After we first requested, “Will the cloud kill the agent?”, the safety world was buzzing about agentless options. Three years later, the agentless versus agent-based safety debate continues to be alive and effectively.
At Sysdig, we proceed to consider that each approaches are crucial. With the rise of AI and the rising pace of fabric cloud assaults, we reiterate that cloud safety brokers are irreplaceable.
Agentless scanning exploded in recognition due to the size and pace of the cloud, however the cloud hasn’t killed the agent. Cloud-native safety has made brokers much more indispensable.
Agentless is right for fast onboarding and particularly efficient for cloud workload safety and cloud safety posture administration (CSPM) scans, corresponding to asset discovery, identified vulnerability identification, and checking useful resource configurations in opposition to compliance insurance policies. Nevertheless, the evolution of the cloud safety panorama calls for extra. On this follow-up, we revisit the talk with a contemporary perspective.
Why brokers nonetheless matter
The cloud has accelerated all the pieces. It’s why so many organizations depend on cloud environments for swift enterprise operations and innovation. Brokers are made for this pace, offering real-time, steady syscall-level visibility, course of monitoring, file system monitoring, and container drift detection.
Since 2018, we’ve reported on container ephemerality. In Sysdig’s 2025 Cloud Safety and Utilization Report, we reported that 60% of containers reside for one minute or much less. Cloud attackers have to maneuver rapidly by way of an surroundings to realize persistence earlier than an executed container is killed. Periodic agentless scans is not going to catch that motion as a result of they usually run on a 30-minute to 24-hour cadence.
Sysdig has preached the significance of runtime safety for a number of years, whereas different safety distributors have solely lately caught on. Though some are nonetheless grounded within the thought of agentless scanning being the best way of the longer term in cloud safety, runtime safety calls for real-time, in-depth context that solely brokers can ship.
Agentless options offer you a map, however cloud safety wants a reside feed. Not solely do agentless scans come up brief on ephemeral assaults, however additionally they overlook some more and more standard attacker techniques, strategies, and procedures (TTPs) like kernel exploits, course of injection, and fileless malware. Moreover, agentless scans miss reside mutations like container configuration drift. When a working container begins behaving in another way from its unique picture, solely an agent will establish that conduct. Attackers usually compromise working containers with out ever touching static photos, making agent-based safety important.
Brokers will gas the AI revolution
Simply as AI-driven assaults have modified the risk panorama, necessitating the development of risk detection and response, AI instruments like Sysdig Sage™ are additionally remodeling cloud safety. Sadly, agentless telemetry is simply too gradual and too shallow for efficient GenAI-powered safety.
Responding to AI-driven assaults and utilizing GenAI to reinforce cloud safety requires real-time, wealthy runtime knowledge. An agent offers granular knowledge on course of actions, file adjustments, community conduct, and container drift, repeatedly feeding crucial context in actual time to GenAI safety instruments to allow sooner, extra correct decision-making.
Sysdig Sage makes use of runtime knowledge to energy multi-step reasoning and contextual consciousness to hurry up the risk response and simplify the proactive safety processes of complicated cloud environments. By integrating knowledge captured by brokers, Sysdig Sage facilitates real-time investigations and response steps with context-aware suggestions a lot sooner than a human may.
Higher collectively: Brokers and agentless
It’s not an both/or scenario; it’s agentless the place you may and brokers the place you may’t. Good cloud safety combines agentless scanning for posture with agent-powered runtime detection and response. Begin with agentless onboarding for fast wins in posture administration to incorporate asset stock, misconfiguration and vulnerability identification, and compliance checks like IAM evaluation. Then, layer brokers to get the info you want for runtime detection, incident response, risk looking, and GenAI-enhanced safety processes. Combining each approaches ensures complete protection that addresses the breadth and depth of cloud safety wants.
Sysdig’s battle-tested method
Sysdig has greater than a decade of steady evolution and innovation, adapting alongside the exponential rise in recognition of Kubernetes, serverless capabilities, and multi-cloud environments — domains the place deep visibility issues. The Sysdig agent was constructed for these realities.
Our agent is constructed on Falco, the open supply commonplace for container runtime safety trusted by tens of millions of organizations, together with greater than 60% of the Fortune 500. It’s light-weight and environment friendly to attenuate CPU and reminiscence utilization prices whereas scaling throughout platforms like Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, GKE, and extra.
The Sysdig agent is famend for its reliability. “It simply works” with out slowing down manufacturing or rising prices, and it mechanically scales in high-density environments. Its capabilities have been validated throughout hundreds of buyer environments, securing tens of millions of nodes and workloads.
You may’t faux actual safety with static snapshots within the cloud. Curious how brokers, agentless, and AI come collectively in actual cloud protection? See how Sysdig does it in another way.
