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To Agent or Not to Agent: That Is the Vulnerability Management Question

With the evolution of technology comes new approaches to solving problems. Sometimes a new approach fixes the problem; sometimes it creates new ones. The good thing is as folks who work in fast-paced, high-tech environment, we information security professionals are great at quickly analyzing the new technologies and applying them to our daily lives.

…Or so we thought!

Every once in a while, we need someone to take a complex debate and simplify it down for us. This blog post will look at how the age-old agent vs agentless debate has dawned a new approach to assessing vulnerability risk on various types of assets including on-premise infrastructure, cloud infrastructure and containers.

First, let us examine the various ways to assess vulnerability risk and then look at which scenario best applies to different types of assets. There are four basic approaches that one can take when determining the risk of an asset: (1) the outside only approach, (2) the outside-in approach, (3) the inside only approach and (4) the inside-out approach.

To explain each of these types of approaches, imagine purchasing a house. There are different approaches one can take to examine this house. We will look at each of the four approaches as if we were examining said house. We will then follow up by applying each approach to vulnerability risk assessments.

The Outside Only

This is the traditional way of examining a house. In this approach, you literally walk up to the house and start looking at the outside of the house. You carefully examine the walls, grab a ladder and examine the roof and take a look at the windows. Once you identify how many windows there are and the size of them, you can take a look inside each one to see how much of the inside (Read more...)