8.1 Agent and Agentless Capability

Agent is an installable component that resides on a machine and helps to manage and monitor privileged access to the machine. It creates comprehensive session audits and video recordings of the privileged sessions of the machine beyond the limits of the Agentless approach. This approach requires regular maintenance and is not suitable for a sophisticated environment.

Agentless enables you to secure, manage and monitor privileged access to remote machines through the PAM User Portal. This approach provides monitoring of computers without agents by using a proxy agent and applying those management packs that support agentless monitoring. The ability to capture session audits and create video recordings of the privileged sessions varies from one agentless module to another. This approach is easy to manage as new updates to the agent need not be applied.

Clientless enables users to connect through a web browser and use HTTPS connections. Clientless solutions provides access to the web-based resources without any client. On demand client - Users connect through a web browser and a client is installed when necessary. The client supplies access to most types of corporate resources according to the access privileges of the user

Privileged Access Manager provides both these capabilities. Refer to Remote Desktop Protocol Web Relay and Section 8.3.3, Agentless Session Management in Unix and Linux to use SSH and RDP on Linux/Unix and Windows machines respectively to reap agentless as well as clientless benefits. Browser refresh disconnects the active sessions for both SSH Web and RDP Web.

Figure 8-1 Agentless Capability

The following tabular overview illustrates the agent and agentless features available in the product.