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Scanners Are Yesterday’s Solution: Rethinking AppSec for Modern Development

Javier Rivera
Lead Threat Researcher
Posted:
June 23, 2025
read time:
0 mins
words by:
Javier Rivera

There was a time when scanners were the go-to solution for application security. They fit the world they were built for—a world of quarterly releases, long QA cycles, and plenty of time to patch before shipping. Back then, static and dynamic scans were essential. They caught things early. They gave teams time to fix them. Security scanning wasn’t just helpful—it was the gold standard.

But software development evolved—and security got left behind.

Teams didn’t just tweak their process; they completely transformed it. Waterfall gave way to agile. Monthly releases turned into daily, even hourly deployments. Product teams embraced continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines designed to move as fast as customer demand.

While development evolved to meet these new realities, security often stayed stubbornly familiar. The processes, tools, and mindsets didn’t keep up. That’s why teams today still face impossible trade-offs: move fast but deal with noisy, unreliable results, or insist on accuracy but sacrifice the velocity that keeps the business competitive.

But modern security shouldn’t force those choices.

Why Yesterday’s Tools Don’t Work Today

In a world where code ships dozens of times a day, heavyweight security scans simply don’t fit anymore. Teams can’t afford to pause their pipeline to run analyses that take hours—or worse, days—and then comb through mountains of confusing results. Yet scanners are still trying to work the way they always have: thorough but slow, accurate but noisy. They’re built to find every possible risk, even if that means burying the real threats in a sea of false positives.

The result? Security teams are being asked to deliver instant, high-fidelity answers while developers move at breakneck speed. That’s simply not feasible with legacy scanning alone. It’s not that scanners are bad. They were indispensable for the world they were built for. But they’re no longer the right fit for how software is built and shipped today.

The Haystack Problem (and Why It Matters)

Anyone who’s spent time with a traditional scanner knows the haystack problem all too well. They’re excellent at flagging potential issues—but they bury actual, exploitable risks in thousands of false positives. Security teams end up spending precious time chasing ghosts. Developers grow numb to the alerts. The cost of triaging and verifying issues outweighs the perceived benefit. And eventually, real vulnerabilities slip through simply because everyone’s overwhelmed.

Static analysis can be deep, but it’s noisy and slow. Dynamic analysis depends on precise configuration and still misses new or sophisticated attack techniques. Neither approach was built for the pace and complexity of modern pipelines, where risk emerges in real-time, across distributed systems and micro-services.

Runtime Observability: Built for Today’s AppSec

It’s not enough for security to “keep up” with development—it needs to work the way development works. Agile, automated, continuous. Security has to be built in at every stage without becoming a bottleneck. But legacy scanning tries to graft old-school, heavyweight analysis onto a fast, lightweight process. That mismatch creates friction between security and development teams. It leads to burnout, ignored alerts, and, ultimately, risk accepted by default.

Here’s where the game changes. Advances like eBPF have made true runtime observability viable at scale, without the trade-offs of traditional approaches.

Unlike legacy tools that require modifying application code or slowing delivery, runtime observability operates at the operating system level. It delivers deep visibility into how applications behave in real production environments—how they communicate with services and networks, how they handle actual user inputs, and how they react to real-world conditions.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s live, actionable, high-fidelity insight designed for the pace of modern development. It empowers security teams to detect real threats as they emerge, prioritize what matters most, and respond quickly—without forcing development teams to change how they work.

It’s Time to Retire the Scanner as Your Primary Strategy

Scanners aren’t evil. They had their moment, and they’re still useful for certain classes of issues earlier in the SDLC. But AppSec has outgrown them as the primary defense strategy. Modern teams need security solutions that work with CI/CD—not against it. Tools that provide signal, not noise. Protection that’s always on, always watching, and always aware of what’s really happening in production.

That’s why Run Security built RS Prevent: an always-on runtime observability and protection platform designed for today’s development realities.

Ready to see how RS Prevent can help your team move faster and stay secure? Request a demo today.

