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Container-based cloud deployments are growing in popularity due to the ease with which DevOps teams can continuously roll out micro-services and interacting, reusable components as applications. As a result, the number of organizations prioritizing the adoption of container technologies will continue to increase in 2020. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 75 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production – a significant increase from fewer than 30 percent today.” 1 Container technologies will help organizations modernize legacy applications and create new cloud-native applications that are scalable and agile.
Containerized applications are built by assembling reusable components on software defined Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) which is deployed into Cloud environments. Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools automate the build and deploy process of these applications and IaC, creating a challenge for pre-emptive and continuous detection of application vulnerabilities and IaC configuration errors. To adjust to the rise in containerized applications operating in a CI/CD model, security teams will need to conduct their risk assessment at the time of code build, before deployment. This effectively shifts security “left” in the deployment lifecycle and integrates security into the DevOps process, a model frequently referred to as DevSecOps.
Additionally, threats to containerized applications are introduced nor only by IaC misconfigurations or application vulnerabilities, but also abused network privileges which allow lateral movement in an attack. To address these run-time threats, organizations are increasingly turning to cloud-native security tools developed specifically for container environments. Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) are used to conduct configuration and vulnerability scanning, while Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) work as traffic enforcers for network micro-segmentation based on the identity of the application, regardless of its IP. This approach to application identity-based enforcement will push organizations away from the five-tuple approach to network security which is increasingly irrelevant in the context of ephemeral container deployments.
When CASB and CWPP solutions integrate with CI/CD tools, security teams can meet the speed of DevOps, shifting security “left” and creating a DevSecOps practice within their organization. Governance, compliance, and overall security of cloud environments will improve as organizations accelerate their transition to DevSecOps with these cloud-native security tools.
1 Gartner Best Practices for Running Containers and Kubernetes in Production, Arun Chandrasekaran, 25 February 2019