“I’ll never say runtime isn’t important,” Badhwar tells CSO. “But you want to fix as much as you can early. The average cost of a runtime security finding is $4,000, versus $40 at build time. So, guess what? You want to fix as much as you can before it ever gets there.”
A vulnerability caught while a developer is still writing code takes minutes to fix. That same vulnerability, once deployed into a container, run through QA, and pushed to a production environment, requires retracing every step of that journey before it can be addressed — at roughly a hundredfold the cost. Badhwar uses the analogy of a car manufacturing line: Quality controls on the assembly line are always cheaper than recalling 70,000 cars from the street.
His framework is simple: Shift left, shield right. Shift as many security controls as possible into the development process — catch problems while agents are being built, not after they’re running. Then shield right with runtime monitoring as your last-mile safety net, because some things will always slip through, and zero-day vulnerabilities by definition can’t be anticipated at build time.
