Managed Container security

The process of securing containers is continuous. It should be integrated into your development process, automated to remove the number of manual touch points, and extended into the maintenance and operation of the underlying infrastructure. This means protecting your build pipeline container images and runtime host, platform, and application layers. Implementing security as part of the continuous delivery life cycle means your business will mitigate risk and reduce vulnerabilities across an ever-growing attack surface.

Container security is the protection of the integrity of containers. This includes everything from the applications they hold to the infrastructure they rely on. Container security needs to be integrated and continuous. In general, continuous container security for the enterprise is about:

Containerized environments have many more layers of abstraction that require specialized tools to interpret, monitor, and protect these new applications. In a production container environment, you have a number of different layers to secure. In addition to the host OS and the container runtime, you have an orchestrator, a container registry, images, and most likely several different micro services within your application. Finally, containerized applications add complexity by redefining the old notion of protecting a single “perimeter”, requiring new approaches for securing the network layer.

When securing containers, the main concerns are:

• The security of the container host
• Container network traffic
• The security of your application within the container
• Malicious behaviour within your application
• Securing your container management stack
• The foundation layers of your application
• The integrity of the build pipeline