What true end-to-end security means: an agent and agentless approach

Perspectives on market innovation from the Field

Tim ChaseMarch 10, 20233 min read

Abstract architectural photo shot from the ground. Features a lot of modern windows and steel.

Cloud security is complicated. And that’s before you add the dizzying plethora of security vendors sending mixed signals while vying for your security budget. But, over the last few weeks, we've started to see vendors across the space unite around something we've always believed: true end-to-end security requires both an agentless and agent-based approach.

At Lacework, we were founded on the idea that true security starts with data and collecting that data requires a comprehensive approach — both agent-based and agentless. We spent our early years rigorously building and proving the value, depth and breadth an agent provides. We then furthered our innovation by expanding that capability into agentless deployment methods — giving customers even more ways to continuously prioritize and fix the issues that matter most.

Lacework has given the market a new, better, and more secure option for agentless scanning — the privacy and least privilege elements were essential for us to deploy this solution across our environment

Charly Vitrano, Director of Security Operations at Medallia
 

A unified approach delivers the simplicity you need

Industry experts agree that a combined approach is needed. Frank Dickson, Group Vice President for IDC’s Security and Trust research practice, said, “The ongoing conversation around agent-based and agentless cloud security deployment models does a disservice to customers, creating confusion about the right approach to securing their cloud environments. Leveraging agent and agentless approaches provides the appropriate role-based visibility needed across the entire organization.” 

So while other security companies were claiming that agents were old news, we were optimizing ours and expanding support to cover more systems. For the past 8 years, Lacework has been innovating in runtime security and optimizing the size, reliability, and maturity of our agent. And with agentless workload scanning and cloud APIs, our customers have the flexibility to secure more of their environment with speed and ease. 

 

I don’t want a Frankenstein monster, I want security to be efficient and streamlined and don’t want to have to plug in and move between multiple things, I like Lacework as it is all in one place

the head of product security at a global data analytics firm

We built this functionality into one single, comprehensive platform to  help our customers consolidate tools, instead of forcing them to use more through strategic alliances, our single platform approach has enabled them to consolidate unwieldy tools. At Minim, we helped them save over $300,000 by consolidating tools and not requiring them to hire additional staff to run their security operations. Similarly, at AOK Systems, Hans-Michael Odenthal, Systems Expert at AOK Systems said “By adopting a single platform, we fully eliminated five tools, which has saved us valuable time and reduced our costs.” 

CNAPP end-to-end capabilities include things like CWPP

The cloud can get complicated, but securing it doesn’t have to

While we continue innovating for our customers, we’re glad to see other vendors embrace our viewpoint that the only way to truly protect customers and their data in the cloud is through a holistic agentless and agent-based approach. While they add ‘exclusive partnerships’ with other companies to add the necessary features to their products, we’ll continue offering our customers the most comprehensive cloud security in one unified, data-driven platform. If you want to learn even more about why customers choose Lacework, visit our website.  

Categories

Suggested for you