In today's rapidly changing cloud-native world, security teams are inundated with tools, data, and risks. But what’s often missing is context—the glue that connects vulnerabilities to real-world threats. That’s where runtime application security comes in.
Understanding the Risk of an Application
When it comes to application security, we’re all trying to answer one key question:
What is the actual risk posed by this application? And answering that isn’t as simple as scanning for known vulnerabilities. Risk depends on a multitude of factors—some of which are invisible to traditional tools.
What makes runtime so compelling is its ability to provide additional context. It helps teams make more informed decisions by showing not just where a vulnerability exists, but how it actually behaves in a live environment.
Doing More with Less
Today’s application security toolkits are overflowing with scanners, pen testing results, and alerts. Each tool throws data at security teams—often unfiltered—leading to what Eric Sheridan describes as "drinking from a fire hose."
This unmanageable flow of information introduces major scalability challenges. Security teams are faced with two options—both problematic:
- Blind Trust: Accept tool or test results as-is and pass them on to engineering.
- Manual Filtering: Spend massive amounts of time finding the "needle in the haystack"—what's real and actionable.
Either way, the handoff to engineering is often inefficient. If teams simply forward raw results, they get pushback:
"This isn’t real."
"This isn’t exploitable."
"This isn’t worth my time."
That kind of feedback can erode the credibility of the security team.
On the flip side, doing deep analysis on everything takes time. By the time security delivers actionable insights, the vulnerable feature may have been released weeks or even months ago—making remediation slower and more costly.
Where Runtime Comes In
These are exactly the challenges that runtime application security is designed to solve.
It becomes especially clear when you consider the three most common AppSec tools:
- SAST (Static Application Security Testing)
- DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
- SCA (Software Composition Analysis)
Let’s dive into the first one—SAST.
The SAST Struggle
SAST tools analyze source code without compiling or running it. They look for patterns that indicate potential vulnerabilities. While useful, SAST tools generate tons of data—and with that comes a high volume of false positives.
Why? Because they lack runtime context.
They make assumptions about how the code operates, or how third-party components are used—but those assumptions often don’t align with reality. The biggest shortfall is that SAST doesn’t know what’s actually happening in the running application.
Security teams are left wondering:
Which of these issues even matter?
Are any of them associated with assets that are actually deployed in production?
Most of the time, these vulnerabilities are just tied to raw code, not live services.
Runtime Makes It Real
With runtime application security, you gain insight into the assets and services that are actually running:
- Which containers and services are active?
- What APIs are exposed?
- What endpoints are being hit?
When you correlate SAST results with this real-time information, you can filter out the noise and focus only on vulnerabilities tied to live, exposed components. This not only increases accuracy but accelerates remediation.
Runtime application security doesn't replace traditional tools—it enhances them. By bringing critical context to the table, it helps security teams operate more efficiently, collaborate more effectively with engineering, and ultimately reduce risk in a smarter, faster way.
