Delivering A New Foundation for Agent Security: Built From the Data Layer Up

Every business leader is asking the same question: can we use agents for this? Their teams have already decided. They're deploying with or without security's sign-off because the operational upside is real and waiting comes with a cost. Security is expected to keep pace, and most teams want to. What they're missing is a core capability the industry hasn't delivered: the ability to see what agents can actually access and govern it in real time.

Today's security tools were built around humans and the deterministic software they use, which means they can tell you what a person accessed but not what an agent can see, what it intends to do with that access, or whether its runtime behavior matches what it was built for.

What can your agents see, and what can they do? Answering that question with precision, and acting on the answer in real time, is the trust layer the industry is missing. That's what we're building at Cyera.

Why the Data Layer Has to Come First

Humans are bound by the laws of physics. A person can only work so many hours and reach so many systems, which is why the average person touches about 4% of the data they have access to. Agents have no such limits and can reach all of it in seconds. The industry's response has been to watch: monitor the prompts, filter the outputs, flag unusual behavior.

But agent behavior isn't fixed the way traditional software is. The same instruction can produce different actions depending on context, and intent can drift mid-task without any visible signal. By the time something appears in the logs, it's already happened. The only control that exists before something goes wrong is what the agent can reach. That's the data layer. The industry has left it unaddressed, and it's what Cyera is built on.

Here's how we're putting that into practice:

• Data context is the ultimate boundary. Before you can secure what an agent does, you have to know what it can see. Traditional pattern-matching often fails on unstructured datasets, proprietary schemas, and non-labelable files, leaving entire categories of sensitive data outside your security model. Cyera combines pattern matching, language models, and semantic analysis to build high-precision and dynamic data classification, mapping the exact data footprint accessible to every agent in your environment. That map is the foundation for everything else.
  
• Evaluating intent before execution. Static access privileges don't work for probabilistic workflows. Cyera analyzes conversational reasoning and intent before an agent calls an external tool or executes a command, distinguishing authorized operations from behavioral drift in real time.
  
• Monitoring and controlling data access at every agentic step Most security tools investigate after the final output. In autonomous agents, the real risk lives in the middle of the execution chain, during tool calls, database retrievals, and prompt translations. When an agent accesses something sensitive, that's the moment new guardrails need to be created, in real time, not after the fact. Cyera monitors and intercepts dynamic data access without halting business productivity.

None of this works if the pieces are separate. Cyera runs Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and agent security under a single policy engine, so the rules governing human access are automatically applied to agents. Before deployment, it resolves overprivilege and rightsizes machine identity permissions. At runtime, coverage spans browser sessions, developer environments, API gateways, and endpoint integrations, without requiring organizations to rearchitect how they already operate.

Continuous Coverage, Across Every Agent

A snapshot of your agent environment is outdated the moment you take it. Agent environments shift: new agents get deployed, access rights change, and behavior drifts. Cyera organizes continuous coverage around four phases throughout the full lifecycle of every agent in your environment:

1. Discovery: Continuously maps and catalogs all active AI agents, model dependencies, approved actions, and data connections, building an Agent Graph of relationships between users, agents, permissions, tools, and data.
2. Governance: Continuously evaluates agent configurations, access rights, and behavioral drift to verify that autonomous workflows stay aligned with their designed business purpose.
3. Protection: Evaluates prompts, responses, and intermediate tool calls and data retrievals in real time, blocking unauthorized database queries or exfiltration attempts before they execute.
4. Validation: Runs read-team simulations against active agents to test guardrail resilience and generate objective compliance evidence for audit readiness.

‍The Confidence to Say Yes to Agents

Security teams need the ability to determine what agents can see and what they can do before they do it. That means knowing what every agent can reach and whether it's acting within those limits, in real time, across every agent in your environment. Cyera's agentic security solution is designed to do exactly that across every agent in your environment.

So when the business asks whether we can do more with agents, the answer is yes, and we can do it securely.

To get a first look, join our upcoming webinar on Cyera’s approach to agent security or visit us at Black Hat to see it in action.