While tools such as web application firewalls (WAF) and runtime application self-protection (RASP) have historically been used to secure applications, they have their own drawbacks and challenges, such as maintaining complex constantly changing rulesets or being cumbersome to the point where they may impact application performance.

Modern applications are complex and have complex security needs

Modern applications can be incredibly complex, involving underlying hosting environments, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and various API calls. All of this complexity can be difficult to address with tools that don’t account for the full runtime context of applications.

Utilizing application context, service interactions, data flows, and accounting for authentication activities can help you identify unexpected and potentially malicious behaviors, and also be more prepared to quickly contain, mitigate and remediate malicious activity, ultimately limiting the blast radius and impact of security incidents.