Top ADR (Application Detection and Response) Tools of 2024

The TL;DR on ADR

Application Detection and Response (ADR) solutions are changing the game of application security. They not only give teams long needed visibility into applications but enable proactive threat detection and response by focusing on application behavior deviations in real time and at runtime. The ADR market offers a range of solutions with their strengths and potential challenges. The right ADR tool can fully transform your application security strategy by turning applications into your strongest line of defense.

Let's explore what they are, their benefits, and the top ADR Vendors of 2024, as upvoted on the Latio list.
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What is ADR?

Application Detection and Response (ADR) solutions record and store runtime application behaviors, use various observability techniques to detect anomalous application native behavior, provide contextual attack path information, block malicious activity, and provide remediation and mitigation suggestions. The tools must offer comprehensive visibility to detect and respond to threats, prevent exploitation during the patching cycles, identify and manage active application attack paths. ADRs reduce application risks while making it easy for teams to stay in control of their applications at runtime.
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The Benefits of ADR

Unlike the scanner first approach to AppSec, implementing a robust ADR solution provides immediate value for your organization's application security. Here are five reasons why:

1. Comprehensive visibility: ADR provides continuous monitoring of live applications, uncovering vulnerabilities and risks as they arise within dynamic environments. This visibility ensures that no hidden threats go unnoticed.‍
2. Proactive threat mitigation: Rather than waiting for an incident to escalate to a full compromise, ADR enables real-time detection of unusual application behaviors as soon as they happen, allowing you to respond before a potential threat escalates.‍
3. Effective developer resource allocation: By automating many security functions and prioritizing alerts, ADR reduces manual workloads for AppSec teams, freeing resources to focus on high-value tasks.‍
4. Improved decision making: ADR supports informed, timely decisions on incident response, risk management, and resource allocation.‍
5. Faster incident response: In the event of a security incident, ADR solutions send real-time alerts and provide valuable context and insights to speed up your response and minimize damage.

Things to Consider When Choosing an ADR Solution

Selecting an ADR requires thoughtful consideration, and how you approach it will be dependent on your existing environment and available resources. When it comes to assessing which ADR solution best aligns with your current needs, there are two main distinctions teams should think about:

1. Agent vs Agentless

Agentless: Agentless solutions provide visibility into the threats within your applications without requiring the installation of software-driven agents. Agentless solutions are easier to deploy and maintain because there isn’t the need to configure an agent on each of your hosts. Additionally, they have zero risk of performance or application impact.

Agent: Agent-based security is generally seen as the traditional method. This is mainly because advanced security telemetry typically requires an agent to gather, and it’s what security teams are used to. While the setup is more complex and laborious, it can feel familiar because it's predictable: You install the agent on your systems, authenticate to your cloud security service, and then watch the data flow in. This also means there's a burden on IT teams to ensure agents are consistently configured, deployed, and maintained - leading to operational overhead. The challenge involved in scaling agents to support thousands of devices shouldn’t be underestimated. If you’re already running all your endpoints in the cloud, then it’ll be simpler and safer to select an agentless service instead.

2.  Code vs No-Code

No-code: No-code solutions allow security teams to deploy their solutions at scale without developer friction, creating an easy and user-friendly building experience. It goes the extra mile by allowing non-technical business users to leverage applications without needing engineering resources to contribute a single line of code. This approach is designed to conserve developer bandwidth and shorten development cycles.

Code: Historically, runtime application protection tools have been time consuming to adopt as developers are required to implement complex code changes to their application. This creates friction between teams: developers don’t like giving up control of the application, and security teams become dependent on a vendor to guarantee that the application works. Requiring code changes generally means a more complex and time consuming deployment and maintenance. Ironically, the scanning approach to AppSec doesn’t scale because it requires so many code changes - the same applies to runtime.

Regardless of how you decide, each above presents valid approaches for application security and come with their own advantages and drawbacks. The decision comes down to who is using the platform, what resources a team has, the time they have to allocate to deployment, and what they are doing with the solution.
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The Top ADR Solutions of 2024

Choosing ADR vendors can mean the difference between a secure application environment and a potential data breach. Here are the top upvoted ADR vendors.

Miggo Is the #1 Upvoted ADR Tool

Miggo is an agentless ADR platform designed to empower AppSec teams with real-time insights into application behavior at runtime, without any required code changes. Miggo builds the complete storyline of an application attack, constructing critical context based on active threats specific to your environment. This gives teams the immediate context they need to proactively respond to and mitigate any threats or, in extreme cases, actual breaches with speed and efficiency. Miggo ensures teams can answer the questions that matter like but not limited to:

• Am I being attacked right now?
• How did they get in?
• Where did they go?
• What did they take?
• How do I respond?

Conclusion

As organizations navigate through complex application ecosystems, the right ADR can serve as your guide, securing your application. To achieve this, the chosen vendor should meet your threat visibility, threat detection and mitigation requirements,  while being easy to deploy with a great user experience. This is why we're honored to have made it to the top of Latio's list. Our goal at Miggo is to provide security teams with the easiest tool to deploy and maintain without sacrificing critical security value along the way. Miggo ticks all the boxes of a top-notch ADR that can scale your AppSec efforts.

Don’t risk attacks against your most valuable assets going undetected, and definitely don't wait for a breach to realize you need better application protection.

If you’re ready to get ahead of the game and scale your AppSec program, get in touch with our team today.