Cloud computing and the use of cloud native architectures enable unparalleled performance, flexibility, and velocity. The speed of innovation has driven significant advancements across industries, but as digitalization continues pushing applications and services to the cloud, bad actors’ intrusion techniques have also become more sophisticated.
The rise of fintech has pushed traditional financial institutions to provide online-based services and launch fintech applications. But these services must be secure and meet certain regulatory requirements, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or SOC 2.
Containers are a great way to package applications, with minimal libraries required. It guarantees that you will have the same deployment experience, regardless of where the containers are deployed. Container orchestration software pushes this further by preparing the necessary foundation to create containers at scale. Linux and Windows support containerized applications and can participate in a container orchestration solution.
As innovations in the world of application development and data computation grow every year, the “attack surface” of these technologies grows as well. The attack surface has to be understood from two sides—from the attacker’s side and from the organization being attacked.
Container environments are highly dynamic and require continuous monitoring, observability, and security. Since container security is a continuous practice, it should be fully integrated into the entire development and deployment cycle. Implementing security as an integral part of this cycle allows you to mitigate risk and reduce the number of vulnerabilities across the dynamic and complex attack surface containers present.
Architecturally speaking, cloud-native applications are broken down into smaller components that are highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral. Because each of these components is communicating with other components inside or outside the cluster, this architecture introduces new attack vectors that are difficult to protect against using a traditional perimeter-based approach.
As enterprises adopt containers, microservices, and Kubernetes for cloud-native applications, vulnerability management is crucial to improve the security posture of containerized workloads throughout build, deploy, and runtime. Securing your build artifacts and deployment pipeline, especially when it comes to images, is extremely important.
Summer is almost over but we are bringing the heat back with the official release of Tigera’s new container security features. With this official launch, Calico leads the industry by offering a complete line of solutions across every stage of a cloud-native application CI/CD pipeline.
Whether you’re migrating to the cloud via lift-and-shift deployments, or re-architecting to a cloud-native architecture, the migration itself and adopting a microservices architecture is no easy feat. To accelerate their cloud-native journey, many organizations opt for a managed Kubernetes service, as the skill and resources required to run a container orchestration system at scale are demanding.
As more and more applications and application development move to the cloud, traditional security roles and organizational structures are being shaken up. Why is that and what are the benefits of a cloud-first approach for business?
