Runtime security refers to the continuous protection of applications, workloads, and infrastructure while they are actively running. It involves monitoring live systems for behavioral anomalies, unauthorized access, exploits, or policy violations in real time. Unlike pre-deployment checks, runtime security focuses on safeguarding systems during actual execution, making it essential for detecting threats that bypass static controls.
In cloud-native environments where workloads are dynamic, short-lived, and spread across distributed architectures, runtime security plays a crucial role in preventing breaches and maintaining operational integrity.
What is runtime security?
Runtime security is the practice of enforcing controls and detecting threats during the live operation of applications and systems. It monitors everything from process activity and file access to system calls, network connections, and identity behavior—all in real time.
This visibility enables security teams to:
- Detect malware, reverse shells, and privilege escalations
- Identify lateral movement attempts between workloads
- Spot misbehavior in containers, serverless functions, or VMs
- Enforce runtime policies like immutability or allowlists
- Alert and respond immediately to violations or attacks
Runtime security can be implemented using a range of approaches, including both agent-based and agentless technologies. Contrary to the traditional view that runtime security must always be agent-based, modern cloud security platforms have demonstrated that agentless runtime visibility is not only possible, but critical to scalable cloud protection.
Why runtime security matters
As organizations embrace cloud-native architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and microservices, the attack surface grows and changes constantly. Static checks at build-time or deploy-time aren’t sufficient for catching threats that emerge during runtime, including those that exploit misconfigurations, credential abuse, or zero-day vulnerabilities.
Runtime security fills this gap by:
- Providing real-time detection of active threats in live environments
- Responding faster to compromise indicators and attack progression
- Reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR)
- Protecting sensitive data and applications even after deployment
- Giving teams evidence and telemetry for incident response and forensics
Without runtime protections, even well-secured pipelines can become blind spots once workloads are in production.
Agent-based vs. agentless runtime security
Agent-based runtime security involves installing monitoring software directly onto workloads (e.g., VMs, containers, or hosts). These agents collect granular telemetry—like system calls and process-level data—and are capable of detecting low-level threats. However, agents come with operational challenges:
- Require maintenance, updates, and version compatibility
- Introduce resource overhead and may degrade performance
- Are difficult to deploy across large, ephemeral, or containerized environments
- May not be feasible in managed services or serverless functions
Agentless runtime security, by contrast, offers broad visibility into runtime risks without deploying agents inside workloads. It often leverages:
- Cloud APIs to gather configuration, flow, and activity data
- Side-scanning of disk snapshots or runtime metadata
- Integration with cloud-native telemetry like CloudTrail, VPC flow logs, or audit logs
Agentless solutions can monitor for behavioral anomalies, identity misuse, misconfigurations, and lateral movement—in real time and at scale. While they may not offer the same kernel-level depth as agents, they provide sufficient and timely insight for many cloud security use cases.
Organizations increasingly adopt a hybrid approach: using agentless runtime security for comprehensive, low-friction visibility and supplementing with targeted, lightweight agents where deep process monitoring is needed.
Runtime security in Kubernetes and cloud environments
Runtime security is especially critical in Kubernetes and containerized workloads where:
- Containers may be compromised and used for lateral movement
- Secrets may be extracted from memory or volumes
- Runtime behaviors may differ from what’s defined in manifests
- Network communication between pods needs segmentation
- Misconfigured service accounts can be abused for privilege escalation
Runtime protections help enforce workload immutability, monitor inter-service communication, and alert on behavioral deviations that indicate active threats. Similarly, in serverless and PaaS environments where agents can’t be deployed, agentless runtime monitoring provides much-needed visibility.
Orca Security’s Runtime Security
The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers both agentless and real-time runtime security for cloud environments including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. It provides full cloud visibility and real-time detection and protection without requiring heavyweight agents.
For organizations needing deeper runtime visibility, Orca offers Orca Sensor, a lightweight eBPF-based sensor that extends runtime security into containers, Kubernetes nodes, and virtual machines. With Orca Sensor, teams gain:
- Deep real-time detection, monitoring, and prevention capabilities for high-value workloads
- An extensive library of built-in and customizable runtime detections with ability to create custom policies
- Fast deployment with automatic updates and minimal overhead
By combining agentless and real-time runtime security, Orca enables organizations to enhance their cloud security while supporting advanced Cloud Detection and Response.
