Over the past 30 years, we’ve grown  used to data protection solutions that require backup agents to be deployed within an OS. Historically, no other options were available, and the available solutions were designed to protect mostly physical machines, at least in the x86 world. Most people define  a backup agent (sometimes known as a backup client)  as a piece of software provided by the data protection solution that  performs the actual backup job from within the workload. This job is usually comprised of several tasks, including: Preparing the workload for online backup, which involves quiescing the filesystem and running applications to put them in a consistent state. Identifying new and changed data, such as blocks or files, since the previous backup operation. Processing new data, which might include actions such as deduplication, compression, and encryption. Transporting the backed up data to a backup storage target. Backup agents are deployed, controlled, and maintained by a master server that tells each agent what to do. The master server also collects and stores information about the backed up data, called metadata, and logs everything that happens. This is basically a client-server relationship that requires network communication between the backup infrastructure and each…