When we first asked, “Will the cloud kill the agent?”, the security world was buzzing about agentless solutions. Three years later, the agentless versus agent-based security debate is still alive and well.
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At Sysdig, we continue to believe that both approaches are necessary. With the rise of AI and the increasing speed of material cloud attacks, we reiterate that cloud security agents are irreplaceable.
Agentless scanning exploded in popularity because of the scale and speed of the cloud, but the cloud hasn’t killed the agent. Cloud-native security has made agents even more indispensable.
Agentless is ideal for quick onboarding and especially effective for cloud workload protection and cloud security posture management (CSPM) scans, such as asset discovery, known vulnerability identification, and checking resource configurations against compliance policies. However, the evolution of the cloud security landscape demands more. In this follow-up, we revisit the debate with a fresh perspective.
Why agents still matter
The cloud has accelerated everything. It’s why so many organizations rely on cloud environments for swift business operations and innovation. Agents are made for this speed, providing real-time, continuous syscall-level visibility, process monitoring, file system tracking, and container drift detection.
Since 2018, we’ve reported on container ephemerality. In Sysdig’s 2025 Cloud Security and Usage Report, we reported that 60% of containers live for one minute or less. Cloud attackers have to move quickly through an environment to gain persistence before an executed container is killed. Periodic agentless scans will not catch that movement because they often run on a 30-minute to 24-hour cadence.
Sysdig has preached the importance of runtime security for several years, while other security vendors have only recently caught on. Although some are still grounded in the idea of agentless scanning being the way of the future in cloud security, runtime security demands real-time, in-depth context that only agents can deliver.
Agentless solutions give you a map, but cloud security needs a live feed. Not only do agentless scans come up short on ephemeral attacks, but they also overlook some increasingly popular attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) like kernel exploits, process injection, and fileless malware. Additionally, agentless scans miss live mutations like container configuration drift. When a running container starts behaving differently from its original image, only an agent will identify that behavior. Attackers often compromise running containers without ever touching static images, making agent-based security essential.
Agents will fuel the AI revolution
Just as AI-driven attacks have changed the threat landscape, necessitating the advancement of threat detection and response, AI tools like Sysdig Sage™ are also transforming cloud security. Unfortunately, agentless telemetry is too slow and too shallow for effective GenAI-powered security.
Responding to AI-driven attacks and using GenAI to enhance cloud security requires real-time, rich runtime data. An agent provides granular data on process activities, file changes, network behavior, and container drift, continuously feeding necessary context in real time to GenAI security tools to enable faster, more accurate decision-making.
Sysdig Sage uses runtime data to power multi-step reasoning and contextual awareness to speed up the threat response and simplify the proactive security processes of complex cloud environments. By integrating data captured by agents, Sysdig Sage facilitates real-time investigations and response steps with context-aware recommendations much faster than a human could.
Better together: Agents and agentless
It’s not an either/or situation; it’s agentless where you can and agents where you can’t. Smart cloud security combines agentless scanning for posture with agent-powered runtime detection and response. Start with agentless onboarding for quick wins in posture management to include asset inventory, misconfiguration and vulnerability identification, and compliance checks like IAM analysis. Then, layer agents to get the data you need for runtime detection, incident response, threat hunting, and GenAI-enhanced security processes. Combining both approaches ensures comprehensive coverage that addresses the breadth and depth of cloud security needs.
Sysdig’s battle-tested approach
Sysdig has more than a decade of continuous evolution and innovation, adapting alongside the exponential rise in popularity of Kubernetes, serverless functions, and multi-cloud environments — domains where deep visibility matters. The Sysdig agent was built for these realities.
Our agent is built on Falco, the open source standard for container runtime security trusted by millions of organizations, including more than 60% of the Fortune 500. It’s lightweight and efficient to minimize CPU and memory usage costs while scaling across platforms like Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, GKE, and more.
The Sysdig agent is renowned for its reliability. “It just works” without slowing down production or increasing costs, and it automatically scales in high-density environments. Its capabilities have been validated across thousands of customer environments, securing millions of nodes and workloads.
You can’t fake real security with static snapshots in the cloud. Curious how agents, agentless, and AI come together in real cloud defense? See how Sysdig does it differently.
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Article Link: Cloud hasn’t killed the agent: A real-time reality check | Sysdig