Vulnerability Scanning Services: Self-Serve vs Managed
Written by the Rafter Team
Vulnerability scanning services fall into two models: managed services where a vendor runs periodic assessments on your behalf, and self-serve platforms where your team runs scans continuously through CI/CD. Managed services deliver expert-reviewed reports quarterly. Self-serve platforms deliver automated findings on every commit. For teams shipping code daily, the self-serve model catches vulnerabilities weeks or months before a managed engagement would even begin.
The average time between a vulnerability being introduced and a managed scanning service detecting it is 47 days. Self-serve scanning in CI/CD reduces that window to minutes.
Try Rafter's self-serve scanning — continuous vulnerability detection on every pull request.
Managed Vulnerability Scanning Services
Managed services assign dedicated security analysts who configure scans, interpret results, and deliver reports on a fixed schedule — monthly, quarterly, or on-demand. The analyst filters false positives, prioritizes findings by business context, and often provides remediation guidance.
This model works well for:
- Compliance-driven organizations that need signed attestation reports from a third party
- Small teams without security expertise that can't triage raw scanner output
- Pre-launch assessments where a one-time deep review is appropriate
The limitations are structural. Managed services operate on human timescales. Scans run periodically, not continuously. Every line of code pushed between engagements ships unscanned. Remediation advice arrives in a PDF weeks after the vulnerable code merged.
Self-Serve Vulnerability Scanning Services
Self-serve vulnerability scanning services give your team direct access to scanning infrastructure through platform integrations. You connect your repository, configure severity thresholds, and the platform scans every pull request automatically.
The self-serve model delivers:
- Continuous coverage — every commit is scanned, not just the codebase snapshot from last quarter
- Immediate feedback — developers see findings while the code is fresh, not in a report delivered weeks later
- Developer ownership — findings appear in pull requests where developers can act on them directly
- Predictable cost — flat pricing based on repositories or seats, not per-engagement billing
Self-serve does not replace expert judgment entirely. Complex attack chains, business logic flaws, and novel vulnerability classes still benefit from human review. But for the known vulnerability patterns that account for 80% of real-world exploits, automated scanning is faster, cheaper, and more consistent than manual assessment.
How Rafter Works as a Vulnerability Scanning Service
Rafter is a self-serve vulnerability scanning service built for development teams. It connects to your repository through a one-click integration and runs three scan types on every pull request:
- Static analysis — traces data flows through source code to detect injection, authentication, and cryptography flaws
- Secrets detection — flags API keys, tokens, and credentials across your codebase and commit history
- Dependency scanning — maps your package tree against CVE databases and alerts on vulnerable transitive dependencies
Results appear as inline PR comments. Each finding includes a severity rating, an explanation of the risk, and a concrete fix suggestion. For AI-generated code, Rafter applies additional detection rules targeting the insecure patterns that language models produce most frequently.
You set merge policies based on severity. Critical findings block the PR. Medium findings surface as warnings. Informational findings stay out of the way. The CI/CD integration works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket — one pipeline step, no configuration files to maintain.
Start scanning with Rafter — self-serve vulnerability detection, results in under two minutes.