The Right Scan Ingredients

Early Release: The following content is an early preview and should be considered a work in progress. Information may be missing or incomplete until the final release

Let’s be honest—application security can feel like trying to cook a complex meal with half the ingredients missing and no recipe to follow. You’ve got vulnerabilities popping up everywhere, tools that don’t talk to each other, and security teams drowning in alerts they can’t properly prioritize. Sound familiar?

The truth is, most organizations know they need comprehensive security scanning, but figuring out what “comprehensive” actually means—and how to implement it without breaking the bank or your sanity—is where things get messy. Today, we’re breaking down the essential security scanning ingredients every organization needs and why getting them all to play nicely together is both harder and more important than you might think.

The 9 Core Scan Engines You Can’t Live Without

Think of application security scanning like building a well-stocked kitchen. You wouldn’t try to cook everything with just a microwave, right? Similarly, you can’t secure modern applications with just one type of scanner. Here are the nine essential tools you need in your security toolkit, organized by where they fit in your development and deployment lifecycle:

Dev Sec: Catching Issues During Development

1. AI Model Security / LLM Red Teaming The newest and increasingly critical component of your security arsenal. LLM red teaming is a systematic approach to finding vulnerabilities in AI systems before they’re deployed by using simulated adversarial inputs and attack scenarios. LLM red teaming involves detecting vulnerabilities such as bias, personally identifiable information (PII) leakage, prompt injection attacks, data poisoning, or misinformation generation in your AI systems through intentionally adversarial prompts and interaction patterns. With AI integration exploding across enterprise applications, this isn’t optional anymore—it’s become a fundamental security requirement.

2. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) SCA is the systematic verification of third-party libraries, frameworks, and components used within your application—essentially all the code that you and your team didn’t write. Nearly all business applications used in the enterprise now incorporate significant amounts of open source software (OSS), making SCA absolutely critical for supply chain security. SCA tools track known vulnerabilities in dependencies, identify licensing issues, and help you understand the security posture of your entire software supply chain.

3. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) SAST scans proprietary code during the coding and build stages, analyzing source code, bytecode, or compiled binaries without requiring a running application. It’s your early warning system, designed to catch vulnerabilities before they make it into production environments. SAST tools can be integrated directly into your IDE, helping detect security issues during software development and saving significant time and resources compared to finding vulnerabilities later in the development cycle when they’re more expensive to fix.

4. Secrets Scanning This one’s exactly what it sounds like—systematically hunting for API keys, passwords, authentication tokens, database credentials, and other sensitive information lurking in your code repositories, configuration files, and deployment artifacts. The exposure of secrets in code repositories has become a major attack vector, making secrets scanning a non-negotiable security control for any organization that takes application security seriously.

App Sec: Infrastructure and Deployment Security

5. Container Security With containerization becoming the default deployment model for modern applications, you need specialized tools that scan container images for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance violations, and security policy breaches. Container security tools analyze both the base images and the layers you add, checking for known vulnerabilities in installed packages, insecure configurations, and compliance with security benchmarks. Tools like Trivy demonstrate how these scanning domains often overlap, providing multi-purpose security analysis that covers both containers and infrastructure code.

6. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security Infrastructure as Code scanning is the process of analyzing the scripts, templates, and configuration files that automatically provision and configure your cloud infrastructure. IaC scanning targets the specific syntax and structures used in declaring cloud environments through tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes manifests, and Ansible playbooks. This scanning approach automates the detection of security misconfigurations, compliance violations, excessive permissions, and exposed secrets in infrastructure code before they get deployed to production environments.

Runtime: Testing Live Applications

7. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) - Web Applications DAST analyzes applications from the “outside-in” by simulating real attacks against running applications, interacting with the application without requiring access to its source code. Web application DAST is used for post-deployment testing, validating compliance with common security regulations, and testing for runtime vulnerabilities that might not be detectable through static analysis. Think of it as automated penetration testing that can run continuously against your applications.

8. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) - APIs API-specific DAST focuses on the unique security challenges of application programming interfaces, including authentication bypass, parameter manipulation, injection attacks, and business logic flaws specific to API endpoints. As applications become increasingly API-driven and service-oriented, API security testing has become a distinct discipline that requires specialized tools and techniques beyond traditional web application scanning.

9. Client-Side Security This covers frontend vulnerabilities, third-party JavaScript libraries, browser-based attacks, and the security implications of modern single-page applications. Client-side security scanning analyzes the code that runs in users’ browsers, including your own JavaScript and any third-party libraries or widgets you incorporate. As applications become more JavaScript-heavy and rely extensively on external APIs and services, client-side security has become increasingly critical for protecting users and preventing data breaches.

Each of these scanners can operate as standalone tools, but here’s the crucial insight—they’re exponentially more powerful and effective when they work together as part of a unified, integrated platform that can correlate findings and provide comprehensive visibility.

The Brutal Reality: Standing Up All These Scanners Is Expensive and Complex

Let’s cut through the vendor marketing speak for a moment and acknowledge the uncomfortable truth. Getting all nine scan engines running effectively in your organization is expensive, time-consuming, and frankly, can be a significant operational nightmare. Here’s why:

Multiple Scanners, Multiple Headaches

You’re not just buying one tool—you’re potentially dealing with nine different vendors, each with their own pricing models, licensing terms, integration requirements, technical support teams, and product roadmaps. While many teams try to choose scanners that combine SAST, SCA, and other functions to get broader coverage in fewer tools, finding truly comprehensive solutions that excel across all these domains is challenging and often requires accepting compromises in functionality or effectiveness.

The Integration Nightmare

Your security tools need to integrate seamlessly with your CI/CD pipelines, ticketing systems, chat tools, monitoring platforms, and most importantly, with each other. But here’s the frustrating reality—most vendor tools don’t play well with others by design. You end up building and maintaining a complex architecture of integrations held together by custom scripts, API calls, and constant maintenance effort that diverts resources from actual security work.

Operational Costs Add Up Fast

Beyond the obvious licensing fees, you’re looking at substantial operational overhead:

• Multiple vendor relationships to negotiate and manage
• Different contract terms and renewal cycles to track
• Various support agreements with different service levels
• Training costs for each tool across multiple teams
• Ongoing maintenance overhead for all those integrations
• Staff time spent managing tools instead of improving security

The Alert Fatigue Problem

Security professionals consistently report that their developer teams are experiencing overwhelming numbers of false positives and alert fatigue from multiple security tools. When each tool produces its own stream of alerts with different formats, severity scales, and prioritization logic, your security team drowns in noise rather than focusing on genuine threats. The cognitive overhead of context-switching between different tools and alert formats significantly reduces team effectiveness.

The Singular View Challenge

Even with all these sophisticated tools running and generating findings, you still face the enormous challenge of manually correlating results, deduplicating alerts that represent the same underlying issues, and figuring out which vulnerabilities actually matter to your specific business context and threat model. Individual scan engines, no matter how advanced, still require a unified view for effective reporting, prioritization, and coordinated remediation efforts.

The Gradual Build vs. The Enterprise Approach

Most organizations fall into one of two distinct camps when building their security scanning capabilities, each with its own advantages and challenges:

The Gradual Builders

These teams start small and practical—maybe with just SAST and SCA coverage—then systematically add more scan engines over time as their security program matures and their budget allows. It’s a sensible approach that spreads costs over multiple budget cycles, allows teams to learn and adapt gradually, and avoids overwhelming development teams with too many new security requirements at once.

The significant downside? You’re operating with known security blind spots for extended periods, potentially missing critical vulnerabilities in areas you haven’t yet covered. Additionally, this approach often leads to the integration complexity we discussed, as you end up with a patchwork of tools that weren’t designed to work together effectively.

