What is runtime security?

This episode of Techsplainers explores runtime security and explains why it has become a critical response to the AI and nonhuman identity risks discussed earlier in the series. As applications, workloads, machine identities and AI agents operate live in production, organizations need security controls that can detect misuse, enforce boundaries and respond in real time. The episode follows how runtime security works and explains proactive measures such as process isolation, network segmentation, secure networking and identity-focused controls that help reduce the blast radius of compromise before an attack spreads. Special attention is given to cloud-native environments, where ephemeral workloads and complex microservices make predeployment inspection less reliable, and to generative AI, which has increased the speed of vulnerability discovery and exploitation. The episode also examines why runtime security is especially important for AI agents, whose nondeterministic behavior, tool-calling capabilities and autonomy create risks that often only appear during live execution. Find more information at https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/runtime-security Find all the Techsplainers episodes here https://www.ibm.biz/techsplainers-podcast Narrated by Anna Gutowska