Defend Agentless Workload Detection: Bringing Visibility to Blind Spots in Threat Detection

In cloud security, we’re obsessed with visibility. Yet, a massive blind spot persists in nearly every cloud environment- we can’t deploy traditional security agents on many of our most critical assets. Think about your virtual appliances like firewalls and network gateways, vendor-managed systems, or workloads with strict performance requirements. These are "unmonitorable" by traditional tools, and attackers know it.

This lack of visibility is not a theoretical problem. When critical PAN-OS vulnerabilities were discovered, 24% of cloud environments had vulnerable devices. Worse, 7% had internet-facing, exploitable devices. Before, identifying these at-risk appliances was nearly impossible because they are vendor-managed black boxes. This visibility gap means security teams can't detect threats, struggle to collect forensic evidence, and are left vulnerable to novel exploits.

It’s time to close this gap. We believe the solution isn't to force old tools into new environments; it's to continue re-imagining threat detection for the cloud.

What is Defend Agentless Workload Detection?

We are bringing the power of Wiz's agentless scanning to threat detection, investigation, and response with Agentless Workload Detection, a new capability in Wiz Defend. It applies the core Wiz agentless concept to detection: by automatically collecting local logs from appliances, SOC teams gain deep workload visibility with zero deployment friction and no performance impact.

From Raw Logs to a Holistic Story

Getting local logs is just the first step. The real power comes from turning that data into high-fidelity, actionable insights. Here’s how Agentless Workload Detection improves threat detection and investigation:

Extends Visibility to Appliances

Traditional agents simply can't provide coverage on virtual appliances like Palo Alto Networks firewalls or Aviatrix gateways. With Agentless Workload Detection, Wiz Defend can identify at-risk virtual appliances before they're exploited and proactively detect infected machines or exploitation attempts. This is especially critical for malware detection- Agentless Workload Detection enhances malware detection by correlating existing detections with information from newly ingested log files.

Tell a Holistic Threat Story

With Agentless Workload Detection, local machine logs are ingested directly into the Wiz Signals data lake. This allows Wiz Defend to correlate suspicious activity on a workload with cloud control plane events, runtime signals from the Wiz Sensor, and all the cloud context in the Graph. This correlation provides deep investigation context and unparalleled visibility into every phase of the cloud kill-chain - from control plane, through network and workload.

The Wiz Vision: Unconditional Visibility

Agentless Workload Detection is a core part of our broader vision for Wiz Defend: to provide a single, unified platform for cloud detection and response. Our goal is to provide unconditional visibility into your entire environment.

This new capability finally breaks down the barriers that have frustrated security teams for years:

• For SecOps and IR teams: You get a critical new source of logs for investigations on your hardest-to-monitor assets.

• For Cloud Security Architects: You can finally achieve 100% coverage across all cloud assets without adding deployment complexity or friction.

• For DevOps and Platform Engineers: Security gets the deep visibility it needs without installing performance-impacting agents on workloads.

You can't protect what you can't see. With Agentless Workload Detection, the "unmonitorable" parts of your cloud are no longer a blind spot.

To learn more about how Wiz Defend provides complete, correlated threat detection and response for the cloud, request a demo.