The Enterprise Approach

Large organizations tend to have most or all of the scan engines already deployed, often as a result of comprehensive security initiatives, compliance requirements, or acquisitions. They typically have more comprehensive coverage from a scanning perspective, but they’re often dealing with different and equally challenging problems:

• Legacy tools that don’t integrate well with modern CI/CD practices or cloud-native architectures
• Multiple overlapping solutions inherited from different business unit acquisitions or historical purchasing decisions
• Complex approval processes and change management procedures that slow down updates and improvements
• Scattered ownership across different teams, making coordination and optimization difficult
• Technical debt in integrations and custom solutions that require ongoing maintenance

Neither approach is inherently wrong, but both highlight the same fundamental challenge: having all the individual pieces doesn’t automatically give you a complete, actionable picture of your application security posture.

The ASPM Solution: Getting All Your Findings in One Place

This is where Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) becomes not just useful, but essential—and if you’ve been following our previous discussions about ASPM, you know this is the key to making sense of all these disparate security tools and creating a coherent security program.

ASPM unifies security findings from all application security tools in your technology stack into one comprehensive dashboard, delivering real-time data on vulnerabilities in your code, software components, APIs, infrastructure, and security policies and processes.

Here’s what effective ASPM platforms accomplish that individual scanners simply can’t:

Correlation and Deduplication

ASPM solutions systematically correlate and analyze data from multiple sources to simplify issue interpretation, triage, and remediation workflows. Instead of seeing the same underlying vulnerability reported five different ways by five different tools—each with its own terminology, severity rating, and remediation guidance—you get one consolidated, authoritative view that eliminates confusion and duplicate work.

Risk-Based Prioritization

The ASPM platform’s risk-based analysis engine correlates findings from multiple sources, assesses their potential business impact based on application context, and prioritizes vulnerabilities based on a combination of technical severity, actual exploitability, and business criticality. Finally, your teams can focus their limited time and resources on addressing issues that actually matter to your organization’s risk profile and business objectives.

Policy Enforcement at Scale

ASPM solutions allow you to centrally define, enforce, and monitor the security policies that orchestrate testing procedures and prioritization logic across your entire application portfolio. You set the rules, thresholds, and workflows once, and they apply consistently across all your scan engines and development teams, ensuring uniform security standards without requiring manual coordination.

Developer-Friendly Integration

ASPM platforms improve collaboration between security and development teams by integrating security checks and feedback directly into existing development workflows. Developers get actionable, contextual feedback without having to learn nine different security tools or navigate multiple interfaces to understand what they need to fix and why it matters.

Making It All Work: It’s Not About Having All the Tools

Here’s the fundamental insight—you probably do need most (if not all) of these nine core scan engines to achieve comprehensive security coverage in today’s threat landscape. The question isn’t whether you need comprehensive security scanning; it’s how you’re going to implement and manage it all without losing your effectiveness, your budget, or your sanity.

Application security solutions are increasingly combining SAST, DAST, Software Composition Analysis, and other scanning capabilities into integrated platforms, offering end-to-end visibility across the entire application stack. The clear industry trend is toward consolidation and unification rather than continued tool sprawl.

The smart strategic move? Think beyond individual tools from day one and start planning for how you’ll create that unified view regardless of which specific scanning technologies you choose. Whether you’re just starting your security scanning journey or you’re currently drowning in alerts from a dozen different tools, the end goal remains the same: comprehensive coverage with actionable intelligence that enables effective decision-making.

Your applications are only as secure as your weakest scanning blind spot, but your security team is only as effective as their ability to make sense of all that scanning data and translate it into appropriate action. Get both pieces right—comprehensive coverage and intelligent unification—and you’ll have a security program that scales with your business instead of creating bottlenecks that slow down development.

The individual scanning ingredients are important and necessary, but the recipe—that unified, risk-based approach to managing all your security findings—is what transforms a collection of tools into an actual, effective security program. And that’s where the real value and protection emerge.