ADR vs. RASP: It’s All About the TCO

Two technologies that work to detect application intrusions at runtime—but are they just two different names for the same tech?

Here’s the TL;DR: ADR is a newer technology, with capabilities that are built differently from the bottom up. These core differences give ADR a decisive advantage in TCO, ROI, and scalability.

How RASP Became a “Four-Letter Word”

The market isn’t making it easy on security practitioners who want to understand the difference between ADR (Application Detection & Response) and RASP (Runtime Application Self-Protection): faced with declining interest in RASP, some older security vendors have simply re-labeled RASP products as ADR.

So let’s talk about the elephant in the room: why would vendors flee from the RASP label? Why wouldn’t we just have “next-gen RASP,” with no need for a new category of products? It all boils down to that “S.” 

RASP stands for “Runtime Application Self-Protection.” In other words, the product itself didn’t provide the protection—each application had to individually have code inserted to protect the application from within.

Using this degree of user instrumentation was a tricky idea. RASP didn’t scale, and it required a lot of babysitting—making sure your RASP instrumentation didn’t break (or break the applications it was used on) was a full-time job, often requiring multiple headcount to maintain the tools even without scaling it up into a full production environment.

RASP deployments took months and often remained incomplete. The RASP code could stop applications from working properly, impacting production stability and overhead.

Instead of feeling protected, development and security teams felt burdened by RASP. While runtime controls remained a powerful idea, the RASP approach simply didn’t meet real-world needs, leading to failed deployments with negative ROI.

ADR: Scalable, Rapid Deployment with Low TCO

ADR took a new approach to detecting application intrusions in runtime. Instead of user instrumentation, ADR tools use non-invasive, passive sensors or telemetry-based approaches that monitor application behavior directly. When ADR products detect anomalous behavior, they report it so that incident response can begin. RASP products do active analysis on code as it flows, interrupting or intercepting each action. ADR sensors passively observe the application as it performs its duties, allowing the code to run the way it was designed to run, without interference or impacts on stability.

The Oligo ADR sensor sees deep into application behavior at the component level—detecting when individual libraries act in an unusual way.

Let’s take a look at a common situation: If a library that should never execute code (and has never done so before) starts to execute code, that’s a clear sign of an RCE attack being initiated. Without ADR, these types of breaches would typically take four to six months to detect, leaving attackers plenty of time to wreak havoc. With Oligo, the same attack is detected instantly, enabling fast response and minimizing losses.

The best part of the Oligo ADR approach (and a key contrast with RASP tools) is how deployable and scalable it is. As Igor Zavulunov, VP of Information Security at OneTrust, told us: 

“The most surprising aspect of Oligo was honestly how quickly we were able to stand up the environment and get it operational. They told us it won't take more than a week or two. And it truly didn't.״

״I've worked in the industry for over 20 years, and I've seen a number of technologies that say the same thing: don't worry about it, it'll be implemented in a very short period of time—but when you start getting down to it, it takes forever. So this was one of the greatest surprises: we were able to operationalize and implement Oligo in a very limited time, which immediately brought value.”

Our Oligo ADR customers tell us that their deployments take anywhere from a few hours to a week or two—and that maintaining their Oligo deployment, even at full production scale, takes only a few hours a week (approximately 0.1 FTE).

How ADR Goes Where RASP Never Could

The instrumentation differences between ADR and RASP also create differing detection capabilities. The sensor that powers Oligo ADR can observe every application you build, buy, or use—so you can detect attacks on third-party commercial software as well as attacks on your own applications.

These capabilities are especially valuable when responding to an unknown attack (pre-zero-days), a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability, or supply chain attack: with Oligo ADR, it takes just seconds to know whether attackers have exploited any backdoors, malicious code, or newly discovered vulnerabilities in your running applications.

Oligo ADR vs. RASP: Key Differences

See More, Defend Smarter: Oligo ADR

Detecting anomalies in runtime has long been a dream of security practitioners—but the RASP approach had significant limitations that prevented that dream from becoming a practical reality for most organizations.

Oligo ADR is built differently from the start, using non-invasive sensor-based detection to keep deployment easy and scalable, with low TCO.

Talk to us today to learn more about how Oligo ADR can monitor your applications in runtime—without all the heavy lifting.