Agent-based scanning is getting less relevant because modern cloud-native elastic workloads are too fast-moving and dynamic for agents to keep up.

1. Why do Next-generation snapshot scanning security solutions raise
security concerns?
Why is Agent-based scanning getting irrelevant with cloud-native elastic workloads?
Agent-based scanning is getting less relevant because modern cloud-native elastic workloads are
too fast-moving and dynamic for agents to keep up. With serverless and containers becoming
more popular, traditional security solutions that rely on agents are struggling to keep up. For
example, an agent on a server may only be able to scan new code when it is deployed, but with
serverless, new code can be deployed hundreds or even thousands of times a day. This means
that any vulnerabilities in the new code may not be detected until it is too late.
Another reason agent-based scanning is becoming less relevant is that it is often impractical to
deploy agents on all machines in a modern cloud environment. This is because there are often
too many machines to be feasible to deploy an agent on each one. It is also often not possible to
deploy agents on all of the machines in a cloud environment because some of them may be
ephemeral, such as containers that only exist for a short period of time.
Modern cloud scanners
Modern security solutions take snapshots of production environments and attach them to vendor-
managed compute to scan them offline without any operational challenges. This allows them to
scan the environment quickly and effectively without needing agents on all machines. It also
allows them to scan ephemeral machines, such as containers that would otherwise be
inaccessible.
About Prancer
Prancer is the industry’s first cloud-native, self-service SAAS platform for continuous security
validation and penetration testing for cyber systems.