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We’re ready for you! Schedule a demo

Click the button below to get started.
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Blog

Scanners Are Yesterday’s Solution: Rethinking AppSec for Modern Development

Words by:
Javier Rivera
read time:
This is some text inside of a div block.
This is some text inside of a div block.

There was a time when scanners were the go-to solution for application security. They fit the world they were built for—a world of quarterly releases, long QA cycles, and plenty of time to patch before shipping. Back then, static and dynamic scans were essential. They caught things early. They gave teams time to fix them. Security scanning wasn’t just helpful—it was the gold standard.

But software development evolved—and security got left behind.

Teams didn’t just tweak their process; they completely transformed it. Waterfall gave way to agile. Monthly releases turned into daily, even hourly deployments. Product teams embraced continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines designed to move as fast as customer demand.

While development evolved to meet these new realities, security often stayed stubbornly familiar. The processes, tools, and mindsets didn’t keep up. That’s why teams today still face impossible trade-offs: move fast but deal with noisy, unreliable results, or insist on accuracy but sacrifice the velocity that keeps the business competitive.

But modern security shouldn’t force those choices.

Why Yesterday’s Tools Don’t Work Today

In a world where code ships dozens of times a day, heavyweight security scans simply don’t fit anymore. Teams can’t afford to pause their pipeline to run analyses that take hours—or worse, days—and then comb through mountains of confusing results. Yet scanners are still trying to work the way they always have: thorough but slow, accurate but noisy. They’re built to find every possible risk, even if that means burying the real threats in a sea of false positives.

The result? Security teams are being asked to deliver instant, high-fidelity answers while developers move at breakneck speed. That’s simply not feasible with legacy scanning alone. It’s not that scanners are bad. They were indispensable for the world they were built for. But they’re no longer the right fit for how software is built and shipped today.

The Haystack Problem (and Why It Matters)

Anyone who’s spent time with a traditional scanner knows the haystack problem all too well. They’re excellent at flagging potential issues—but they bury actual, exploitable risks in thousands of false positives. Security teams end up spending precious time chasing ghosts. Developers grow numb to the alerts. The cost of triaging and verifying issues outweighs the perceived benefit. And eventually, real vulnerabilities slip through simply because everyone’s overwhelmed.

Static analysis can be deep, but it’s noisy and slow. Dynamic analysis depends on precise configuration and still misses new or sophisticated attack techniques. Neither approach was built for the pace and complexity of modern pipelines, where risk emerges in real-time, across distributed systems and micro-services.

Runtime Observability: Built for Today’s AppSec

It’s not enough for security to “keep up” with development—it needs to work the way development works. Agile, automated, continuous. Security has to be built in at every stage without becoming a bottleneck. But legacy scanning tries to graft old-school, heavyweight analysis onto a fast, lightweight process. That mismatch creates friction between security and development teams. It leads to burnout, ignored alerts, and, ultimately, risk accepted by default.

Here’s where the game changes. Advances like eBPF have made true runtime observability viable at scale, without the trade-offs of traditional approaches.

Unlike legacy tools that require modifying application code or slowing delivery, runtime observability operates at the operating system level. It delivers deep visibility into how applications behave in real production environments—how they communicate with services and networks, how they handle actual user inputs, and how they react to real-world conditions.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s live, actionable, high-fidelity insight designed for the pace of modern development. It empowers security teams to detect real threats as they emerge, prioritize what matters most, and respond quickly—without forcing development teams to change how they work.

It’s Time to Retire the Scanner as Your Primary Strategy

Scanners aren’t evil. They had their moment, and they’re still useful for certain classes of issues earlier in the SDLC. But AppSec has outgrown them as the primary defense strategy. Modern teams need security solutions that work with CI/CD—not against it. Tools that provide signal, not noise. Protection that’s always on, always watching, and always aware of what’s really happening in production.

That’s why Run Security built RS Prevent: an always-on runtime observability and protection platform designed for today’s development realities.

Ready to see how RS Prevent can help your team move faster and stay secure? Request a demo today.

Have questions? Fill out the form, and we’ll get back to you soon.
we're online

We’re ready for you! Schedule a demo

Click the button below to get started.
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