Why ADR Is the Core of Modern App Security (And What the Other Acronyms Miss)

In today’s cloud-native world, most security teams are overloaded with acronyms, CSPM, CNAPP, CWPP, DSPM, CDR… you name it. Each one promises to cover your cloud, workloads, or data. But here’s the truth: none of them actually protect your application’s behavior or business logic in real time.

That’s where ADR (Application Detection & Response) comes in.
ADR focuses on what really matters, how your app behaves, how data flows, and where logic breaks can be exploited. If your business runs on software (and let’s be honest, it does), then protecting it starts with into what it’s actually doing at runtime.
So let’s break down what all the other acronyms do, and more importantly, what they don’t do, so we can understand why ADR is the missing piece.

The Acronyms (What they really do, and what they miss)

1. CSPM - Cloud Security Posture Management
   CSPM tools check for misconfigurations in your cloud setup, public S3 buckets, open ports, over-permissioned roles. Great for hardening your cloud environment, but completely blind to how the app behaves at runtime.

2. DSPM – Data Security Posture Management
   DSPM focuses on where sensitive data lives and who can access it. It helps classify and monitor PII or customer data, but it doesn’t track how that data moves inside the app or what business logic governs it.

3. CNAPP - Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform
   CNAPP sounds like it protects your application, but in reality, it bundles multiple existing tools — CSPM, CWPP, IaC scanning. There’s still no visibility into the app itself, its APIs, its flows, or its logic.

4. CWPP - Cloud Workload Protection Platform
   CWPP tools protect cloud workloads like VMs and containers. Think of them like antivirus for your infrastructure. They watch for suspicious behavior on the machine level, but they don’t see what your app is doing.

5. CDR - Cloud Detection & Response
   CDR ingests logs and events from cloud services to detect threats. It’s useful, but log-based detection is reactive and limited. It lacks application context and can’t catch logic flaws or abnormal flows in real time.

Enter ADR (Application Detection & Response)
ADR was born to fill the massive blind spot left by all the above.

Where others scan configs, infrastructure, or static code, ADR looks at the live, dynamic behavior of your application, how users interact with it, how services talk to each other, how data moves, and how business logic is enforced.
What ADR brings to the table:

• Real-time understanding of user flows and service-to-service communication

• Visibility into sensitive data in motion

• Runtime analysis of your app’s behavior and logic

• Detection of business logic flaws, broken authentication, and insecure integrations

• Dynamic threat modeling and policy enforcement based on actual user violations and incidents

Think of ADR as EDR for your application, it focuses on what’s happening now, not just what’s configured or scanned once.

But Here’s the Problem…

Most companies claiming to offer ADR today are barely scratching the surface.
The majority of ADR vendors focus narrowly on vulnerability prioritization, they identify and rank known vulnerabilities in your app (based on CVEs, reachability, etc.), and call it ADR.
That’s not enough.
Prioritizing CVEs is helpful, but it’s still point-in-time, static, and doesn’t cover the app’s behavior, flows, or logic.

Alma is doing it differently

Alma is the only ADR solution that covers the full picture of application-layer risk:
Live, real-time visibility into how your app behaves in production
Sensitive data tracking across internal and external flows
Detection of logic flaws and misused from APIs and internal services to third-party components, business logic,
data flows and dynamic threat modeling, even when there’s no known CVE
Application-layer protection that goes beyond cloud misconfig analysis
While others are stuck scanning for vulnerabilities, Alma protects what actually matters, your data, your flows, your logic, your business.

Final thoughts

Cloud security has gotten better, but it's still focused on the outside of your application.
If you care about stopping account takeover, data leakage, logic abuse, or supply chain issues inside your app, you need runtime, behavioral visibility.
That’s exactly what ADR is built for, and Alma is leading the way by going beyond vuln prioritization, to deliver real application-layer protection.