It’s Time to Put an End to Security Agent Overload

The average enterprise has as many as 45 security tools deployed at any given time. Among large enterprises, that figure climbs even higher, with an average of 76 security tools deployed.  With today’s constantly shifting threat landscape, and the dissolution of the traditional enterprise perimeter, security teams have found themselves inundated with incomplete and often incompatible security solutions whose whole is often lesser than the sum of its parts.

Unfortunately, the status quo in enterprise cybersecurity today seems to be the parallel (but not integrated) operation of dozens of these niche security tools designed to address a very narrow swath of the threat landscape, all while offering nothing in the way of interoperability, compatibility, or comprehensiveness.

While not all security tools are equally cumbersome, in the aggregate, the proliferation of these siloed security solutions has placed admins in a state of perpetual agent overload. Obviously,  not all security solutions are agent-based, and agentless solutions are certainly growing in popularity. But, considering the average enterprise operates 45 separate security tools at any one time, even if the majority of  those tools were in fact agentless, that would still leave admins having to wrestle with some 22 separate endpoint agents at once.

Flexible Work Demands Flexible Security Solutions

No matter how you slice it, it’s simply too much. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the advent of hybrid work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies have dissolved the traditional enterprise perimeter and left the average company awash in a flood of untrusted web connections (often coming from a multiplicity of undersecured, over-provisioned devices).

In such an environment, it becomes essential for security solutions to be as flexible as the ecosystems they’re meant to protect. And when it comes to flexibility, agent-based tools are anything but. In an ever-changing cloud environment, agent-based tools simply can’t keep up, and the deployment, maintenance and updating of agents is a daunting task. Moreover, there are plenty of services that don’t allow the installation of third-party security agents, meaning these elements of your cloud ecosystem will simply go unsecured. 

To make matters worse, these cumbersome security architectures often fail to justify the administrative headaches with improved security. On the contrary, there are many instances in which these disjointed, convoluted security architectures render organizations more vulnerable, as a result of unexpected incompatibility issues, losing track of updates, and the development of unpatched backdoors into enterprise applications and data.

Agent Overload and the Danger of False Positives

Proponents of agent-based security solutions will often claim these tools offer a degree of “deep visibility”  that can’t be had from their agentless counterparts. However, there’s a real danger that can come from a too finely-tuned solution. 

Today’s state of agent overload often leaves security teams overwhelmed with noise — with each agent issuing alerts, often from separate dashboards, all utilizing different metrics and norms that can be difficult to interpret and tempting to ignore as they can easily be assumed to be false-positives. 

Red Access and the Agentless Advantage

With all this in mind, saddling administrators with yet another cumbersome endpoint agent has become largely untenable for the majority of organizations today. At the same time, however, with cyber attacks of every stripe on the rise, and a dramatically changing security landscape, organizations can’t afford to simply forgo fundamental defenses. 

This is especially true of today’s rapidly expanding browsing attack surface. Over the past half-decade, web browsing has gone from a largely leisure-time activity to the average employee’s primary gateway to the digital world. That’s why, when we developed Red Access, we knew it had to cover the entire browsing attack surface, while also being an agentless solution. And, although it certainly was a challenge, today Red Access is the first agentless platform to secure all enterprise web browsing activities, across any browser, web app, and on any device — all without compromising user experience or disrupting companies’ existing infrastructure. 

In addition to a streamlined user experience and reduced administrative overhead, being an agentless solution also provides a list of secondary benefits, including: the ability to update in real-time; reduced operating costs; superior, instantaneous threat detection; and the ability to be accessed and managed from anywhere, through a single, streamlined web-based user interface.

Want to improve your browsing security without burdening your admins or employees? Start your free trial of Red Access today.