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For many modern businesses, effective cloud security is an important part of their digital infrastructure. Many different enterprises are moving applications, workloads and sensitive data to cloud environments, and traditional digital security teams can be hard-pressed to keep a keen watch over all the potential entry points. Agent-based legacy security approaches are often unable to keep up with the dynamic and large-scale cloud infrastructure that many modern businesses are working with.
In such an environment, Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs), especially ones like Orca Security, which function as an agentless platform, are rising in popularity. CNAPP solutions are simply able to function with faster speeds, better scalability and at a level of operational simplicity that legacy security tools, which rely heavily on the distribution of software agents across workloads, can never do.
Let's take a closer look at the difference between agentless and agent-based security systems in cloud environments, and at why agentless solutions are proving superior.
Agent-based security tools typically require software agents to be installed wherever they are needed. This means that endpoints, virtual machines, containers and servers all require their own agent. These agents then need to communicate with a central platform that manages them. This sort of model has been in use for many years, but modern cloud environments are sounding its death knell. The more fluid and dynamic cloud environments become, the more ineffective and unreasonable it becomes to manage all of the agents necessary to keep things secure.
Agentless CNAPP platforms function differently from this. They have integration directly with APIs associated with the cloud provider and with infrastructure layers, allowing them visibility over cloud environments. This means that they can detect misconfigurations, analyse risks, identify vulnerabilities and monitor assets, all without needing a direct software installation for every single workload.
Older security systems have done fine for years, we hear you cry, why are they suddenly being cast aside? Well, traditional agent-based security tools can do the work, but they also introduce a significant amount of operational burden. The more complicated and fluid the cloud environments that they must monitor become, the greater the operational burden they produce. With legacy systems, security teams often need to:
Make sure agents are installed across thousands of systems.
Ensure version compatibility is up-to-date.
Monitor performance.
Handle the updating of agents.
Troubleshoot failures in deployment.
Fill in any blind spots from missing agents.
As digital infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, the operational burden from legacy agent-based systems becomes restrictive.
CNAPP solutions like Orca Security, as well as reducing the operational burden that legacy systems cause, are also much faster to deploy and so have a much tighter time-to-value ratio. Instead of taking weeks or longer for testing and implementation, agentless CNAPP solutions can begin working within hours. By using a modern CNAPP security solution, digital security teams can immediately gain visibility of:
Misconfigurations.
Vulnerabilities.
Cloud assets.
Identity risks.
Exposed sensitive data.
Any potential paths of lateral movement that are open for attackers.
These modern systems have no need for an extensive rollout of agents over a large scale and provide access almost instantly to everything a security team could need.
In many cases, the infrastructure of modern cloud systems can be highly dynamic. Containers might exist for only a few minutes, serverless functions can operate in an ephemeral manner, and automatic scaling of workloads is not uncommon. In such environments, traditional agent-based approaches are simply not effective. In many cases, agents might not be deployed quickly enough to gain any visibility.
CNAPP agentless platforms have no such weakness. They can analyse the infrastructure directly at the cloud layer, without the need to deploy agents to every container. This gives them a much better range of visibility over the ever-shifting cloud environment. This means that security teams can maintain constant vigilance for things like:
Exposed workloads.
Risky identity relationships.
Permissions that are excessive.
Storage buckets that are misconfigured.
Software packages that might be vulnerable.
Often, an agentless CNAPP platform can provide oversight of all relevant cloud environments in a single easy-to-understand interface.
Orca Security and solutions like it are gaining traction across the CNAPP market with their agentless architecture approach and ability to provide broad visibility over cloud environments. Workloads can be analysed without the need for intrusive agents, and security can remain high, while operational complexity stays low.
These sorts of cloud security solutions are able to provide enterprises that engage them with a range of benefits, such as:
Identity security.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).
Attack path analysis.
Data security posture management.
Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP).
Management of vulnerabilities.
There is no need for a broad range of disconnected tools when consolidated CNAPP security solutions like Orca Security are able to provide everything under one roof.
