Agentless Scanning or Runtime Sensor? The Wrong Question

Agentless scanning or a Runtime Sensor? From our perspective, that's not truly the right question to ask.

Both approaches provide different types of information and aim to answer distinct questions.

Understanding Agentless Scanning

Agentless Scanning allows you to connect to your cloud environment and gain broad visibility into assets, configurations, vulnerabilities, identities, and data—all without installing an agent on every resource.

The primary advantage is the ability to get started quickly, achieve wide coverage, and map the environment independently of an installation process on each workload.

However, a static snapshot doesn't always tell us what's happening in real-time.

The Role of Runtime Security

This is where the runtime layer comes in. A Runtime Sensor can provide information on:

• Which processes are actually running
• Which packages or components are truly loaded
• What communications are occurring from the workload
• Whether suspicious activity is taking place in real-time
• Whether an identified vulnerability is actually relevant to the active environment

For example, Agentless scanning might identify a vulnerable library within an image. Runtime context can then help determine if that library is actually loaded and in use—information that can significantly impact prioritization for remediation.

A Complementary Approach

Therefore, Agentless and Runtime are not necessarily competing solutions.

Agentless provides broad coverage and context.

Runtime provides depth, verification, and real-time behavioral insights.

The choice shouldn't be "Which technology is better?" but rather "What decisions do we want to be able to make using the information provided?"