sense to both developers and executives 

Takeaway: Build a Unified Security Practice 

ASPM and RBVM are complementary — not competing — disciplines. At Nucleus we believe ASPM converges into a unified exposure management platform that integrates application, infrastructure, and cloud risk into one normalized, prioritized view of enterprise cyber risk. Additionally, integration is the next evolution of Application Security as it enables shared context, better prioritization, and fewer handoffs. Particularly, specialized ASPM capabilities and shift-left automation will contribute to a cross-functional risk integration layer that is central to operationalizing security across both the SDLC and production environments. 

As Forrester highlights, 62% of the time it’s the developers who decide what security tool to use, so make sure to include them in the conversation. If your current tooling strategy still relies on siloed platforms, reactive workflows, or generalized risk views, it may be time to reevaluate. Be sure to check out the full recording of our webinar with Cycode to learn more.