Agent or Agentless Security?

Which is better, agent or agentless security monitoring?

Many of the companies which are associated with computer security and virus scanning are agent based products, meaning that the user has to install the product onto the systems that they wish to monitor. Many of these systems require the user to update the system or monitor it themselves, while it is possible to send alert to a central location. This still requires a person to go and update or deal with the issue locally.

Agentless security on the other hand does not require the user to install anything on each host but to have a centralized monitoring console where they can see all of the assets that they are monitoring. With agentless security it is easier to scale the solution to many more devices, but there is the drawback of internal network traffic which is normally avoidable when the scans are run at certain times of the day.

While there are benefits to each one and they can both help to protect a network. I would say that agentless security would be the easiest to deploy into a larger network verses trying to install a program to each computer. Agentless is also easier to monitor with fewer company resources and can be monitored remotely for all of the systems. For the number of people that can monitor and the number of things that are able to be monitored remotely through agentless security I think that agentless is the best way to go with larger corporations and large networks that need to be monitored.